Presentations in Action

by Jerry Weissman

First off, let me say that I know a lot of people I would like to give this book to, because, I know a lot of people who cannot (or do not) distinguish between a report and a presentation, or a document and a slide. Those same people also don’t know (or care) anything about my eyesight, my hearing, or my intelligence level. Accordingly, I have experienced “death by Powerpoint” firsthand more times than I care to remember. This book could help alleviate many of those problems, because this book is not just about PowerPoint, but about presentations in general, and it contains a lot of sensible information on presentations. Some of it I knew already, but some of it was new and I’d never thought about before. Without going into details and specifics, it covers things like audience expectations, how to “prime” the audience, where graphics should and shouldn’t be used, where they go on a slide, the difference between right and left (both movement and location), where to stand, when to talk (and when not), and many more things like that. Each concept is presented in its own chapter, usually with some correlation to a real life person, as in the subtitle “80 Memorable Presentation Lessons from the Masters”. These correlations are not really lessons so much as “proof in the pudding” observations. Still, although the anecdotes and correlations did not really help me remember the lessons any more easily than reading through them carefully, they do drive home the point that there is something to be gained by incorporating that lesson in one’s own presentation methodology. I felt that almost every tip and technique the author explains would be useful or at least serve as some kind of reminder to use in preparing a presentation. And as I said, I found the majority of the information to be something new. This book is dense and the “lessons” come one after the other in rapid fire succession, so as much as I would like to share its tenets with some of the folks around me,  I’m going to have to keep this book handy and refer to it often to get the most out of it. The overall content of the book is worth a full five dollar signs, but I have to take one off for the misleading subtitle. Other than that, this is a very good book.