Book Review: The Naked Presenter

Recently, I was exchanging email with a colleague on the subject of presentations when he brought up Nancy Duarte's books, which I'd read some time ago, and given a positive review to at least one of them. One of the books that came up was Garr Reynolds Presentation Zen, which I'd also liked. It turned out he had a more recent book out, The Naked Presenter, and so I decided to give it a read.

It's okay, but I can't recommend it as highly as his previous book or Duarte's. The book focuses more on the "Zen" aspects of approaching presentation preparation and delivery, and less on the actual mechanics of those things themselves.

This would be well enough, but I found many of the techniques to be high level and vapid compared to other works, and the metaphors to all things Japanese felt forced.

Like many of the more recent "pretty books" (Duarte's and Reynolds' both fall in this camp), the content is so blown out in favor of whitespace, quotes, and pretty pictures, that it's pretty devoid of content. What's there is not beyond what's already covered in the original book. It does try to get into the whole zen-mental-state thing, on approaching prep, on delivery, on handling a hostile audience, etc, but only superficially. I'd have liked to see some approaches to drills or to methods of rehearsal and the like.

In summary, the book is alright, but I'd recommend Duarte's Resonate or Reynolds' Presentation Zen over this book. If you like Reynolds' other book a lot, then you may enjoy this one.

The Naked Presenter: Delivering Powerful Presentations With or Without Slides (Voices That Matter)

Book Review: Resonate

A few years back, I read (and reviewed) Nancy Duarte's slide:ology , a book about making presentations. I gave it a mixed review, saying that it was very pretty and perhaps useful in conveying some basics about how to use or not use Powerpoint, but that it focused too much on the slides, and not enough on the story, where clearly the latter is more important.

I guess I wasn't the only one to give her the same criticism, because Resonate is largely an answer to this concern. Duarte touts it as a prequel, and I'd argue it's the more important of the two for most people to read.

Duarte centers the book largely around the Hero's Journey (a sound concept for presentation structure), and then backs it up by analyzing a number of case examples from wide variety of speeches, breaking them down into components and showing how they align to this model. She then goes on to give a number of rules to follow when building presentation narratives. I like her "sparkline" model for visually breaking down presentations.

Overall I liked this book much more than Slideology, though I found it to have two downsides. The first is the same I complained about with the previous book: It's a very pretty, but very lightweight book. Almost as though someone built it out of a PowerPoint presentation to begin with, and filled in pieces of the text. As a result, it's very quick to get through (this may be a plus for some) but lightweight in numerous areas.

The second complaint I have about it is that Duarte doesn't delve into the differences in presenting to different kinds of audiences. She does say to tailor the talk to your audience, but doesn't talk about the dynamics of, say, presenting to superiors rather than subordinates; to a large group vs one-on-one, etc. (For example, when presenting to superiors at a large company, one has to be prepared for being sidelined with questions that you don't have the option of ignoring. If one of of these ends in a 10-minute time sink, then I find it useful to have "ripcord" slides that I can jettison to make time, and will have rehearsed ahead of time how to do a transition from slide 8 to slide 11 gracefully)

Still, even with these complaints, I think anybody but the most accomplished speakers will find something of use in this book.

Resonate

Great talk on future of publishing (+ a great speaking tip)

Craig Mod, who wrote a couple really awesome pieces on the future of book publishing on the iPad, and whom I linked to in a couple previous posts, and who I recently coincidentally ended up driving across the Mexican desert with (a long story), has a video up of talk he gave at a conference called 'the Do Lectures'.

First off, it's a great talk about the future of publishing, ebooks, and how the Internet is democratizing and changing publishing itself.

But second, if you are a fan of presentation techniques, watch it through to the end. Craig wraps the talk by calling out about ten of the audience members by name and giving them specific challenges on what THEY should be doing. From the talk, I'm going to assume that many of them he just met in the previous day or two at the conference, and (a) he makes his point that ANYONE can be a publisher, and (b) it absolutely connects that he's taken his audience seriously, so much that he can call them out by name and state what they are working on. So powerful!

For lunch today: A million mile tomato

A while ago I posted something about Matt Jones presentation on The New Negroponte Switch.

Now here's a link to a presentation, entitled Scope, from another principal at Schulze and Webb, Matt Webb.

I found it inspirational, and there's a couple bits of it that sent shivers down my spine. Well worth the read.

And then go find your '100 hours'

[As an aside, I thought the ultra-conversational, realtime-esque, voicing of his speaker notes was quite infectious. Interesting how he posts a deck for offline reading and still gets the energy across. Curious if other readers feel the same]