HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations

HARVARD MANAGEMENT COMMUNICATION LETTER

The Basic Presentation Checklist

Here's how to prepare and deliver that next speech effectively

In a perfect world, you would have learned about the presentation months ago. Your personal assistant would have spent weeks researching startling factoids about the topic. And you'd be sitting down well in advance of the event with hours to spend preparing your presentation.

Instead, the reality usually is last-minute. You're pulling together material on the fly from a number of old talks and hoping no one will notice that the whole hasn't really been thought through.

But you can improve that all-too-typical experience with this basic checklist of the necessary steps for a successful presentation. Following ...