Steve Jobs' 10 Secrets for Great Presentations

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Vijay Jha< [email protected]>

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Ten Secrets that Made Steve Jobs' Presentationsthe World's Best

And How You Can Use Them to Astound Your Audience

Genius. Legend. Visionary.

These are but a few of the

superlatives that have been usedto describe the late, great Steve

Jobs.

But beyond his business acumen,

the man behind

Applecomputers and Pixar

Animation Studios was perhaps

the greatest keynote speaker ofour time. There are more than

57,000 links to his presentations

on YouTube.

What made his presentations so

amazing that people all over theworld want to see them? More

importantly, how can the rest ofus learn from Steve to inspire

our audiences the way he did?

In his excellent book, ThePresentation Secrets of Steve

Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great

in Front of Any Audience,

Carmine Gallo takes us behind

the scenes and offers Steve's tensecrets that you can use for

presentations that will inform,

engage and, yes, astoundyour

audience.

"My presentation was supposed to

knock your socks off. I guess I gotcarried away."

Buy SmartDraw now and

save $100 for a limitedtime.

Page 1 of 5Gmail - Steve Jobs' 10 Secrets for Great Presentations

29/10/2012http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2&ik=ca7f72c4d3&view=pt&search=inbox&th=13a...


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Holy Smokes, Bullets Kill! (And Other PresentationTips)Before planning your presentation, according to Carmine Gallo, it is critical to know

the question that matters most to your audience: "Why should I care?"1 You need to

think about how to inspire your audience. Simply trying to sell them something

doesn't cut it. As Carmine writes, "Your widget doesn't inspire me. Show me how

your widget improves my life, and you've won me over."

2

Here are Steve Jobs' ten secrets for insanely great presentations.3

1. Plan in analog. Brainstorm in advance of creating your presentation. You can

use pen and paper, a whiteboard or, better yet, a mind map.

DO NOT use PowerPointto create your presentationit will be used only in the

final step! (More on this later.)

2. Create Twitter-friendly headlines. Describe your product or service in 140

characters or less. Preferably, a lot less. Steve introduced the MacBook Air

assimply, "The world's thinnest notebook." About the first-generation iPod

, he

tweeted: "It's one thousand songs in your pocket."

3. Introduce the villain. Steve saw a presentation as a three-act play that must

tell a story, but what is a story without a hero and a villain? Before he

introduced the famous 1984 ad to a group of Apple salespeople, he set the

stage, casting "Big Blue" as Goliath. "IBM wants it all," he warned, and

defiantly asserted that only Apple stoodin its way. His dramatic moment sentthe crowd into frenzy.

While the villain doesn't have to be a competitor, it must be a common foe that

your audience will want to join with you in rallying against. Your product is

then revealed as the conquering hero.

4. Create visual slides. As Carmine writes, "Neuroscientists are finding that the

best way to communicate information is through text and pictures, not text

alone." As for bullet points, Steve never, ever, used them and neither should

you. Carmine has a section in her book titled, "Bullets Kill" that describes why

you should avoid using PowerPoint to create your presentation.

"Think about what happens when you open PowerPoint. A blank-format slide

appears that contains space for wordsa title and subtitle. This presents a

problem. There are very few words in a Steve Jobs presentation. Now thinkabout the first thing you see in the drop-down menu under Format: Bullets &

Numbering. This leads to the second problem. There are no bullet points in a

Steve Jobs presentation. The software itself forces you to create a template

that represents the exact opposite of what you need to speak like Steve!"4

Take a look at the following comparison of bullet-point slides compared to the




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same information, presented visually.

5. Practice, a lot. Most people read their presentations off of their PowerPointslides. This is why most presentations are boring. Steve treated every slide as

piece of poetry and every presentation as a theatrical event. He wasn't a

natural presenter; he worked very hard at it. Rehearse your presentation, toss

the script and look at your audience. Practice at making it look effortless.6. Obey the ten-minute rule. It's a scientific fact that the brain gets tired after

ten minutes. Steve's presentations typically lasted an hour and a half. He

would break them up into short intervals of ten minutes or less by

interspersing videos, demonstrations, or guest speakers. Don't let your

audience get tired or you'll lose them.

A great way to keep your audience's attention when presenting information is

though sequencing, which builds the story within a visual one step at a time,

making the information much easier to digest.

7. Dress up your numbers. We often deal with large numbers or data that an

audience can't comprehend without context. Breaking them down and

presenting numbers visually can overcome this. Notice how much more

effectively the chart below illustrates sales figures as opposed to a matrix of




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data.

8. Reveal a 'holy smokes!' moment. Maya Angelou said, "People will forgetwhat you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how

you made them fe el." Steve Jobs always produced a memorable moment in a

pre sentation. When he introduced the MacBook Air, he told his a udience that

while everyone had seen manila envelopes floating around the office, what

they had never seen was someone pulling a notebook computer out of onewhich is precisely what he did. The audience went wild and images of that

moment remain emblazoned in people's minds four years later.

9. Sell dreams, not products. When it looked at the iPod, the world saw a

music player. What Steve Jobs saw was a tool to enrich people's lives. Howard

Schultz of Starbucks didn't have a passion to sell coffee; his vision was tocreate an experience: a 'third place' between home and work where people

would want to gather. The dream met the customer's need and the product

sales took care of itself.

10. Have fun! When was the last time you saw someone enjoying giving a

presentation? Steve Jobs had fun in every keynote. He made jokes at his ownexpense. While most people give presentations to deliver information, Steve

always created an experience that his audience would enjoy and remember.

Most importantly, he sold them on becoming a part of his dream, not his

product.

SmartDraw Can Help You Create Powerful, ProfessionalPresentations that will Knock Their Socks OffSmartDraw is the best tool for helping you to create an insanely great presentation -

it offers mind maps and storyboards for the creative process and an array of

templates for creating amazing visuals. One of the great things about SmartDraw is

that you don't have to be able to draw to use iteverything is automated andsimple.

PowerPoint, on the other hand, sucks you into thinking about slides, transitions,

animations and themes without carefully considering more important concepts like

content, message, and sequence of information. As mentioned, the very design of

the software forces you to use text and bullets that are the exact opposite of a greatSteve Jobs type presentation!

You can build a well-organized, visually rich and animated presentation using

SmartDraw. Once your work is finished, SmartDraw will convert it into a PowerPoint

slideshow that is ready to present with one click. Amazing but true!

Get Started NowSay goodbye to boring presentations. Impress your audience! Discover for yourself

the powerful benefits of SmartDraw. Click the button below and save $100 today.

Now that you're part of the SmartDraw community we invite you to keep intouch with us on your favorite social networks.




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To read more

about

sequencing and

presentations,

download this

white .

To watch a video

showing how to

use sequencing to

make your visual

presentation evenmore engaging,

click here.

If you prefer to

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specialists,

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Corporation.

Apple, MacBook Air

and iPod

are registered trademarks of Apple Inc.

All Rights Reserved. 2012 SmartDraw, LLC

1Carmine Gallo, The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any

Audience, McGraw-Hill [Kindle Edition], Loc. 223-31.

2Gallo. Loc. 201-7.

3For a slideshow presentation of these 10 tips, see Carmine Gallo's Forbes e-zine

article:http://www.forbes.com/2009/10/08/steve-jobs-presentations-technology-meetings-09-tips_slide.html

4Gallo. Loc. 249-63.


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Steve Jobs' 10 Secrets for Great Presentations