Meeting Communication

I went to a meeting the other day where 3 of the 5 presenters did not have slides. They were all “OK” speakers, but it occurred to me that it was obvious that the 3 with no slides were less prepared and sort of rambled on at times. They all had speaker experience and were experts on the topics they spoke. But is was clear to me that the only one that had taken the time to prepare for the meeting was the one with slides. In this day and age of the occasional trend of “no-PPT” meeting people seem to take less time preparing for their meetings and therefore have less productive meetings.

Good meetings do require time to prepare. Often meetings where information is being shared, if you don’t take the time prepare a strategy for the best way to share the information there is less chance of successfully sharing the information successfully. Successful sharing of the information might be producing a handout and/or PowerPoint slides that summarize the key points or detail the highlights of the content to be shared.

The next time I get invited to a meeting without PowerPoint or handouts, I’m going to pass on the meeting.

I participated in a one hour Tele-Class today. It was disapointing for a number of reasons. I suspect there were 25-50 participants and 2 speakers. It started off with some technical difficulties. One of the speakers had the wrong number and was not in the call at first. Then when the call was switched to record it knocked everyone off out of the call. I and others had to dial-in 3 or 4 times to get back into the call. I missed the first half of the first presenter.

I felt like it was a step back in time, like listening to an old AM radio show. There were some noise in the background including a few people who obviously did not know how to mute thier phones. I found myself watching some email coming in, then answering a few emails, and the phone call became the background.

The big problem . . . NO VISUALS. Not even some bad PPT visuals. I have to admit that I’m biased a bit (or a lot) on the value of visuals, but this is the age of YouTube and VISUALs. Show me a talking head, show me a bad PPT, but show me something.

I had the honor and pleasure to be a speaker at the Small Biz Summit 2008 today. It was a great opportunity to be on the other end of the slides. It’s been a while since I was a speaker and not the speaker support person or on the speaker support team. I was speaking on a Panel on how to transform your business. The panel presented 40 tips in 40 minutes. I had 10 minutes for my 10 tips. I had ten plus weeks to prepare. I started thinking about it maybe ten weeks ago, but didn’t dive into it seriously until maybe 10 days ago. We were supposed to have the slides finalized and to the event producer 14 days ago. I’m so used to most of eSlide’s clients giving us slides for their presentation the day before they are to present, I kind of thought 14 days in advance was silly. But it wasn’t.  Read the rest of this entry »

Maybe because your presenting at a meeting on a small tropical Island that has
no electricity. To me having a meeting without projected visuals is like professional carpenter refusing to use a power saw or other power tools that would enhance his ability to complete the project at the highest quality and in the least amount of time.

Sure there are there are a few situations that may be better to avoid the
slides, but I personally can’t imagine many that would not benefit from the
addition of visuals to help focus the meeting participants on the key messages
of the meeting.

In 20 years of assisting speakers develop effective visuals to support their
communication, I have never heard the complaint “that was a great meeting, and
those slides were a big waste of time”. I have heard the opposite plenty of times
that the enhanced slides helped make it a great meeting.

I would love to find a research study, where a presenter used slides with a speech one day and did the same speech the next time with no slides and measured audience response and memory of content.

People often forget about one of the most important cost factors of a meeting – the audience’s compensation. I’ve seen people balk at the cost of a $1000 cost of PPT visual support costs. This is kind of penny wise, but pound foolish if they considered the 400 people in thier audience was probably costing them $20,000+ per hour. And the cost of not communicating thier important message could priceless.

www.payscale.com came up with a cute little widget tool to monitor the cost of your meeting. Check it out: Meeting Cost Minder.

I believe that one of the reasons that people generally do not like meetings, or hate meetings is that along with a meeting typically comes some hard deadlines. There is usually more than just a deadline for the speech and slides, but the information being reported in the speech and slides. There’s lots of pressure to get the tasks requested to be completed from the last meeting to be completed by the next meeting so you can report that the task has been completed. Now with the ease and speed of producing or editing a PowerPoint slide, you can work on a task right up to the last minute before the meeting and update the task as completed just in time for the meeting. It’s a grown up version of peer pressure. You have to face the entire group at the meeting and report you success and/or failures. I’d write more, but I have to complete a task or two before my next meeting.

A friend of mine sent me an article on someone that listed what they thought were the top presenters of all time. top ten presenters the list is from the knowHR blog. Steve Jobs is listed. He’s one of my top ten. Guy kawasaki is another good one. Dr. Martin Luther King – yes. But they leave out people like John Kennedy and Bill Clinton. They also include Andy Kuafman? Maybe there should be a site to vote and keep a running Top Ten Presenters list like the New York Times best book seller list?

I really like using GoToMeeting.com for our business capabilities presentation. I can pitch to anyone in the country or world for that matter. It takes two minutes to setup. We just did a face-to-face meeting because the potential client was only a few blocks away. It was fun to get out and meet the client, but it took way too much time. We’ll soon see if the results are better than the virtual meetings. I can’t wait for the day when I only need to make a virtual commute.

I’ve only heard bad things about PPT 2007, such as they changed all the quick key short cuts. No one I know is using it. Of hundreds of clients we have working with PowerPoint, no one has requested it to be in 2007? PPT 2003 works well. It is reliable. Fast. What more do we need? Check out PPT 2007 at Microsoft.com