Presenting to Win: The Art of Telling Your Story

Chapter 1 You and Your Audience

Company Examples

• Network Appliance
• Luminous Networks

The Problem with Presentations

Few human activities are done as often as presentations, and as poorly. One recent estimate has it that 30 million presentations using Microsoft PowerPoint slides are made every day. I'm sure that you've attended more than a few. How many of them were truly memorable, effective, and persuasive? Probably only a handful.

The vast majority of presentations fall prey to what I call the Five Cardinal Sins:

1. No clear point. The audience leaves the presentation wondering what it was all about. How many times have you sat all the way through a presentation and, at the end, said to yourself, "What was the point?"
2. No audience benefit. ...