Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery - Improve Public Speaking & Business Presentations for Professionals & Students

In this age of information overload and short attention spans, the ability to deliver clear and concise presentations is one of the most important skills.Instead, business presentations today are mostly long, unfocused and boring. In a typical PowerPoint presentation, the audience is forced to sit through slide after slide of charts, bullet points and text while the presenter reads from the screen.As a result, both presenter and audience feel stressed and disengaged, and everybody ends up wasting their time (this common situation is also referred to as Death by PowerPoint).Garr Reynolds' quest to end PowerPoint presentations as we know them started years ago when, riding on the express train from Tokyo to Osaka, he had his epiphany: after watching a Japanese businessman nervously flipping through a printout of poorly designed PowerPoint slides in an obvious state of confusion, he decided to launch his Presentation Zen blog, now the most popular presentation design site on the web.Presentation Zen (the book) is organized in three main sections:*Preparation*Design*DeliveryIn the way of the true classics, this book is more than a simple step by step tutorial. It outlines an approach, a strategy to solve the complex communication issues of today. It not only tells us how to do a presentation, but instead takes us on a journey to discover what is it that we need to communicate in the first place, and how to make it resonate with our audience.Here are some of the things I learned:*How to discover your core message (the one thing, and only one, that you want your audience to remember).*The importance of having quiet time to think. Busyness kills creativity. We all need some quiet time alone to come up with our best ideas.*Use two often forgotten PowerPoint tools: notes (so you don't have to read from the screen) and handouts (so you don't have to cram all the data on your slides)*Less is more: remove from slides every single element that is not necessary and doesn't add to our core message.*PowerPoint is not a document creation tool. It's job is to provide visual aid to our presentation. The slides themselves are not the presentation.*Images are more powerful than words.Drinking from his own Kool-Aid, Reynolds packs his book with visual examples of great (and not so great) presentations, so we can see the difference. Also, he summarizes the most important ideas at the end of each chapter, and links to great presentation resources on the web (my favorite is TED, where you can see the great presenters of our time in action).This book is not for everyone. Those readers who are looking for a few quick tips on how to do a PowerPoint presentation may get impatient with the author's frequent and lengthy references to the Zen philosophy and concepts.However, if you bear with him, you will learn more than just do a presentation. You will learn how to analyze and solve complex communications problems, how to see the big picture from your customers' perspective, and how to effectively position products and services in the marketplace.If you have to do presentations for a living (and who doesn't these days?) read this book and keep it handy for future reference. And, while you're at it, add Presentation Zen (the blog) to your blogroll or favorites.