Presentation Zen:
Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery
Reviewed
by Harry {doc} Babad © 2009>
Author: Garr Reynolds
Publisher: New Riders Press (Peachpit); 1st edition (January 4, 2008)
Web Site: http://www.peachpit.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=0321525655
Product Dimensions: 228 Pages including the
Index, as an 8.9 x 7.5 x 0.4
inch paperback. Language: English ISBN-10: 0321525655, ISBN-13: 978-0321525659
Cost: List $29.95, Street $23.09
USD or Safari books online,
an eBook $25.19 USD
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Review
Ratings: Readers open to
or Comfortable with oriental concepts — 
The rest of
the world’s challenged would be presenters; you too can overcome!
Audience: Anyone who has to give or individual
with influence who
will have to sit though canned presentations at meetings and symposia.
Strengths: Nancy Duarte, CEO, Duarte Design, noted: “Garr is a
beacon of hope for frustrated and bored audiences everywhere. His design philosophy and fundamental
principles bring life to messages and can invigorate careers. His principles of
simplicity are as much a journey of the soul as they are restraint of the
mouse." This book will make you rethink everything you've known (and
likely done) about how a presentation should be designed.
Weaknesses: This is not a PowerPoint or Keynote
recipe book about how to create slides. The book contains no software mechanics
of sets of prefab templates that follow the Microsoft of other corporate
presentation rules. This, as the author and other presentation experts he cites
note, is about re-imagining how your entire presentation will work together as
a persuasive and integrated graphics and verbal (you) show, from conception
through delivery. Hurrah for Gar Reynolds.
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Copyright
Notice: Product and
company names and logos in this review may be registered trademarks of their
respective companies.
Sidebar #1: Reviews were written on my iMac 2.8 GHz
Intel Core 2 Duo with 2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM running Mac OS X version 10.5.8
with all current security updates installed. Techniques were tested, more for
fun than necessity, for doing this book review; and I do own both the latest
versions of MS PowerPoint and Apple’s Keynote.
Sidebar #2: Disclaimer: When reviewing books I will often use
the authors or publishers product, functions and features descriptions. At
times, when they say it better than I can, I cite other reviewers. Because of
this unless I’m quoting directly from another source, I do not cutter up the review with
quotation marks. All other comments are strictly my own and based on my review.Why need I rewrite the author’s
narratives, if they are clearly written?
Sidebar #3: All
the slides that illustrate this review were liberated from Garr Reynolds
website. Thanks sir, they complement my review perfectly.
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Introduction
When I first
moved from academia to industry, I had no training in making presentations
other than teaching (lesson plans) and giving papers at professional societies.
I’ve been cleaning out very old files including view graphs from those days
gone by; yuck… what boring hard to understand crowded visual material! I hope
my talks were better than my visuals, but alas none of those have survived. On
a more positive side, all the papers I had written, around which the
presentations were planned and made, made sense and were for the most part
still technically valid.
About two score and five years ago, I was
first formally exposed to the concepts of persuasive presentation. I took the
lessons to heart, and even created mini-courses for my colleagues, but alas all
too many of my talks turned out to be death by viewgraphs, slides and more
recently PowerPoint. Like many others, I have grown (very) weary of the
so-called "death by PowerPoint" culture in which I live and work. It
saturates the Nuclear Waste Management and Energy sector where I consult.
Whether in presentations by contractor management types, often brilliant
technical researchers, or the engineers that makes things happen — death
my power point is not a choice I’m often willing to take. Understand, its not
PowerPoint or any other slideware that is the problem, but the way it is being
misused. This is true whether dished out by contactor personnel, the staff of
US DOE or the regulatory community.
How weary? At
the Phoenix based annual International {Nuclear} Waste Management Conference,
my favorite information exchange venue, I attend a minimal number of papers
beyond the plenary sessions. instead, caging authors for a copy of their
submitted manuscript. I’d rather take 30 minutes to digest a peer-reviewed
paper than spend 20 minutes in the dark, at a presentation filled with sound
and fury signifying, not much.
It wasn’t until
I stated reading this book that I began to see way in which I could have better
shared my ideas with my audiences that were often 50 people strong.
Publisher’s
Introduction — Presentation
designer and internationally acclaimed communications expert Garr Reynolds,
creator of the most popular Web site on presentation design and delivery on the
net - presentationzen.com - shares his experience in a provocative mix of
illumination, inspiration, education, and guidance that will change the way you
think about making presentations with PowerPoint or Keynote. Presentation Zen
challenges the conventional wisdom of making "slide presentations" in
today-s world and encourages you to think differently and more creatively about
the preparation, design, and delivery of your presentations. Garr shares
lessons and perspectives that draw upon practical advice from the fields of
communication and business. Combining solid principles of design with the
tenets of Zen simplicity, this book will help you along the path to simpler,
more effective presentations (by Guy Kawasaki).
The
Nature of the Beast — Key Ideas to Stimulate Your Mind
Slides and the
Presentation
The slides at the author uses to illustrate the ideas in
this book do not tell nearly the complete story. If you attended his
presentations, the slides would have served to reinforce the points and
establish a connection to the audience. But on their own, aside from being
interesting and perhaps nice to look at, they served no real utility outside
his specific presentation. And that is OK.
Presentations
are ephemeral, a unique moment in time to connect, to teach, persuade, sell, or
whatever your purpose of the talk may be. Once it's over, it's over. A printout
of slides, like the ones above, will be of little use. And that is precisely
why I do not printout my slides for the audience. Instead, I provide a handout to be distributed after my
presentations. This allows Garr to provide more
detail and better-written prose, rather than short, bulleted lists contained
within wordy PowerPoint slide printouts that confuse (not to mention bore) more
than they inform.
The Sins of
our Corporate Trainers — Pages of slides, chock full of text, cluttered unreadable tables and
graphs, Borders that border on nothing, unneeded-distracting use of special
effects, company logo’s and topic lines that take half the slides space. Presentation
Zen is about simplicity and storytelling.
Garr’s
Premise — Your
slides should support you, the speaker. If someone can get all the information
from your slides, why do they need you? Your slides should not overwhelm the
audience, but should reinforce the points that you are sharing in your talk.
Couple this focus on you with your desire share stories about your subject,
rather than recite facts, and you can put together presentations that will be
appreciated, remembered, and best of all, acted upon.
How
the book is organized (with annotated comments.)
Presentation Zen is not a step-by-step systematic process to good slides, as I
hoped it would be. It is an approach to which Reynold’s touches of Zen almost
make it feel like a way of life. Readers of this book will be most comfortable
with it is they have been exposed to Oriental philosophy such as the Japanese
Zen or perhaps the mental underpinnings of the martial arts. Westerners can not
open up to these ideas will found the book shallow of detailed hot to do its
and unsatisfying. Although not a disciple of any of the oriental mind
practices, I sufficient familiar with them that I could tie into what Garr was
sharing about mindset and presentation design.
I, as have other reviewers like Marieke Guy, admit to a feeling of disappointment when
starting to read this book. Yes I know the publisher was clear on defining is
scope and purpose, but… I had hoped that there would be a baker’s dozen steps
to presentation nirvana, but then it I realize my own bad slides have been 35
years in the making and I won’t solve my less than perfect presentations in a
day or a month. As Reynold’s implies, it a journey taken for its own joy, to
expecting top reach an end point. Actually I don’t really miss the advice that
has guided me for years. (E.g., Tell then what you’ll tell them, tell them in
detail, and the at the end remind them of what your told them; or no more the 8-10 lines including blank
spaces on a slide.)
Introduction,
Presenting in Today's World — “This is not a book about Zen; this is a book about communication and
about seeing presentations in a slightly different way, a way that is more in
tune with our times. … Our professional activities—especially
professional communications—can share the same ethos as Zen. That is, the
essence of spirit of many of the principles found in Zen concerning esthetics,
mindfulness, correctness, and soon can be applied to our daily activities
including presentations.” Garr Reynolds.
The
book is an approach, not a method, to persuasive presentations. The book is not
prescriptive. There are no recipes, rules, or procedures in this book. It does
however share the idea that not only is each audience for a presentation
different, but each time a presentation is given it to will be different
because you and the circumstances have changed.
PREPARATION
The
typical PowerPoint presentation consists of a speaker presenting streams of
information on slides with general titles. They include hokey, usually
unrelated clip art and endless bulleted lists highlighted only with
unintelligible report-style graphics and tables. The human mind cannot process
such intense visual data and listen to you at the same time. The result, after
only a half hour or so, you forget what you’ve seen and heard: that is if you
managed to stay awake. Topics and concepts discussed herein include:
- Creativity, Limitations, and Constraints
– You’ll need both your right (creative) and left (organized) side of
your brain. After all, creative thinking and design awareness are both useful
attributes of successful businessmen, academics and presenters. An example of a
Zen concept introduced here is start with a beginners mind… be open to
possibilities despite potential risks. Even if you afraid to admit it, remember
you too are creative in what you do. It’s you’re presentation, let it all hang
out!
- Planning Using Analog Tools – Why paper and pencil matters. As
you prepare your presentation remember these ideas… simplicity, clarity and brevity
- Crafting the Story – Story boards
can be of real help and value; sometimes brainstorming helps if it’s to be a
hard to sell idea, in a soft pitch disguise. Know your audience, know your
purpose, and most of all you should be willing to freely share with them.
Before you get started, think through the answers of some critical questions
related to your presentation and the venue in which it is to be made. (See
pages 61-62, and 67). Define your central point – use it as a compass to
guide your presentation. Stay anchored; determine what’s the point for
presenting at the meeting, and why does your talk matter?
DESIGN
- Simplicity: Why it Matters
- Presentation Design:
Principles and Techniques — These are concepts, not a tutorial. Design is
very much about subtraction. This need for simplicity leads on to the general
design principles that Reynolds describes in the book:
oReduce the signal
versus noise ratio – Take out irrelevant items including, if possible,
organizational logos and super-sized distracting space wasting headers.
oUse good quality
images, not cutsey clip art – People remember visuals better than bullet
points. Reynolds recommends a number of different stock photo suppliers, some
free.
oEmpty space is good,
wasted space is bad.
oContrast –
Create dynamic differences. There’s nothing much duller then the blahs.
oRepetition –
Repeat a few critical carefully selected elements in your presentation
oAlignment – Use
a grid to align objects successfully. Try the rule of thirds (page 151) great
photographers do.
oProximity –
Ensure that related items are grouped together – they eye notices. Don’t
group them together and the togetherness link is lost.
- Sample Slides
(Chapter 7)— Too many illustrations without any sense of coherent
linkages to either a story behind them or even Garr sharing of why some are
good, others bad and ugly. See the next section my disappointment at this
limitations.
DELIVERY
- The Art of Being
Completely Present — Everyone is overloaded and distracted. Too much so.
Put it behind you when you get up to talk, for those few minutes, nothing else
should matter. It isn’t easy, but to it anyway. Make eye contact, pitch to
different part of the audience, and mainly be there for these folks; they came
to listen.
- Oh yes, keep the
#@$%# light on! You can’t connect with an audience you can’t see. Use a
projector/computer remote mouse and most of all get unchained from that
awkwardly placed podium. Who are you hiding from?
THE NEXT STEP — The
Journey Begins. Like all things, using a Zen-like metaphor, “A journey of a
thousand miles begins with a single step.” Confucius. Take a chance, you be
surprised at the results.
Disappointments
A
Reader Audience Check Please —I
felt Reynolds seemed out of touch with the usual working environment, whether
it is in the United States or in Japan. Unless you were a CEO, think Apple’s
Steve Jobs, with staff to design you Zen-like presentation at you’re beck and
call. Garr alas, unrealistically makes the suggestion that if we put 25-30
hours into the creation of a slide presentation. The reason, we’d save our
collective audiences that time. I’m sure most of us could put together great
slides in 3 working days.
I have always,
due to the press of other priorities, written my papers, prepared my talk and
created my slides at home, after wok or on a weekend. However, as a manager I
could not expect most of our staff to be able to free up that amount of time. I
would have welcomed a few tips and guidelines to split the difference between
where I am and where I’d like my presentations to go, taken of course from a
more time-saturated academic or business perspective.
Zen
Terms and FOG — I would have welcomed a glossary of Zen terms at the end of this book,
one with simple definition to which westerners can open up. The book’s FOG
index is a bit higher than a general outreach book should be. Having said that,
so were my first experiences, years ago, with the thoughts and ideas of Zen.
But patience, above all else and the desire to make thing clear, will allow you
to succeed in your presentation efforts.
Too
Much Repetition — I recognize that a Zen master will repeat concepts to
their students until they have internalized the ideas. But we do not read books
in that manner, whether they are approaches, guides or tutorials to our subject
matter.
Too often, the
book was frustratingly repetitive, with even the simplest points restated
through multiple chapters (really, how many times do you have to suggest using
limiting the use of bullets or graphics taken as is from reports?). For
example, the book was frustratingly repetitive, with even the simplest points
restated through multiple chapters (really, how many times do you have to
suggest using post-it notes? (Paraphrased from Andrew C. Saks, an Amazon.com
reviewer)
No Formal Bibliography of Sources — As a writer of textbooks and
technical papers, disturbs me. Although I had no trouble googling the
individual referenced books and their authors. Indeed, to his credit, many of
these citations were available on Mr. Reynolds website. However, that’s more
work, alas, then I’d bargained for when starting to review this book.
Sample Slides, a
Poor End Game — I was disappointed by the last few sections of the book,
especially as related to the pages of provided sample sides. The book is
replete with sample slides, starting at page 165 — there's page after
page of examples.
However, with
little to no analysis of their focus or design elements being illustrated, they
were only slideware. Pretty, when I could see them, slideware that accompanying
guides or slide evaluations, did nothing for my understanding of what I should
learn or even see in the graphics provided. Some of the thumbnails were so
small that I could not tell, even with a magnifying glass, which design
features were represented.
Alas, this is
the opposite treatment that Garr makes in the earlier parts of the book –
that of always trying to maintain focus, clarity and connectedness.
Conclusion
To the
individual who has never been exposed to the concepts inherent in Zen, some of
the concepts Gar Reynolds presents seem a till off-putting. That coupled with a
somewhat high “FOG” index will slow a newbie in accepting and practicing the
discipline of “Using Zen concepts in creating focused, persuasive e and
audience capturing Presentations”
Initially uncomfortable. But go with the flow, it will all come together in a
way that everyone who is willing to look and see, can succeed presenting persuasively.
I have found
many faults with this book for a reader and from a presenter perspective. I do
however recommend it to our readers and would-be presenters who are acquainted
with the concepts of oriental philosophy. It need not be Zen, any of the oriental
philosophies of life, whether they are of Chinese, Korean or Indian origin,
share many common concepts that parallel those in Zen. 4.5 macC’s
I am less
convinced that readers who are either uncomfortable with the ideas of oriental
philosophy and design will gain as much from the book as I did. That includes
folks who are totally comfortable with the corporate or academic practice of
presentations, or are unwilling to get out of their comfort zone, no matter how
many PowerPoint deaths they may cause. 3.5
macCs
I totally agree
with Seth Godin, Speaker and Blogger (Amazon.com Review.) "Please don't
buy this book! Once people start making better presentations, mine won’t look
so good. (But if you truly want to learn what works and how to do it right, Garr
is the man to learn from.)" But the book, it will grow on you and you will
grow on your audiences.
About
the Author
Garr
Reynolds is the author of Presentation Zen and a leading authority on presentation design and
delivery. A sought-after speaker and consultant, his clients include many in
the Fortune 500. A writer, designer, and musician, he is currently Associate
Professor of Management at Kansai Gaidai University in Japan. Garr is a former
corporate trainer for Sumitomo Electric and worked as the Manager for Worldwide
User Group Relations at Apple, Inc. A long-time student of the Zen arts, he
currently lives in Osaka, Japan, where he is Director of Design Matters Japan.
His popular blog can be found at http://www.presentationzen.com. For more, check: http://www.garrreynolds.com/
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Notes and References…
Check out Garr’s detailed 3 section Presentation tips at http://www.garrreynolds.com/Presentation/index.html. No it will not replace this book. It
will provide you a great introduction to Garr Reynolds ideas. There’s even a
sample presentation handout for you to reflect on.
For
professionals today, presentation and public-speaking skills are more important
than ever. Management guru, as noted in the book, Tom Peters for example, says
that presentation skills are worthy of extreme obsessive study!’ Strong
presentation skills and the ability to engage and connect can truly set you
apart from the crowd. Garr Reynolds website, and the links to other material
he provides, can complement the book can start you on your journey to
satisfying successful presentations.
Rethinking
the Presentation — These
practical tips can help you improve your presentations and avoid sabotaging
your business's chances of success. Business Week, April 4, 2008. http://www.businessweek.com/print/smallbiz/content/apr2008/sb2008044_186674.htm
Presentation
Zen: Simple Ideas on
Presentation Design and Delivery, A review by Marieke Guy, University of Bath,
the United Kingdom. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue58/guy-rvw/.%5D/
Presentation
Zen Design, by Gar
Reynolds, New Riders Press; 1st edition (December 28, 2009), ISBN-10: 0321668790 ISBN-13: 978-0321668790 [List Price - $35 (USD),
$23 Street Price.)
