How to be a Presentation God: Build, Design, and Deliver Presentations that Dominate!

Chapter 3. Omniscient View

Let's establish something: Just because the Presentation Revolution is fomenting throughout the world, you don't have to hunker over your laptop and projector in fear that wild-eyed hooligans are going to throw Molotov cocktails on stage and loot your setup. Audiences are not upending conference tables or burning huge piles of complimentary hotel notepads. Physical danger is not imminent.

But every revolution makes someone mortally terrified or, at least, mildly uncomfortable. However, the Presentation Revolution has moved beyond discomfort. Several years ago it was making the old guard feel as though they'd been on a one-hour road trip; now, it's post-sugar, toddler-rage frightening. It will not be stopped; it will not be ignored; it will eat its cupcake and yours, too.

If the old guard (for example, individuals clinging to bullet-pointed PowerPoint presentations in the same way that a skeleton in the desert might still clutch a phony tonic purchased to guard against thirst) is not in danger of physical harm, what exactly should they fear? Oblivion is the fearsome wound most notably inflicted by the revolutionaries. Handed out like Depends at a bingo marathon, these energetic storytellers are taking their ideas, brands, and products to the world; they see need, and they see opportunity. The damage to the old guard is far worse than destruction; it is exclusion.

As New York Times columnist and author Thomas Friedman has illustrated, the world is now ...