Guy Kawasaki is a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and a former product evangelist for Apple. 

In his current role as an investor, he hears hundreds of pitches a year and so has some pretty strong feelings about how people present information (often very badly.)

Among other things, he is known for his strict 10/20/30 Rule that states “A PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.”

While you’d be a bit foolish to break this rule if you went to Guy asking him to invest in your business, I do think this is not a guideline that can hold up in all situations.

Nonetheless, it’s good advice to keep in mind as your slide count balloons, your text starts getting smaller and smaller and you find yourself with 60 minutes of material all of a sudden for what was supposed to be a 30 minute meeting…

Read more about the 10/20/30 Rule and more about presentation at Guy’s blog and in his book, The Art of the Start.

One of my favorite video podcasts is Apple’s Quicktips.

It’s a handy little regular series of 1 minute videos by Apple employees each of which teaches a particular Mac trick or feature. The real reason I like it though is that there is absolutely nothing extraneous about them.

Produced by anybody else, there probably would be opening and closing graphics, wordy introductions, added production values, attempts at humor, etc.

But Apple strips away almost everything that is extraneous to the particular message being communicated to pack as much information into as little time as possible.

One example? The Apple employees skip the “Hi, my name is…” and let an on screen graphic communicate this info. 3 seconds saved. 

How long did your last presentation take? Could the same amount of information have been communicated in less time and with less “stuff?”

Subscribe to the video podcast via iTunes here.

Remember this guy? 

How about now?

“I’m not only the Hair Club president, I’m also a client…”

Sy Sperling wasn’t the coolest guy around, but he made his pitch deeply personal–something which few people are brave enough to do these days.

I just finished a pitch for the opportunity to help publicize a malaria drug in Africa. The team leader on the pitch wanted to stress to the client that he and the company knew Africa and the marketplace intimately. “I mean, I’ve been there, I’ve already done this,” he said. 

“Do you have any pictures from your trips…?” I asked.

And so, instead of stock imagery of African children we used actual snapshots from his travels, like this one.

“It’s Sunday and I was on a reporting assignment for Voice of America covering polio eradication efforts,” he told me. “I was walking across the street and saw this father smiling and carrying his child to church. I was struck by his joy and happiness, so I stopped him…”

Not really the kind of story you could tell in a pitch using iStock Photo…

We’ve all said to people, “Nobody wants to see your vacation pictures…” But what if those pictures are actually relevant to the story you’re telling? 

A few months ago I designed a presentation for an executive at Ebay that focused on the site’s fixed price items and how it’s no longer just for auctions. The speaker began not with success stories of average users, but instead put up the images of everything she had personally bought over the past six months for her and her family. 

Her presentation was a big deal in front of a huge industry audience. Many might have thought that this was no time to make it “cute” or “clever.” Someone else might have just wanted to hit the audience over the head with persuasive numbers and revenue opportunities. But this speaker knew that though Ebay and its partner sellers are businesses, it all ultimately comes down to individuals. And so she started by humanizing her talk using the best possible case study: herself.

How can you personalize your next pitch?

Remember this guy?

Say what you will about whether or not he was actually funny, but you can’t deny that he was memorable. 

Most effective stories, presentations and performances that are effective are memorable (although the reverse cannot always be said).

The use of props will go a long way towards making your presentation memorable. Words alone just can’t compete. 

Do you remember what Gallagher said, or do you remember his sledgehammer? How about these guys?

Okay, enough with the comedians. That’s not your gig. 

This past week we were discussing a recent very successful winning pitch we designed and its use of props. Apparently, though the client was impressed with our entire approach and team capabilities (and screen presentation), they kept talking about the props we brought which included actual lapel pins and necklaces of a logo we were proposing as part of a campaign and which were handed out to the clients. Most would have stopped at just designing the logo and putting it on screen. Maybe some would go ahead and make t-shirts to hand out. But our team actually created a wearable piece of jewelry that, like Gallagher’s sledgehammer or Steve Martin’s arrow-through-the-head, effectively encapsulated the entire story being presented.

Here are 3 more examples–maybe the most famous and effective use of presentation props of the last 25 years:

You probably recognize Colin Powell’s UN presentation in which a small vial of fake anthrax effectively told his entire story. Similarly, Johnnie Cochran didn’t just rely on oratory (“If the gloves don’t fit, you must acquit”), but he used the actual gloves as props to accomplish his goal. Good or bad outcomes,props made these presentations unquestionably effective and memorable. 

Okay, so who’s the 3rd guy and what’s he doing? That’s the physicist Richard Feynman testifying before Congress about the Challenger explosion. You may remember that blame was ultimately laid on the rubber O-rings of the booster rockets that were compromised at the freezing temperatures on the launch pad. Well, to prove this, Feynman didn’t present PowerPoint slides, but instead took out one of the O-rings and submerged it in a glass of ice water. He then showed how the piece of rubber lost its resiliency at low temperatures–something NASA’s managers had denied and which ultimately proved disastrous for the shuttle. Edward Tufte devotes a whole chapter to Feynman’s presentation in his book, Visual Explanations. 

So, what props are you going to use in your next presentation?

A Memorable TED Talk

If you’re not familiar with and a frequent viewer of the various talks given at theTED conferences, you should be.

In her essential book on presentation, Slide:ology,Nancy Duarte talks about a presentation given by brain researcher Jill Bolte-Taylor as one of the most memorable TED talks to date.

To see why this speech is one of the most talked about of recent years and to see just how effective a single prop can be in making what you have to say memorable, watch Jill Bolte-Taylor speak about her own stroke.

Just today a client expressed disappointment because a slide’s design failed to “Wow” him. Last week someone else felt that my design department didn’t earn their keep because a template was “too simple.” (“We have to blow people away with this pitch,” she insisted…) 

Both of these people shared a desire first and foremost for a presentation that was visually “impactful,” strong and full of “Wow” factor. What they didn’t care about was whether their presentations were EFFECTIVE.

Perhaps I’ll save my feelings about those awful heavily layered and Photoshopped background templates for another day (even though I’m guilty of having designed hundreds of them in my day), but regardless of what your template looks like or how many bullets you’re jamming onto a slide, there still remains hope for every presenter to create without any design skill at all The Most Powerful Slide Possible…THE BLACK SLIDE…

Stay with me here.

Remember when you were sleeping in biology class and the teacher suddenly slapped the table with a ruler? Got your attention, didn’t he? I bet you paid attention to whatever it was he said right at that moment (and for at least a minute after).

A black slide in the middle of a series of slides filled with imagery and charts and text has this same effect.

It’s different, and it’s eye-catching, but it doesn’t bring attention to itself. It brings attention to YOU and to your story at that moment.

Here are just a few ways you can make use of a black slide in your next presentation:

• Bring attention to a prop in your hands
• Give focus to someone in the room who has something to add
• Show printed boards, a mocked up advertisement, poster or marketing item
• Throw focus to your audience and ask them a question (audience participation)
• Make sure everyone really pays attention to your big statement
• Make the moment about YOU and not your slides

A black slide doesn’t have to be an earthquake moment. I designed a pitch once in which 8 people tag-teamed different sections for an hour. One presenter showed a series of web designs and videos, but at the end of her section, simply requested a black slide so she could wrap up her part and say thank you to the audience personally. It was such a nice rhythmic break to the whole hour that I still remember that 20 seconds more than any part of the rest of the pitch.

And the best part of it all is that you don’t even need to create a slide for this…

You can easily toss a black slide into your series of slides, but you can also just hit the “B” on the keyboard at any time to bring up a black screen. Hit it again to return to your presentation. (Works in Keynote as well.)

• “W” brings up a white screen.
• “H” shows your next slide if it is hidden.

And don’t forget, you can always type in a slide number and hit “enter” to jump to that slide number.