Presentations

I HATE folks that stand up before meetings to "present" and proceed to read from their 10 point font that they have placed on slide after slide.

Not only is this "death by powerpoint" - it serves the presenter poorly since no matter how dynamic they might be - most people over the age of 7 in the audience can READ their slides faster than the dman fool can drone through them.

A presentation is an opportunity to tell someone something useful - to give them information that they did not already know - help them avoid a trap they are already walking into - or show them how to do something they can not accomplish today.

A fantastic book regarding one of the great communicators of the last 25 years is JACKED UP by Bill Lane - former speachwriter for Jack Welch at GE.

GE's culture was about learning from best practices - not a cliche that I still associate with a former colleague known as Best Practice Brad that figured his lunch order, hair gel and fingernail cuttings should be collected and stored in the company archive with the same reverence as the Magna Carta - but the real opportunity to share something that IS working with others in the organization as quickly as possible.

Lane's point is that being ON MESSAGE - being consice - being on topic and being USEFUL should the the focus of EVERY presentation....

and he is right!

Pentagon's new map

Most of my friends know that I was a huge fan of Thomas Barnett's book "The Pentagon's New Map" 3-4 years ago when it was released. I probably gave away 10 copies over the last couple of years.

Barnett's work IS important - and is probably to first really interesting blueprint for american foreign policy since George Kennan sat in the basement of the US embassy in Moscow in the 40's and banged out the "Long Telegram" that eventually became the Doctrine of Containment (or at least the first iteration of that strategy as it morphed over the next 40 years)

Above is a link to a TED talk given a couple of years ago by Barnett.

For those of you who are not yet familar with the TED talks - run! don't WALK to their web site for some of these extraordinary 18 minute presentations.