The Mobile Presenter

You may have seen Simon Sinek's TED talk, in which case you can probably complete this sentence:

People don't buy what you do; they buy ...

I recently saw a longer talk by Simon Sinek, in which he talks about leadership, what biology has to do with it, and a whole lot of other things. It's a very good talk, 45 minutes long, and chock-full of interesting thoughts and insights. But I found it really hard to summarise in a sentence or two.

When I suggest that a talk should always be prepared with a specific audience in mind, people often misunderstand this to mean that they should start over from scratch every time - and are, understandably, horrified by the seeming amount of extra work that this implies.

But that's not what I meant.

When I wrote about busy speakers recently, from the perspective of an event organiser, I was also writing about myself a little bit, since I've been one of those "busy" speakers on more than one occasion. So I know why you'll sometimes end up in such a situation.

It's usually one of the following:

We've organised 3 TEDx events in Stuttgart so far and I've been involved with all of them, mostly in the interaction with our speakers. So here are some first lessons that I've learned from these 3 events. These are mainly aimed at other organisers (not necessarily restricted to TEDx events) but if you're a speaker, you may also want to take a moment to think about them.

Something that I've noticed when people give presentations to smaller groups, e.g. in a small room or when everybody sits around the same table, is that the speaker is sitting down during their talk. While this may be suitable for some situations, I'd argue that most of the time, the speaker should be standing up, even in a more "cozy" setting.