If your presentation could be boiled down to a bumper sticker, what would it be? It’s a question I often ask of presenters, and it’s a surprisingly hard one to answer. But if you can’t identify a singular message, you may not have as strong a presentation as you think. Certainly you probably don’t have one that will be remembered by your audience for as long as you might like. 

Think of the presentations and speeches you’ve heard in the past year. Can you remember a single message from any of them? But you probably remember these…

Think of it another way: If a journalist was covering your speech, what would the headline be? I’ve mentioned before that Steve Jobs often literally provides the press with their headlines because his messaging is so distilled. Is yours?

I was reminded of all this recently when I read that the New York Knicks had commissioned a study to woo LeBron James to New York to play for them. Branding powerhouse Interbrand produced a 15 slide presentation showing that LeBron had the potential to earn north of $1 billion if he signed with the Knicks (including sponsorships and other business opportunities). Signing with any other NBA team would result in significantly smaller lifetime earnings. TheForbes article nailed the takeaway…

“What the Knicks Told LeBron: Come to New York and Make $1 Billion”

Actually, the real numbers are more complicated, and his “lifetime average value” with the Knicks is calculated at $983 million with a “lifetime maximum value” of $1.94 billion. But you know what? Who cares! New York was abuzz with news of a basketball player earning $1 billion dollars. 

But nowhere in Interbrand’s 15 slides was the bumper sticker/headline takeaway: LeBron James will earn $1 Billion as New York Knick. This was a classic case of burying the lead. 

I pulled out the three most important slides from the presentation and spent 5 minutes “exhuming the lead.” The slides on the left are the originals. The slides on the right are mine.

 As you edit and wordsmith your presentations to death (as I’m sure was the fate of this one) and gather input from everyone and their mother, be careful not to bury the lead. If your message isn’t clear enough to fit on a bumper sticker, it might not be clear enough at all.

Oh, by the way—in the end he signed with Miami. Now, I’m not saying it was because of a bad presentation…

Stay with me on this one. It’s long, but important. If I had a single piece of advice to give to someone about to create a presentation, it would be… 

OUTLINE YOUR PRESENTATION

And yet, the vast majority of presentations I design for others skip the one step that will make their writers’ job a controlled process as opposed to random chaos. 

Like the vast majority of the world, you probably sit down to create your story and immediately dive into using PowerPoint or Keynote writing headers, bullet points and blocks of text. You probably also quickly start trying to format text and find images on Google that support the idea that just came into your head. Why?

1. It seems easier
2. You think you don’t have time to put off writing “the meat”
3. The software all but begs you to start writing your headers and bullet points.

The problem with rejecting the use of an outline is that you end up forever trying to get a sense of the big picture, get mired in details, miss major components and ultimately find yourself having to identify your story structure near the end from the pieces in front of you. 

I am often asked for “a template so I can start writing my content.” I always respond that I would prefer to design content and not just a frame around it. I hope that Stephen King doesn’t need a designed book jacket to start outlining and writing a novel. 

One reason why outlining is crucial is that most presentations undergo heavy editing from colleagues and superiors. That’s just life. But I have designed countless 1st drafts that, when shown to the boss, ended up completely rewritten because the focus was wrong or the big picture was missed. A solid 1-page outline might save countless wasted hours on your next presentation. So, how do you outline? 

OUTLINING BY HAND

But if you prefer outlining by hand, consider using sticky notes (any size that works for you) and a wall or large table to compose your overall story. I admit that I rarely find that this method fits me personally, but Duarte Design, the country’s leading presentation firm, swears by sticky notes and advocates for them passionately. (Note that there are also software versions of sticky notes if you prefer the keyboard like I do.)

OUTLINING WITH MICROSOFT WORD OR ANOTHER TEXT EDITOR 

Way before you start thinking about slides, fonts, colors and imagery, you should be thinking about content. And Microsoft Word—for all it’s endless faults—is a very serviceable word processor to lay down and organize your ideas. If you choose to make this a detailed prose outline, more power to you. There will be time later to edit 3 paragraphs of text into a slide that says only “Poor customer service has reduced customer base by 25%.” 

Or, you can keep your Word outline more traditional—just like you did in high school when you wrote term papers: hierarchical lists and numbered lists. For this style, use a small font, reduce your margins, and resist long sentences so you can see your entire outline on 1-2 pages. 

In either case, if you spend an extra few minutes setting up your Word outline, you will be able to convert your document into PowerPoint slides with the click of a button. To do this, you’ll need to use paragraph styles in Word. You can use the default styles that Word gives you or you can modify them or create your own. What’s important is that you apply a “Heading 1” style to every line that you want to be a new slide header. “Heading 2” should be applied to any text that you want to be a 1st level bullet point. “Header 3” and so on, should be used for subsequent level bullets.

After you’ve applied headers, you have 2 methods for moving into PowerPoint…

Method #1: “Send to Microsoft Office PowerPoint”

This is a handy little one-touch tool that you will never find in any of the Office ribbons. To use this, you need to add it to your quick access toolbar by going to the Windows circular button (top left), selecting “Word Options” and then “Customize.” From the pulldown menu at the top, select “All Commands” and scroll down until you find “Send to Microsoft Office PowerPoint.” “Add” this to your custom toolbar and you’ll be good to go. Now, once your Word doc is properly set up, just click the newly added icon and a PowerPoint file will be automatically created from your text outline—as many slides as you have indicated.

Method #2: Open “All Outlines…” from PowerPoint
From within PowerPoint Cntrl-O or “Open” from the Office Button. Under “Files of Type,” select “All Outlines.” This will allow you to open and convert your styled Word doc into PPT slides. You can also open a few other types of text files, although your conversion mileage may vary depending on how they were set up.

With either method, this is what you’ll get. Obviously, you’ll have more work to do in applying a template and designing your information, but if your outline passed the tests in Word, you should now be able to think about visualizing your message as opposed to creating it.

OUTLINING WITH POWERPOINT

Unless you’re simply going to use your first couple slides as a word processor (not a bad idea…) I strongly recommend doing your outlining away from PowerPoint to avoid the temptation to make slides while you write. But if you must…take a look at at the left side of your screen at your slide thumbnails. At the top there is a tab for “Outline view” which will display the hierarchical text from your slide headers and bulleted copy. The cool thing about outline view is that you can type your headers and bullets on slides or directly in the thumbnail outline pane. Either way, PPT creates new slides for you. You can also reorder your slides directly in the outline pane, or you can switch to slide sorter to get a birds’ eye view and do the same. If you do use outline preview, you should pull the pane out to the right as far as it will go, reducing the actual slide on the pasteboard to a thumbnail. You should be focusing on the outline here, not the slide itself. 

OUTLINING WITH EXCEL (My Favorite*)

All of my writing—even the plays and screenplays I have written—tend to be very modular in style. And perhaps as a result, I find that Excel is actually most effective for me as an outlining tool. I’m not a numbers guy, but for some reason I’m pretty good at using a spreadsheet to lay out my topics and ideas. I find Excel to be great at re-ordering sections, creating hierarchies, making notes, hiding and unhiding text, sorting and color coding. Furthermore, if I use small enough text (and a large enough monitor), Excel allows me to see my entire project on a single page. I can get an immediate visual sense of my story in one glance. 

FINAL THOUGHTS

I’ve designed, created and seen thousands of presentations from children’s school reports to major CEO addresses and $100 million dollar business pitches. I even did some work for a certain financial institution when they had to explain themselves to the public after they might have contributed to a certain recent financial meltdown. And without fail, the one factor that all “successful” presentations have shared in common, was planning, organization and a controlling story. Design can only help communicate your story better. It can’t help if you don’t know what your story is.

A strong well-written outline is the surest way, in my opinion, to achieve a successful presentation and tell an effective story.

*I also want to note that I recently discovered an amazing Mac-only app called Scrivener that I’m currently using to outline and write a fiction piece. For organizing any type of research or creative writing project, I’ve never seen anything as robust and useful.

I recently had the opportunity to design my first presentation for the TED Conference, held this past February in Long Beach. Jonathan Klein, the fascinating CEO of Getty Images delivered a talk entitled, “Photos That Changed the World.” If you’re not familiar with TED (Technology Entertainment Design), it’s a non-profit that runs regular conferences dedicated to “Ideas Worth Spreading.” 

Imagine gathering together the smartest and most intriguing people (though not always famous) and asking the

m to give brief presentations on what they know best. For those who aren’t fortunate enough to attend and hobnob over dinners, the collection of videotaped TEDTalks on TED’s website, distributed under a Creative Commons license, are some of the best examples of effective and engaging presentations you’ll ever find.

Bill Gates, Al Gore, Jane Goodall, Tony Robbins, Malcolm Gladwell & Richard Dawkins are just a few of the people who have given TEDTalks over the years. (Click the Tony Robbins link if you want to see a heartfelt face to face criticism of Al Gore. It starts about 6 minutes in.)

This year’s conference featured talks by James Cameron,Jaime Oliver, Sheryl Crow, Temple Grandin, Sarah Silverman, Valerie Plame and David Rockwell to name just a few. This kind of diversity is one of the wonderful things about TED. The only thing that group of people has in common is that they have something to say worth hearing.

TED Rules 

The primary reason that I love TED is that it has helped elevate and bring attention to quality presentation. The conference has long been infamous for laying down a set of rules for its speakers that makes even the most accomplished presenter sweat bullets in preparation. The biggest rule is a strict adherence to time. Even renowned guests are often given no more than 18 minutes to speak. We were given 4 minutes. In that time, we had to present something compelling to a super smart audience that wanted to be taught something they didn’t know by an expert in his field. 

The constraint of time is a wonderful tool for creating a good presentation. At Edelman, we are regularly given up to 2 hours to deliver a new business pitch. The client can, of course, afford this time since they’re often in the position of awarding millions of dollars of business. However, I often think that if we only had 10 or 15 minutes to pitch, we would distill our story and offering to a point where there would be zero fat. Of course, it often takes longer to write less than it does more. And that’s an indication that fewer words are more effective than many.

For Jonathan Klein’s TED talk, we spent a great amount of time pouring over every single word and image in order not to waste a single second of the story. There was not a sliver of fat in “Photos That Changed the World.”

Though we received our TED rules by email, supposedly some speakers actually receive a stone tablet with the TED Commandments. I’m not kidding:

1. Thou Shalt Not Simply Trot Out thy Usual Shtick
2. Thou Shalt Dream a Great Dream, or Show Forth a Wondrous New Thing, Or Share Something Thou Hast Never Shared Before
3. Thou Shalt Reveal thy Curiosity and Thy Passion
4. Thou Shalt Tell a Story
5. Thou Shalt Freely Comment on the Utterances of Other Speakers for the Sake of Blessed Connection and Exquisite Controversy
6. Thou Shalt Not Flaunt thine Ego. Be Thou Vulnerable. Speak of thy Failure as well as thy Success.
7. Thou Shalt Not Sell from the Stage: Neither thy Company, thy Goods, thy Writings, nor thy Desperate need for Funding; Lest Thou be Cast Aside into Outer Darkness.
8. Thou Shalt Remember all the while: Laughter is Good.
9. Thou Shalt Not Read thy Speech.
10. Thou Shalt Not Steal the Time of Them that Follow Thee

How many presentations have you sat through which violated not just one buy all ten of the above?

I recommend to everyone spending some time on the TED site and viewing videos. They are all between 2 and 20 minutes long–perfect for watching during lunch at your desk or when you need a web surfing break. There’s even a free TED iPhone app for your commutes.

In no order, here are a few of my favorite TEDTalks:

Jamie Oliver “Teach Every Child About Food”
Michael Moschen “Rhythm & Juggling”
Clifford Stoll “On…Everything”
Hans Rosling “The Best Stats You’ve Ever Seen”
Eric Giler “Wireless Electricity”
Jlll Bolte Taylor “Stroke of Insight”

And, of course, take a look at Jonathan Klein’s “Photos That Changed the World.”

It’s always a good idea to keep files as small as possible without sacrificing image quality (there’s no need to use 300dpi print-ready imagery in on screen presentations), but more often than not, presentations simply exceed the size limits imposed by many email systems.

Most corporate email systems impose a 5MB limit on attachments. And many will not give you a bounce back message indicating your file never made it to your recipient.

There are hundreds of solutions for transferring large files back and forth between colleagues and clients including ftp sites and custom file server solutions, but here are my two favorites that I use almost daily…

The concept is simple. Select a file on your own computer, tell YouSendIt who you want to receive it, and then upload it to YouSendIt’s website. The service then sends an email to your recipient(s) with a link for them to download the file anytime they like.

The service is fast, secure and comes with loads of options and features. Monthly subscriptions and corporate suites are available, but I just use their free plan with gives me a file maximum of 100MB and the ability to only send one file at a time. You can upload files via their website, but there are also plug-ins that allow you to upload from Outlook, Acrobat and MS Office. I use their free desktop application, YouSendIt Express, which lets me drag and drop files and which remembers previous email recipients.

One of my new favorite services, DropBox, has eliminated my need for carrying flash drives back and forth to work and has greatly simplified working with offsite designers when sharing large numbers of files. Like YouSendIt, DropBox’s concept is terribly simple. In essence, it is a shared networked folder that lives on the desktop of your computer. That’s it.

After installing the DropBox application, a folder (just like any other on your computer) is created on your desktop. As soon as you move files into this folder, DropBox begins backing them up to their server. All files are given small indicator icons to let you know if they are backed up, in process and/or shared with others.

And it’s the sharing with other users and on other computers that makes this app sing.

You can install the DropBox application on any other computer you wish, and once you log into your account, you will be given this same folder (and all its contents) on your desktop. You can then select any folder within and share the contents with anyone you wish. The shared folder will appear in the DropBox folder of the other user once they accept. If they do not have a DropBox account, files can be accessed via unique URL links provided for each of your files.

There are a lot of extras that you can explore such as folder management and downloads from your iPhone and automatic public slideshows from a folder of images. Accounts are free for storage up to 2GB. More space can be purchased, but if you use this link to sign up, both you and I will be given an extra 250MB right off the bat. Not a bad deal.

Truly, the best way to think of DropBox is as a network folder. You just don’t need a company’s servers to host it, and anyone—not just your fellow employees—can access it from anywhere. Here’s my DropBox…

Like Made to Stick, The Heath brothers’ latest feels very much like a Malcolm Gladwell book—full of well-told anecdotes that demonstrate each chapter’s message. They also again include numerous “clinics” which are real or fictional situations posed to the reader as problems needing to be solved through the book’s offered techniques.

Switch is written with sticky stories, but it’s focus is change—specifically change in organizations and groups. Thousands of books have written about how to affect change in business and at times this one feels like it’s bobbing in that sea. But instead of a 12 part system with biz school case studies, Chip and Dan view change as a process broken down into 3 parts:

1. Direct the Rider
2. Motivate the Elephant
3. Shape the Path

It sounds a little hokey, but it never feels like it. The representative stories all serve to exemplify solutions under each of the 3 parts: find the bright spots [in a problem], script the critical moves [for the players], point to the destination, shrink the change, grow your people, build habits, rally the herd, etc. 

If for no other reason, the stories make this an enjoyable read: the college student who rallied a whole island nation to save an endangered parrot (grow your people), an NGO worker who dramatically reduced malnutrition in Vietnamese children by first studying not the rule, but the exceptions to the rule (bright spots) and how a simple change of phrase on bathroom signs reduced a hotel’s laundry bill (rally the herd.)

It’s not often that we get to control how information is presented to us and even adjust the format to our personal preferences, so I was unbelievably excited recently to discover a brilliant tool for the web called “Readability.” I have to give a hat tip to David Pogue, who turned me on to this in his NY Times column and who declared: “Readability has changed my life.”

Readability by Arc90 Lab is a “bookmarklet,” and its installation is quite possibly the easiest I’ve ever seen. Simply go to the Readability page, select your few preferences (font, size, margin) and then drag the Readability icon to your bookmarks. Now, any time you find yourself on a web page reading a story and want to eliminate all the distracting advertisements, flashing banners, endless links and other web junk, just click the Readability bookmark and your current page will be transformed into a distraction free page of easily read text. Need to go back to the original page? Just click on the return button at the top left of the page. 

Readability works best for longer form articles, but it does work on Mac and PC and with any browser you might be running. 

Below is a before and after from a NY Times article… 

Let me know what you think of this!

On screen presentations are great, but often they can be overkill if you’re presenting to only one or two people.

A “Walk-Through” deck has been a typical solution in which a presentation is printed and paged through while sitting next to your viewer (or “audient” as some of used to say.)

This can be effective, but it still lacks a sense of immediacy and interactivity. Seth Godinpublished a blog post recently with a new solution that I wanted to share:

The Modern Talking Pad.

Seth apparently has been having success lately with a bound deck that he removes information from and then fills it back in in real time while sitting with his client.

Jan Schultink who writes the great Slides That Stick expands on Seth’s idea and gives an example in his blog post:

Take a look, let me know what you think and if you have done something similar or do so in the future. I’m going to start suggesting this to some of my guys for smaller meetings…