The Presentations Japan Series

When I exchange business cards in Japan, I select from the one designed for a Western audience and another for a Japanese audience.  Often, I will hand one over to a foreigner and then a different on…

I was reading a post on LinkedIn by an American lady, who spilt coffee over her blouse, just moments before she was due to give a key presentation to a group of executives.  That got me thinking abou…

Presenting online is difficult.  Presenting in person is difficult. The new hybrid version is a combination of the worst of both online and in-person worlds for the presenter.  We teach presentation …

Major money has been spent for decades by the Japanese Government, to improve the level of English in Japan and you would have to say with fairly limited success.  Japan faces a declining population …

How could we lose track of buyers?  Unfortunately it is very easy.  That nice person we have been dealing with inside the company, the one with whom we have built a solid relationship, where the trus…

I have a couple of very good books here at home on how to create your visuals for the slide deck.  The layout clearly does make a big difference to the quality of the message.  If you ever doubt this…

 The raconteur is admired and the reason is because they are brimming with interesting stories, incidents, vignettes and amusing reflections.  We don’t need to be a gold medal winning raconteur to be…

Don’t Forget To Pause When Presenting

 Nervousness drives speed when we are speaking.  Without even realising it, the adrenaline pumping through our veins is speeding everything up.  Once we get on a…

“Man, it feels hot in here.  My throat is parched.  My hands are sweating and butterflies have taken over my stomach”.  These are some typical symptoms of nervousness about getting up in front of hun…

What do we bring to our presentations?  Usually we have two things – information and a point of view.  For a lot of presentations, the information element becomes a data dump.  This is very boring an…

Normally a talk for a business audience will be around 40 minutes long.  That seems a lot until you start putting the talk together and you always feel you don’t have enough time to include all of th…

We have a talk coming up which we have to give to a business audience and we work hard on the preparation.  We make sure that we don’t suck up all of the time though, with preparing the slide deck an…

The beauty of being the presenter is that for the majority of the time we are dominant, the lord or mistress of all we survey, we are the big shot.  We can craft the speech anyway we wish and deliver…

ChatGPT is a marvel, there is no doubt about that.  We can programme the type of information we seek and it will scan through squillions of pieces of content and spit out an answer in seconds.   When…

I am constantly amazed at the lack of thinking about seizing opportunities for storytelling to be more persuasive in business.  Most interactions are one dimensional.  We want to buy something and th…

We love another acronym, not!  It is a handy memory jogger though, so let’s persevere with yet another one.  Whenever you are in a situation where you need to get collaboration,  support, funding or …

We all know that first impressions are critical, but what happens if you blow it?  There are a couple of typical ways we can hurt our credibility at the start.  Trying a joke that bombs is a very com…

As businesspeople, we don’t get that many chances to face a public audience and give an actual talk.  The majority of the time, we are giving internal weekly reports on projects or revenues.  We feel…

There are some fundamental mechanics of the presentation delivery.  I would call these hygiene factors for presenting.  Eye contact, facial expression, voice modulation, gesture usage, pause insertio…

There are some levels of presenter and so where do you fit in?  The scaredy-cat like I used to be, avoiding all opportunities to present.  The novice presenter trying to work it out by yourself throu…