Here’s a simple way to make your PowerPoint slides more visual. Ask yourself: What would this slide look like if it was designed to be a billboard?

In preparation for this, take a drive and look at some billboards. Read quickly because you only have a few seconds to get the message. Any longer than that and you become a traffic hazard.

And that’s the point.

What do we know about billboards? They must communicate at a glance. A good example is the McDonald’s billboard that appears on this page promoting the restaurant chain’s signature Big Mac.

How much better would our PowerPoint slides be if they communicated at a glance?

The marketers and copywriters who design billboards know that drivers must be able to assimilate the billboard’s meaning within three seconds. Otherwise, drivers’ eyes must return to the road and the message is never received.

We don’t have such an urgent time restriction with an audience sitting in chairs. But adherence to the Three Second Rule makes great sense. It forces us to refrain from glutting our slides with text or complicated charts, graphs and other images that slow and complicate our presentations.

When we apply the Three Second Rule audiences are communicated with using succinct text and images that are easily absorbed. It also speeds the presentation along and forces the presenter to play his or her rightful role as narrator.

Make your slide the headline while you provide the details in your narrative. Adhere to the billboard approach to slide design.

One of the premier sports writers of the day is John Feinstein, the author of 28 books. Among his most acclaimed titles are A Season on the Brink, about his year shadowing the volatile Indiana University basketball coach Bobby Knight, and A Good Walk Spoiled, a behind-the-scenes look at the pro golf tour.

Feinstein was questioned about his interviewing techniques on the National Public Radio program Fresh Air by interviewer Dave Davies. One of the key points made by Feinstein is that some of the best reporting he has done was without the presence of a notebook. Here are some excerpts from that interview:

Dave Davies: A lot of your latest book [One on One: Behind the Scene with the Greats in the Game] is about the business of getting meaningful access to players and coaches, moments in which they may be candid. How did you learn that?

John Feinstein: Well, I think it goes back to my first days as a reporter, when I was still in college. It became apparent to me that the more you could see what was real, as opposed to what was served up to you, whether it was in a locker room or in a practice or if you could get somebody to let you into a team meeting, or if you could get an athlete away from their domain and put them in a restaurant for lunch or dinner…. When I was first at the Washington Post, I spent several years covering cops and courts and politics, and I learned from that that the less formal the situation was, the more you learned. And that’s why I made the comment in the book that I think I do some of my best reporting without a notebook in my hands, when I’m just talking to someone, and I ask about their family or about last night’s ballgame and then eventually work my way towards a real question rather than just walking up with a notebook or a tape recorder in my hands, because when you do that, that’s what you are: You’re a notebook or a tape recorder. You’re not another person. When you walk up and say, hey, can you believe what happened in last night’s game, then you establish common ground and you become a person rather than just a reporter.

Davies: Right, but then the athlete thinks he’s having a conversation when he’s in fact giving you on-the-record comment. Is that an issue?

Feinstein: You know, it’s never been for me, because what I have always done is if someone says something to me that I think might be controversial ... usually at that point I’ll take out a notebook and say, “Let me make sure I get this right,” or “Do you mind if I quote you on that.” I don’t want there to be any doubt. I don’t want anybody I’m working with to be surprised. And I have only once in my career had an athlete claim that he thought he was off the record with me, and that was 30 years ago when I was a young reporter at the Post. I got sent to the home of John Riggins, the star running back who was holding out, and he was in Lawrence, Kansas, and he was refusing to talk to anybody in the media. And I was the low guy on the totem pole at the Post, and my boss said just go knock on John Riggins’ door and see if he’ll talk to you, which I did. And John Riggins basically said “get out of here, I’m not talking to anybody.” And I said to him: “Look, John, if I go back with nothing, I’m going to be fired.”

He looked at me and said: “I’ll call your boss and tell him that I wouldn’t talk to you.” And I said, “That’s not good enough. Can’t you just tell me what it is you want?” And he started talking about how it was the Redskins’ move, and the [team’s] general manager needed to do this and that.

I never took out a notebook, and I stood there, and I asked him more questions, and we talked for, I don’t know, 10 or 12 minutes, and I went back to my car, wrote down everything I could remember, didn’t quote him specifically but paraphrased everything that he had said to me in the story. When another TV reporter called Riggins the next day and said why would you talk to that guy when you’re friends with us, and you don’t even know him, Riggins said, “Well, I thought we were off the record.” And when the guy called me from the TV station and said, “John said he thought you were off the record,” I said, “Did he really think I flew to Lawrence, Kansas because I was personally curious about his contract?”

Exercise restraint.

That’s one of the most powerful things public speakers can do to make themselves more effective.

There are two areas in particular where restraint pays great dividends.

1. The length of a presentation. Shorter is almost always better, in part because it leaves an audience keen for more.
2. Giving the audience less information rather than more (though the information offered should be concentrated and evocative).

Examples of the powe

r of restraint abound in all areas of life, including movie making. A recent demonstration took the form of The Iron Lady, an Academy Award-winning motion picture about the remarkable life of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who ruled over Great Britain for a decade and dramatically changed that nation’s politics and self-image.

As you can imagine, there was a huge amount of material this cinematic biography could have delved into. The movie could have easily run three hours and Maggie Thatcher’s many political battles, accomplishments and defeats could have been enumerated in great number.

Instead, director Phyllida Lloyd did just the opposite.

The movie runs a relatively modest 1 hour, 45 minutes.

She creates a storytelling structure by making the movie a pastiche of flashbacks from The Iron Lady’s now feeble and sometimes delusional mind.

Instead of drowning the audience in an exhaustive recitation of her curriculum vitae, Lloyd choose to focus on just a few truly signature Thatcher decisions, such as her epic battle with the unions, and her declaration of war against Argentina over the Falkland Islands.

(As an aside, moviegoers are also rewarded with stories of the enormous imprint Thatcher received from her father who spoke passionately about self-reliance, and the real and imagined love affair The Iron Lady had with husband Denis Thatcher.)

The result is a film that is well crafted, well paced, clear in its priorities, and leaves viewers wanting more Iron Lady.

These same principles of restraint work wonders for our public presentations. Less is more in almost all things in life, and that is certainly true of public speaking.

Before stepping onto the dais, choose your material wisely. Make it strong but lightweight. That will easily outperform attempts to enter the ring with a heavyweight bout in mind.

Jack-rabbit starts might be a bad idea when you’re behind the wheel of a car, but it’s exactly what you want with most sentences.

We do just the opposite when packaging the start of sentences with qualifiers and other forms of excess verbiage. That gets sentences off to a slow start, obscures or weakens our point, and makes our writing blubbery. Some examples of what I mean, followed by the rewritten sentences free of the excess language…

I think that this business deal will set us on the right path.
This business deal will set us on the right path.

There are investors out there who are desperate for financial advice.
Investors are desperate for financial advice.

It is my opinion that job satisfaction is at an all-time high.
Job satisfaction is at an all-time high.

The bold-faced words in the above sentences are superfluous because … we know you’re stating your “opinion” what you “think” or you wouldn’t be saying it. And so on.

Make your sentences lean.

Strip away unnecessary verbiage.

Give them jack-rabbit starts. 

Few things in life feel better than making people laugh.

Just ask the public speaker who gets his or her first laugh. We’ve seen this many times before. They become intoxicated with the laughter and go for broke. Many public speakers are quite skilled at making audiences laugh. They come prepared with comedic digressions.

Just one problem, the audience didn’t attend to watch a standup comedy show. Yet over and over again I’ve watched speakers get their first laugh and let it go to their heads. They start going for the laughs more than imparting the knowledge they were hired to convey.

Time grinds on. An otherwise educational session turns into a comedy routine, and the jokes get progressively more tiresome. It gets annoying.

As the audience rewards the speaker with more laughter, the speaker dishes out more one-liners, comedic stories and other riffs of merriment. In time, audience laughter becomes less genuine and becomes more a courtesy to the speaker. The speaker catches on (though often too slowly) and gets back to a sober articulation of the subject at hand. By then, quite a bit of time has been wasted and the rhythm of the presentation must be re-established.

It’s bad form. A few laughs along the way are a good thing. But too many speakers get seduced by the guffaws and are knocked off track.

Don’t make that mistake. Be amusing if the opportunity presents itself, but stay focused. Stay on subject.

If laughter eventually becomes our goal, there are plenty of open-mike-nights at local comedy clubs to accommodate us.

 

Most of the talking heads on political and financial talk-shows come and go like ocean tides.

Then there are those who stick. They get invited back again and again because they score well with viewing audiences and program hosts.

Joe Duran is an example of the latter group. You’ll find him being interviewed with regularity on MSNBC and CNBC, not because he’s a paid financial or political analyst, but because he’s a terrific interview.

In Duran’s case we can assume it’s paying off handsomely.

Joe Duran is the founding partner and CEO of United Capital, a fast-growing wealth advisory firm. That means every time Duran speaks on national television and says intelligent things about investing and the economy, more money flows into United Capital coffers and the investment models it has designed for clients.

Duran’s been down this road before. He spearheaded the growth of Centurion Capital Management and its eventual acquisition by GE. His other successes include raising more than $45 million for three private equity funds.

The real question for the purposes of this blog is, Why is Joe Duran such as a successful guest on financial talk shows?

You can see for yourself during this recent appearance on CNBC.

After the producers get done running through a series of distracting graphs, you can settle in and notice several important habits that make Duran a model guest. You will see and hear that he…

• Is relaxed
• Waits for the interviewer to complete his question before launching into an answer
• Keeps his replies short but complete and meaningful
• Smiles
• Nods
• Punctuates his remarks with natural facial expressions and head movements
• Raises his eyebrows to demonstrate alertness and interest
• Shares his attention with everyone on the set by making eye contact with each person
• Speaks deliberately so listeners can absorb what he’s saying
• Doesn’t get flustered when challenged
• Doesn’t get argumentative
• Doesn’t raise his voice while being interrupted by the interviewer

When the interviewer says (barely audible) “we gotta go,” Duran finishes his thought within a couple of seconds, rather than trying to squeeze in another policy position or marketing bromide. For the program host, that means Duran is a guest who’s easy to manage and doesn’t add unnecessary pressure to the situation. (Compare that to how most politicians behave in those circumstances.)

Why wouldn’t you want to bring back a no-maintenance guest of Duran’s stripe? He makes life easy. Those are the kind of people we seek to surround ourselves with in any situation.

It doesn’t hurt that Duran has a friendly face and a Zimbabwean accent that adds a dash of panache. In short, he’s a likable guy. That makes him influential. Human beings are naturally inclined to follow the advice of people they like.

Add it all up and Duran has a winning formula that we can emulate – during everyday conversation, as well as during formal interviews.

We might not be able to replicate his endearing smile or appealing foreign accent; but we can certainly adopt many of the good practices I’ve enumerated above.

 

It would seem obvious that we need to be focused on our audience while presenting. There would be no presentation without the audience, after all. We’ve written and rehearsed the speech with the audience in mind, and will be speaking and looking directly at them while articulating our thoughts.

So focusing on the audience is automatic.

Or is it?

Not necessarily. Not without truly conscious effort.

To truly focus on our audience means concentrating on their visual reaction and feedback while presenting.

Yes, we look out to our audience. Yes, we see them. The problem is most presenters don’t actually read their audience. In other words, they aren’t paying attention to how audience members are reacting to their remarks.

Here’s one of the most common reasons for this: We’re so nervous about our performance, so concentrated on what we’re going to say next, we overlook focusing on the audience in a detailed way. Under these circumstances we treat the audience as a mass demonstration, rather than a collection of individuals.

There’s another reason for this disconnect. Any audience has more than its fair share of unfriendly or blank faces staring at us catatonically. With optics like those, who wants to make genuine eye contact? What presenter wouldn’t feel dyspeptic with that kind of response to their finest public speaking efforts?

We need not despair. The expressions usually have nothing to do with us. Gaze out at most audiences of any substantial size and we will almost certainly find polarity among its members. Some people who are alert or smiling, while others wear dour or bored expressions.

Regardless, pay close attention to what the audience is silently communicating. Here’s why.

The audience provides us with an enormous amount of feedback that can benefit us. Unfortunately, this torrent of feedback usually goes lost.

Think about when we have a conversation with a person. We are highly attuned to how the person is reacting to everything we’re saying, every motion we’re making, every question we’re posing. That rarely happens when we’re speaking from the dais.

The solution is to read the audience by paying strict attention to what the crowd is telling us with facial expressions and body language. If we truly concentrate on the audience and look for the feedback it’s sending our way, we’re likely to see:

• Heads nodding
• Confused or bored faces
• People shifting in their seats
• Someone taking note of what we’ve just said
• A person playing with their smart phone
• Someone dozing
• Someone checking their watch
• Heading to the restroom
• Raising their eyebrows with rising interest level
• Raising a hand to get our attention
• Cupping an ear to indicate we need to speak more loudly
• A hand waving off our latest comment, as though to indicate we’re all wet
• Whispering to a colleague

It’s always a good idea to notice how many people are making eye contact with us. If the percentage is less than 80 we might not be striking the proper chords.

In each case, we have something to learn, something to potentially adjust to. By paying attention to such indicators we can gradually refine our delivery. We speak louder when prompted by the man having difficulty hearing us. We give an example to clarify our point and wipe the confused or incredulous expression off that woman’s face. We pick up the tempo to increase the energy level so bored audience members will come back into our fold.

Be responsive. Then notice how the audience feedback is altered by our own attentiveness and responsiveness.

Remember that we cannot embody the poise required to really concentrate on the audience if our delivery is too feverish. Slow down. Modulate the rate of information being imparted to the audience so its members truly absorb what we’re saying. When we slow down we also give ourselves a chance to absorb what the audience has to “say” to us through its visual comeback.

The audience focus also helps reduce our anxiety because we’re less self-conscious. If we consider ourselves the most important person in the room, it’s no wonder audience members would perceive that we’re giving them cursory attention.

Think about when we’re at a business networking event having a one-on-one conversation with someone we’ve just met. Think how quickly it becomes apparent to us when that person isn’t really interested in what we’re saying. How do we most effectively salvage such conversations? We cease our monologue and instead ask the person a relevant question. Suddenly they’re engaged again because it’s about them.

We must do the same thing while on stage; make our presentation about our audience members. They will pick up this shift in attention very quickly. Instead of us downloading a torrent of information we think they need to know, or assume they’ll be interested in, we attune ourselves to the audience and let it guide us. We make adjustments based on what the audience is transmitting to us.

By focusing on audience members we connect with them, and they feel a sense of connection with us. They are far more likely to be careful and responsive listeners. And we’re far less likely to get to the end of our presentation, ask for questions, only to find not a single hand goes up.

What happened?

We lost our audience. They weren’t paying attention to us, and we were clueless about the situation because we weren’t paying attention to them. Now we’re in an embarrassing situation where the event’s master of ceremonies bails us out by quickly vamping together a clumsy question. Ouch!

Genuinely focus on audience members and they’re far more likely to ask questions in the midst of the proceedings. Indeed, people will often indicate by their facial expressions and body language that they would like to interact, to ask a question. Call on them. Why wait until the very end to entertain questions? The questions people ask along the way are yet another guide wire that informs us about the right content to deliver.

We are especially effective when we know our subject matter cold and can easily make content adjustments on the fly. The atmosphere changes when we stop talking at our audience and start talking to our audience. The distance between us and them closes. The atmosphere warms.

Imagine, back at the business networking event, a person looking to do business walked up to us and started rattling off his sales pitch. We would be put off. We’d realize this individual has his mind made up about what to say regardless of whom we are or how we reacted. The person has just turned us into a prop of his marketing campaign.

Yet, that’s how so many public presenters regard their audiences. They take their place on the stage, immutable script in hand and start prattling away. How does that come across to astute audience members? Like this…

You listen to me.

Here is what I have to say about that.

Homilies are fine for preachers, not for presenters. We cannot become mesmerized by our own soliloquies.

Think about when we’re audience members. We want the energy to flow in more than one direction. Our audience members are no different. They want to feel the interplay. Give them conversation not disquisition.

Without that audience connection much of what we have to say, regardless of its sophistication, turns to pabulum.

People aren’t nearly as impressed by the grandiloquent presenter as by the person who shows a genuine awareness in their presence.

Let’s commit to tuning into our audience members. They will give us plenty to go on.

One of the chief criticisms of badly written novels and newspaper profiles is poor character development.

Undeveloped characters are one-dimensional and lie flat on the page. Well-developed characters are rendered in three dimensions and leap off the page fully formed.

But how do we create 3-D characters that really work?

There is a formula. As the name implies, the human animal is constituted of three components: physiological, sociological and psychological. So, while profiling an individual, we need to bring each of these dimensions into full relief.

Let’s consider them individually. When rendering a person’s physiological (or physical) characteristics we might include features such as:

• Height
• Weight
• Race
• Health
• Style of dress
• Overall appearance

Sociological characteristics might cover these areas:

• Social class
• Parents
• Neighborhood
• Schools attended
• Politics embraced
• Religious affiliation
• Values

When writing about the subject’s psychological makeup we might turn our attention toward issues such as:

• Management style
• Passions
• Phobias
• Complexes
• Behavior patterns
• Goals
• Friendships

Here’s a good example of three-dimension profiling by Boston Globe reporter Charles Stein, writing about Jack Meyer, who at the time was head of Harvard Management Co., the investment arm responsible for managing Harvard University’s whopping $12 billion endowment. Stein’s first two sentences alone give us immediate insight into Meyer.

Harvard University’s $12 billion man doesn’t wear a tie, takes the subway to work, and eats his lunch in the cafeteria on the fourth floor of the Federal Reserve Building. Jack Meyer is a person of few pretensions, but strong beliefs.

In the first paragraph Stein brings all three dimensions of his subject into play. We already have a sense of who Jack Meyer is and we’re just two sentences into this profile. Not bad.

Another good example is the first graph of this Fortune magazine profile of Nike founder Phil Knight, written by reporter Daniel Roth.

I had been warned that the interview would be a crapshoot. On some days Phil Knight opens up; on others he barely says a word. I got lucky. On this gray January morning the founder of Nike was willing to talk. Perhaps Knight felt nostalgic: He had just finished his last official day as CEO of the company he had built from scratch some 40 years earlier, and this was his first—and so far only—extensive interview. Or perhaps he just wanted to talk. No one ever really knows with Knight; they just take what they can get. Tinker Hatfield, a 24-year Nike veteran, told me that when he goes to Knight with a question, sometimes Knight doesn’t even answer. (Tinker says he simply treats that as a yes.) Whatever the reason, Knight happily ruminated on the highs and lows of his career; he reminisced about the joys of building his company, about the hunt for a successor, about the athletes he had signed—good and bad—and about the people he had managed—well and not so well. He talked, haltingly, about the death of his son last May. Knight, famous for wearing his sunglasses just about everywhere—even inside the buildings on Nike’s 176-acre campus in Beaverton, Ore.—kept the Nike shades off, though they were always within his reach on the table in the small conference room.

A long opening paragraph rich with three-dimensional material that promises many more interesting insights to come about this captain of the athletic apparel industry.

In both examples you see reporters who expertly rendered their subjects three-dimensionally by speaking to their subjects’ physical, sociological and psychological makeup.

It isn’t easy, but we can do the same.

(Next week we’ll discuss the difference between the general profile and the microcosm profile.)

Business people often talk about the value of bringing a commanding presence into the room or onto the stage.

Some people have been given special genetic advantages in this area, having been blessed with a dashing physique, or a voice as rich and deep as Hollywood actor Sam Elliott.

That doesn’t mean the rest of us are out of luck. There are things we have control over that can make us more commanding figures in the boardroom and on the dais. They include:

• Being well dressed, always with an eye toward what is appropriate for the venue, audience and topic.
• Making eye contact, and making it direct and persistent enough that it says to audience members, “I see you and I’m paying attention to you.”
• Enlarging and animating our physical selves with arm gestures above the waist and extending away from the body.
• Pausing after delivering key statements or phrases. Among other things, it demonstrates that we are poised and in command of the presentation’s tempo.
• Speaking at a volume that fills the room. That increases the energy level and keeps your audience more alert. If you have a soft voice, use a microphone and make sure your sound engineer knows you want the speaker system kept on the loud side.

For presentation coaches, the conversational dynamics of persuasion and salesmanship teach powerful lessons.

I was reminded of that recently by a close friend who works for one of nation’s fastest growing wealth-management firms. She compared the sales styles of the two partners who manage the office that employs her.

The approaches they use during client meetings couldn’t be starker. In essence, the more experienced of the two tells his clients what to do. The junior partner tries to persuade his clients to assent to his advice by rationally explaining to them why it’s the right course of action.

Guess which partner is more successful?

In the interest of anonymity, we’ll refer to them as Mr. Assertion and Mr. Explanation, respectively.

Mr. Assertion is a former Lutheran minister who expresses himself with ecumenical certitude.

Mr. Explanation has an economics degree and a conviction that fact and reason is the winning formula.

Mr. Assertion, when selling a financial instrument, tells the client it’s the “right thing to do,” presents the paperwork, assures him that everything is in order, hands over a pen and points to the signature line.

By contrast, Mr. Explanation, when selling the same product, discusses how the financial instrument operates, its expected returns, fees, and why the product is right for the client’s portfolio.

Mr. Assertion – as required by industry guidelines – also talks returns, fees, etc., but he glosses over them in a headlong sprint to close the deal and get his client on the right path, post haste.

Mr. Assertion wastes little time.

Mr. Explanation will burn an hour talking about the Greek debt crisis and its potential ramifications for the U.S. equity and bond markets.

It doesn’t hurt that the lean, angular Mr. Assertion stands about six-and-a-half-feet tall and is topped off with a head full of white hair. He is an expert in his field and wields that self-assurance during every client exchange.

My friend says clients don’t always understand what Mr. Assertion is talking about. They sometimes come to her to ask, “Do you understand what he meant by…” But clients don’t resist his counsel because their bottom line reaction is, I trust him.

Mr. Explanation is no slouch, by any means. He has a great command of the wealth management business, yet he is averse to operating with the assertive manner of his partner. It simply isn’t his style. He isn’t comfortable with it.

Mr. Assertion sells himself.

Mr. Explanation sells products and expectations.

To answer the question I posed earlier, yes, Mr. Assertion is the more successful of the two (as if that wasn’t obvious by now).

The more important question, of course, is why. That’s pretty obvious, too. People aren’t sold on products and services as much as they are sold on the purveyors of those products and services. Confidence is attractive. Assertiveness, when backed by credibility, can be an irresistible force.

The lesson for presenters is this: When we take the stage we can embody the expertise we have come to impart. Or, we can try to convince audience members that we possess expertise by inundating them with facts, figures, metrics, comparisons and all manner of empirical knowledge.

In the final analysis, Mr. Assertion owns the stage.