Great Public Speaking — Improvise Your Flipchart Oops! I broke my own rules and did not follow a checklist on my last presentation. It was two minutes until start time and I realized there was no flipchart in the room. Oh oh!. Better think fast. I was not using an overhead projector either, so I [...]

Speaking about Presenting — PowerPoint Design in 2009 There’s been a fantastic response to my invitation to write about PowerPoint Design in 2009. 40 contributions. That’s a wealth of material to guide you in making presentations in 2009. They include strong opinions, the odd rant, and many perceptive “hit the nail” comments. I’ve created three [...]

Brad Montgomery’s Laugh-O-Nomics: Meeting Planner Sabotages Keynote Speaker I got my gear set, was all-systems-go with the AV team, and had chatted with the big boss (who by the way had hired me two times in the past.)  So far, everything is easy and fun. But here is where it gets hinky.  I was about [...]

First post of 2009. Happy New Year! Relational Presentation Blog: Fear of Public Speaking Some time ago, I confidently waltzed into a conference room, ready to give a small group presentation in front of a gaggle of professors. We sat around talking, and then I got up to speak on the benefits of interactive presentation, [...]

Great Public Speaking: Humorous Acknowledgments To Tough Situations — “There will come a time when you will either be in front of a hostile audience or a hostile question will pop up during a relatively calm presentation. This is a tough situation at best and you have to handle it with kid gloves. Humor can [...]

jaunted: Nothing Cheery About LaGuardia This Morning — “What were we thinking? Some crazy fantasy of Christmas at home drove us to attempt to fly standby this morning, in order to duck both the forthcoming East Coast storm and the just-passing Midwest storm. While there’s still the remotest chance we might be able to get [...]

FAILBlog: Backstage at BackstageJobs.com: Props are important. Screw them up, and someone could die — “An actor at the Vienna National Theatre slit his own throat in front of a packed house when the fake prop knife he was supposed to have was accidentally switched for a real knife.” Face2face: Teleprompter problems — “I know [...]

Empower Your Point: Context matters : Avoid turkey slaughter in the background — “While watching, it was very hard to focus on her : I totally missed the meaning of her interview. All I actually saw was this crazy man with his poor turkeys… I would much rather be an average presenter in an excellent [...]

Virtual Meeting Success: Disaster Preparedness for Teleconference Nightmares — “At first people thought it was static. But, they soon realized that one of the participants was snoring. And everyone heard it! The snoozing participant had forgotten to turn on his mute button. There was nothing to do but ride it out. Sound familiar? Well, I [...]

We have a ton of really great links this week. Enjoy! a shel of my former self: Connecting to the Net in 1992 — Great story from the bad old days. “We found the AV tech and explained that we had requested a direct line. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘and that’s how you get a direct [...]