The Mobile Presenter

When you give a presentation, you will usually be standing in front of your slides, facing the audience. This is the standard setup for lecture rooms and there's simply no other way for you to do it, given the layout of the room.

Things are different with your typical meeting room, especially small ones. They are often equipped with a table in the middle of the room, around which the audience is assembling. The slides are then projected against one of the walls and often there's not a lot of room between the table and the wall for the speaker to stand in. I've seen such setups in meeting rooms at companies but also for user group meet-ups.

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.

It's been a year since my ebook, Presenting for Geeks, came out. I just wanted to say thanks to those who bought it, read it, and recommended it.

You helped to make the world of presentations a little better and more bearable.

On this blog, I try not to repeat things that are already covered in the book. It resulted in over 50 articles since then. Thanks for reading those, too.

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: