The best presentation is the one never shown | Hacker News Reader

The best presentation is the one never shown

artlebedev.com

48 pointsmakeramen28 comments

I take some umbrage at the ubiquitous slighting of PowerPoint, et al. The vast majority of "business" presentations are for an internal audience that is already partially pre-briefed and the presenter just uses the slides to jog his or her own memory of the important points to review in the meeting. It's essentially pre-written agenda+minutes, and it doesn't have to be anything more.

This is easily contrasted to the kinds of professional presenters you see at TED, or someone like Steve Jobs, but those are public presentations of novel content. Not at all the same, and it's not fair to directly compare the work these folks do to prepare and rehearse their presentations to what 9-to-5ers do. Nearly zero internal business presentations need to be so polished, either in formatting or delivery.

It's essentially pre-written agenda+minutes.

This is very insightful. Powerpoint is a prop for establishing the structure of a meeting. It is -- as pointed out by many -- a lousy tool for conveying actual content. (Of course, in a world with cheap printing, and now cheap email, cheap blogging, cheap e-text, cheap recorded audio, and cheap online video as well, live lectures in general are lousy tools for conveying content.)

Meetings need agendas. Otherwise every meeting ends up being about whatever the best schmoozer at the meeting wants it to be about.

Of course, as with many tools, the use of Powerpoint is most noticeable when it is being terribly abused. People use it to force incredibly boring agendas. People use it as an excuse to lecture.

The rest of the site is good too. "Time makes things worse" I liked particularly.

Good point about being forced to make visual presentation in the form of slides. It's too restrictive sometimes. Does anybody know good presentation tool that allows creating animated presentations not in the form of slides?

UPD. Discovered prezi.com - it's amazing!

145. Pointless presentation

More like "146. Pointless Blog Post".

From the title, I was expecting to read what one should do ahead of time to make one's slide presentation unnecessary. Something like "How to build a tag line so compelling that people will get it immediately," "Show everything a first timer needs to know on your front page," or "How to hit the reptilian brain in the first 10 seconds".

We already know that most presentations suck and want to learn what to do to avoid suckdom. That's advice I'd be interested in learning. Alas, it never came from this post.

Something like "How to build a tag line so compelling that people will get it immediately," "Show everything a first timer needs to know on your front page," or "How to hit the reptilian brain in the first 10 seconds".

See, that's exactly something ArtLebedev and we Europeans object to in American business culture - do you REALLY need to get your "point" out immediately, does "hitting reptilian brain in 10 seconds" is really all that important? Maybe if you didn't need to brainwash us into business relationship in the first place, it wouldn't matter whether it took "immediately", 10 seconds or 10 minutes.

...we Europeans object to in American business culture...

Be thankful for being able to insult us Americans in English, because if it wasn't for us, you'd probably be doing it in German.

</stock response to any illogical European insult of the U.S.>

The allied victory was not a sole American effort. And the US would have had a hard time if the Germans were to take over Europe. It was in its own interests to get involved.

See, taking objective criticism as an insult and reacting strongly with a false sense of pride ("if it weren't for us in the WWII!!!"). Dealing with american here, no doubt about that.

And then there are Americans who agree with your point of substance - yet still don't think HNN is the right place to flame about nationalism.

Pointing out differences between national business cultures != nationalism.

Handwaving with WWII outcomes = nationalism.

"Dealing with american here, no doubt about that" = nationalism. I downvoted both of you, but not your first post, which I agreed with. My point was that I am also an American, yet capable of agreeing with you.

Sorry if that looks like nationalist to you, but it obviously doesn't look that way to whoever downvoted you. I'm definitely not pretending I know everything about americans or that you're all the same or that we can't agree on anything.

But bringing up scars of war is definitely not something we europeans like to engage in. Especially not as a response to criticism.

Well, yes - if I could have downvoted that one more, I would have. It was in incredibly poor taste.

As much as I agree with his point, his America vs. Russia shtick is grating and distracting.

Actually, I enjoyed his unique perspective on American vs Russian business culture. Without it, this article is not hugely compelling and ends up being like many articles before it.

I just help couldn't turning every sentence into something like "In communist Russia, you do not make presentation, presentation make you" in my head.

tbh i lold at this.

It seems he hasn't read Jason Santa Maria's article on presentations: http://jasonsantamaria.com/articles/make-yourself-presentabl...

a) The author is Russian, and his article translated. He probably doesn't speak or read English.

b) The linked article predates Jason Santa Maria's article.

c) The linked article is still interesting, even if a and b weren't true.

A correction: as far as I recall the author studied in US at some point of time.

Interesting. So why does he get someone else to translate his articles? Maybe he's not that confident with his English skills.

He runs the biggest design studio in Russia, so I suppose he does not have that much time to translate his entire website into English.

Because he knows that unless he's really talented at language, he's better off expressing his thoughts in his native language, then paying a professional to translate them?

I've spoken German fluently for over twenty years and translate it professionally to the tune of a million words a year - thus I'm no slouch with the German language - yet if I were to build a site for my services in Germany, you can damn well bet I'd pay a translator to produce the German.

He seems to be describing mostly bad presentations. I've seen good ones that don't suffer these problems, though they can be rare.

I've noticed that for the most part quality of a presentation rests on the skill of the speaker, rather than the quality of slides.

This is true, but it does take certain qualities in the slides, such as not re-stating what is being said word for word, and including relevant & enlightening graphics that show what the speaker cannot say.

Of course, you could argue knowing how to make such a slideshow is part of being a good speaker, because it is all about creating a slideshow to support, augment, improve & fill the holes in your talk.

I fortunately have not been in a position to attend a large number of presentations. Of the ones I have attended, the best have been by well-prepared speakers who use a whiteboard and no slides. The diagrams tend to be crude but hand-drawing on a whiteboard hardly ever outraces the ability of the audience to follow along; with slides the opposite is often the case (for me anyway).

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