The Mobile Presenter

I sometimes see conferences or user groups trying to solicit new, i.e. first-time speakers. It's easy, they say. You don't have to talk for an hour, they suggest. Try giving a short talk about something that you're familiar with.

While this is well-intended, I found that it's actually pretty hard to give a good short talk. I'm wondering if it wouldn't be easier for first timers to start with a longer talk.

Instead of giving out blanket recommendations for books about presenting, I thought I'd package them up so that you can pick the best ones for your level of experience.

The "Basics" Package

If you're only going to buy one book about presentations in your life, then I recommend Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds. It explains the principles of a "new", less text-heavy, more visual and more engaging presentation style. You will be referring back to this book a lot over the next years.

Much has been written about the presentation style of Steve Jobs. For years, his style was also the style of Apple, the company that he founded and later saved from extinction. Now that he's no longer with us, the question was how would Apple's presentation style develop?

I think we saw the answer at the WWDC keynote last week. For the first time after Steve Jobs' death, the entire 2 hour presentation of new products looked consistent and each of the actors, so to speak, has found their place - and they are comfortable in it.

I recently came across this quote by R. Buckminster Fuller:

All the information in the world is available right here in this room.
It’s just a matter of presentation to make sense out of it.

This nicely highlights one of the underlying problems of many presentations.

One of the problems that you'll encounter when doing more visual presentations is that people are going to ask for your slides; yet your slides are pretty much useless for them without your narration. I've noticed that this makes some people - especially technically minded ones - suspicious of the whole concept of more visual slides in the first place.