Author: Dr. Andrew Abela
Available from Amazon.com. For bulk orders, go to 800CEO-READ.
Updates:
- December 31, 2008: Advanced Presentations by Designmakes the Top 25: What Corporate America Is Reading list for December, 2008 at CEO-READ.
- January 5, 2009: hits CEO-READ’s Daily Top 5, in spot #3.
All your hard work—your ideas, your research, your plans, your effort—comes to nothing if you cannot convince others to act on it. The way we get people to act in organizations today is to make a presentation. And yet the quality—and the effectiveness—of the average presentation today is abysmal. We are all afflicted by a plague of “Death by PowerPoint™” and, seemingly, we do not know what to do about it. There is plenty of advice on how to create presentations, but it is this very advice that caused the plague in the first place, and so following it will not provide the cure.
This book overturns much of the conventional wisdom and practice of creating presentations to provide a comprehensive and yet easy-to-use ten-step method fordesigning presentations that propel your audience to action. This method is focusedexclusively on designing your presentations, not on delivering them, for the simple reason that if your content is not interesting and persuasive in itself, then most likely you have lost the game before you even begin presenting. The ten-step method shows you how to take your ideas and information and turn them into a compelling set of slides. The method is supported by hundreds of empirical studies on different aspects relevant to presentation, and it has been field-tested among leading corporations, including Dell, Microsoft, ExxonMobil, Kimberly-Clark, Motorola, and eBay.
The book is divided into five parts, covering the five essential dimensions of an effective presentation: politics (audience analysis and persuasion), metrics (objectives and success measurement), logic (argument and evidence), rhetoric (storytelling), and graphics (visuals). Each of the parts contains an introduction to explain why that dimension is important. The individual chapters then contain material that explains how to implement each of the ten steps in the method. The first page of each chapter gives an overview of the step, so if you are in a hurry you can just read the first page of each chapter and obtain a quick overview of the method.
Read endorsements of Advanced Presentations by Design.
Read reviews of the book by Nancy Duarte of Duarte Design, and others.
Advanced Presentations by Design links and worksheets.