The Presentations Japan Series

 Japanese culture is pretty specific about making eye contact with people.  In ancient times, a commoner might lose their head if a samurai felt they were making eye contact with them in an arrogant …

It is a mystery why more people don’t bring storytelling into their presentations.  Technical subjects may seem to be oblivious to storytelling, because we are only dealing with hard data.  Absolutel…

In some professions, there is a lot of media scrutiny on what the speaker is saying.  The organisation they represent also has very strict rules around who can say what.  This makes giving the presen…

We know that being formal and stiff creates distance between the speaker and the audience.  We also know that a “conversational tone” is ideal, as it creates a strong feeling of inclusivity between t…

There are facts, provable information, data, research results and opinions.  What is the right mix when presenting?  Should we just marshal the detail, lay it out for the audience and let them draw t…

I was held up at the hospital, which those who live in Tokyo will know, is a typical occurrence, so I was late to the presentation. One of the speakers had just started, as I slid into my seat at the…

“You are too loud”, “You are too high energy”.  These were some survey comments following some training I was delivering for 60 managers for a client.  You can imagine that the venue to hold ten tabl…

 “I have been presenting since I was 17, but I am not good at engaging the audience”.  This comment from a man in his fifties was telling.  He was in a very technical area which requires a highly acu…

How much is too much?  For the expert, the boundaries on this equation can be quite broad.  For them, we are only tapping into the very superficial elements of this worthy subject.  They have so many…

When we are giving a public presentation, it is rare that we will be given carte blanche by the organisers to promote our product or service.  That type of blatant self-promotion is frowned upon and …

This last week I saw two speakers who were presenting, but both managed to do so with absolutely no presence.  They could not command the room and they were both hard to hear.  One was hosting an eve…

The best personal branding is to say something useful and interesting in a compelling, professional way.  That is a snap right?  Maybe not.  What constitutes useful and interesting will vary, dependi…

“Greg is all style and no substance”, my erstwhile colleague happily told everyone who would listen, while I was on stage.  It was an occasion where each Division Head presented to the entire company…

I gave a speech recently to a room full of managers, some foreigners and some Japanese.  It was an internal talk and the purpose was to get the leaders motivated and get their mojo going, after havin…

TikTok, Reels and all of the other super short form visual media are creating a nightmare for presenters.  Twitter started things off with the very limited number of words allowed per tweet, forcing …

The vast majority of the time in our company we are teaching presentation training to groups of fourteen.  We have two instructors and we video everything.  We provide an enormous amount of one-on-on…

Most foreigner delivered presentations in Japan will be delivered in English and have a mixed audience of both Japanese and non-Japanese.  There is the tendency to imagine, because it is in English, …

There were three experts on the panel for this luncheon event.  One man and two women.  They were using microphones but that didn’t help in one case.  A very well presented, professional woman was ad…