Be Aware of Presenters without Slides!

Monday, May 19th, 2008

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.