Video Critique: Steve Jobs (Stanford Commencement, 2005) Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

Because I give many presentations as part of my job I've read a number of books extolling Steve Job's style, and rightfully so. Here is an interesting critique.

Video Critique: Steve Jobs (Stanford Commencement, 2005) Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

Winning Body Language Review

I've read a number of books on body language so when I started to read Winning Body Language I expected just more of the same. I was wrong. Mark Bowden, author of Winning Body Language, offers some different advice than the usual based on his own approach called the TruthPlane.

Bowden divides our body into different planes, each of which is best suited for different kinds of communication. For most presentations (and communication) Bowden recommends that our gestures stay in the TruthPlane, the horizontal plane extending from the navel.

If you can concentrate on sending out nonverbal messages that are easy for the receiver to interpret correctly – clearly coded, with congruent images and sound – then the audience’s brains stand a far greater chance of relaxing and getting your meaning in the way you intended.

The navel is indeed the control center of your physical balance and the center of your biological mechanism for coping with stress.

Placing your hands in the TruthPlane is the single most effective way for the business communicator to fight back effortlessly against the natural stress reaction and send out a clear signal to the audience that there is no problem.

While most of our gestures would occur in the TruthPlane Bowden also proposes other planes: PassionPlane at chest level for adding excitement, DisclosurePlane at the mouth level, ThoughtPlane (eye level) and EsctaticPlane (above the head).

All of these planes can be used at appropriate times while there is one plane, the GrotesquePlane (below waist level), where he says we should avoid placing our hands. Bowden claims this lowers energy. This contradicts advice I've seen in a couple other nooks which recommend dropping your hands to your sides when not gesturing. As a test I've paid attention to TV hosts who don't work behind a desk, politicians and actors. Many of them gesture mostly in the TruthPlane. I don't know if they were trained to do this or if they just do it subconsciously but my informal survey showed that many people use Bowden's TruthPlane.

He also suggests we use symmetrical gestures to make your message easier to process.

For a message that you send to stand the optimum chance of being interpreted correctly by the audience, it must be taken in coherently by both the left brain’s linguistic logic and the right brain’s nonverbal image processor. This means gesturing with more symmetry between the left side and the right side of the body.

Winning Body Language covers more than just giving presentations. It also talks about how to establish your territory in a room, how to break down barriers to communication and how to structure a presentation. While all of this information is good and useful I found the TruthPlane concept, the core of Winning Body Language, the part I apply the most. And that's the plane truth about the TruthPlane.

The Power Presenter Review

In earlier reviews I’ve recommended Jerry Weissman’s earlier two books, Presenting to Win: The Art of Telling Your Story, Updated and Expanded Edition and In the Line of Fire: How to Handle Tough Questions...When It Counts. Presenting To Win shows how to structure and design presentations while In The Line of Fire gives advice on how to handle tough questions and answers. His new book, The Power Presenter: Technique, Style, and Strategy from America's Top Speaking Coach, fills a gap between the first two books: how to actually deliver the presentation. Like the first two books, Weissman’s latest is a worthy addition.

The Power Presenter offers advice I have not seen elsewhere. Most noteworthy is his recommendation for the presenter to think about how the audience is doing to shift the natural focus away from the “How am I doing?” concern that bedevils most presenters. While Presenting To Win talked about designing your presentation by constantly thinking how your presentation will benefit your audience, The Power Presenter tells the presenter to continuously ask how your audience is doing to counter-act the normal concern about how you, the presenter, are doing. This differs from the usual recommended solutions such as visualizing your audience naked or other tricks to distract you away from being concerned about how you are doing.

The Power Presenter also gives unique advice regarding eye contact and the use of pauses. Weissman tells us to make eye contact with one person in the audience, deliver an entire thought to that person, pause while moving on to another person in the audience then deliver a full thought to the new recipient. He contends this approach converts your presentation into a number of one-on-one conversations with the pauses allowing the audience to absorb your points while you take time to formulate your next thought. I haven’t tested this idea yet but I can see how this will make a presenter look confident. I definitely will apply Weissman’s ideas.

Weissman also takes a different approach on a key question every presenter asks: What do I do with my hands? The current thinking, based on a presentation skills class I took at work and observing TV personalities, is to hold your hands together at waist level in front of our body. Weissman instructs us to let our hands drop at our sides in a “touch-and-go position”. This means you drop your hands for an instant, gesture with one or both hands then drop back to the rest position. He claims this method provides several benefits. First, your hands have to travel a longer distance which makes your gestures more pronounced. Second, dropping your hands avoids the hunching of the shoulders produced by the “body wrap position”. Plus there are other benefits. And third, it opens your body to the audience, showing your confidence to face them openly as opposed to protecting your midsection with your arms.

I do want to comment that Weissman never says how he concluded why certain behaviors or gestures work. Is it based on empirical research? His own personal testing? He doesn’t say. His ideas make sense but I find his silence on this subject interesting.

I’m looking forward to using Weissman’s ideas. I’m sure they work if for no other reason than the impressive list of clients Weissman says he has worked with over the years.

Made to Stick Review

Have you ever needed to make a memorable point? If you answered no then you must live by yourself, work in a job with no interaction with people, don’t have kids and aren’t married. For the rest of us every day we’re faced with making a point, asking for someone to do something, convincing someone of your position and so on. Some people do it better than others. A lot better. Why? What makes some people so effective while the rest of us struggle?

Chip and Dan Heath have studied this question and concluded that all of us can craft messages that “stick” by applying several principles which are explained in Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.) Being true to their own advice even their book cover is catchy: it has what appears to be duct tape across the front.)

Their formula for success is SUCCES.

S: Simple. Find your core idea and make it compact.

U: Unexpected. Find something unexpected about your core idea and communicate it in a way that keeps your audience guessing. You do this by focusing on what questions you want your audience to ask.

C: Concrete. Make it easy to understand by translating jargon into laymen’s terms. Too many times we slip into using our profession’s jargon and think everyone else understands our lingo.

E: Emotional. Your audience is constantly asking, “What’s in it for me?” Keep this in mind or you’ll lose them!

S: Stories. When possible wrap your message in a story.

This last feature - how to tell stories - has become a cottage industry. But this approach recognizes that we become more involved and receptive when listening to a story as opposed to a dry lecture or a litany of facts. (See The Secret Language of Leadership by Stephen Denning.)

The Heaths provide many examples and stories to support their principles. In the interest of keeping this entry short I have only reported the key points (in a fashion typical for an engineer).

Coming from an engineering background where the currency of the field is facts, facts and even more facts, I’ve come to appreciate the effectiveness of appropriately packaging and presenting these facts to improve how they’re received. The Heath’s advice is sticking with me.

Presenting to Win/In the Line of Fire

Presenting to Win: The Art of Telling Your Story I know there are lots of books out there on how to make presentations. I’ve read many of them. Why single out this book? Because I found it provided useful, unique information. Presenting to Win constantly reminds us to keep the following thought in mind: what’s in it for the audience. Over the years of sitting in presentations I’ve seen all too often the “show up and throw up” approach. By that I mean the presenter tried to win the audience by throwing out every conceivable bit of information in the hope that something will strike a nerve. Presenting to Win by Gerry Weissman provides different advice. He presents four basic ideas.

1. What is your Point B? (What conclusion do you want your audience to reach?)
2. WIIFY What’s in it for you? (What benefits will your audience get, not you?) In other words every feature about your product or service that you want to present needs to be translated into benefits for the audience.
3. What are your key ideas? (He calls them the Roman Columns.)
4. What flow structure will you use?

In addition to his advice on flow and structure Weissman also suggests how to design slides using how our eyes sweep a slide. For instance, he recommends bar charts increase in size from left to right. A chart that decreases from left to right creates the mental image of decline which we would not want to use (unless, of course, your goal is to paint a negative picture).

Weissman also recommends using phrases that do not talk down to your audience. Use “As you recall” instead of “Like I said.” Or, “I think you’ll see that” is better than “We believe.”

The common theme is that everything, from the structure to design to delivery has to be geared to the audience. The advice might appear obvious but we often tend to get wrapped up into what we want to say that we lose sight of how the message is being received.

In the Line of Fire: How to Handle Tough Questions...When It Counts

In the Line of Fire takes on Q&A’s, especially confrontational ones. While I found this book useful and different too, I do have a negative comment to get out of the way. This is one of those cases where it manages to squeeze a good article into a book. You know what I’m talking about. The content is enough to warrant a 10-page article. To fit it into a book the author has to pad it with lots of stories and filler. I’ve read books in this category where I felt it was not worth the money I spent. However, in the case of In The Line of Fire, the value of the core concept was worth the price and the padding. Weisman lays out a structure for answering questions. Not just questions at the end of a Q&A but handling tough questions in general.

Like Presenting to Win, Weissman advises us on how to phrase questions to show the benefit to the audience. He also recommends rephrasing questions using words like “what” (such as “What will we do to …”) or “how” (such as “How are we going to …”) which require more than “yes” or “no” answers and also do not admit to uncertainty or doubt about your being able to deliver. We say “How do we” instead of “How can we.” Rephrasing also strips out emotional words. The question “Why are your prices too high?” becomes “What is our pricing rationale?”

The key idea is how to slow down, think and structure your response first. Our normal reaction is to plunge into answering the question. Weissman says that we should buffer the answer from the question by rephrasing or restating it. This accomplishes three things. First, it buys you time to formulate your answer. Second, it lets you take the initiative by framing the question. Perhaps sanding the edges off of an antagonist question. Third, you can check whether you properly understood the question when rephrasing it by watching the questioner’s body language.

After the third step, which is to answer the question, you give your answer “topspin.” This lets you show your audience “what’s in it for you” and for you to get back on track towards your Point B, the message you want your audience to retain and hopefully accept.

I have been working on applying the key ideas from both books and feel they do work. I highly recommend both books.