Your Presentation Best

Grab 'Em With Your Cover Slide! Don't be afraid to let your cover slide have impact.  Use it to grab their attention and help sell your Teaser ( the first 30 seconds to two minutes).  Start with a bang and then use that momentum to capture your audience's interest. The above slide was used to talk about isolating and attacking a virus. Just like when Hollywood launches a new movie, your Teaser and cover slide give your audience a taste of what's coming and makes them hungry for more. Too often, cover slides are boring Corporate Identity templates with very dry, unimaginative titles. If you want to turn off your audience immediately, use those. If you want to grab 'em immediately, be creative and bold. The only requirement is that you can concretely connect it to your message. Have fun, go crazy.

Dare to Stand Out.  Be a Black Sheep Presenter One of the most challenging aspects of corporate presentations  is to stand out from the crowd. Corporate identity templates, managers trying to control their teams content so it conforms to the no-risk-because-it-looks-like-everyone-else's-slides, and just the overuse of "standard" PowerPoint slides  makes it almost impossible to tell one slide deck from another. If you want your message lost in the crowd, do what everyone else is doing.  Be a white sheep. If you want to stand out, be creative and innovative with your slides and story telling. The only requirement is that both are concretely linked to your message and your audience's needs. Dare to stand out.  Be a Black Sheep Presenter .

Splashdown.  Mission Accomplished.  Welcome Home. A picture is worth a thousand words.  Use visual slides to help you tell your story.   The above slide was used to illustrate success based on teamwork. Try this visual exercise:  for each main point your presentation has, find an image which can bring it to life.   Illustrating your points makes them more powerful and memorable. Don't be afraid to be creative and innovative with your visuals. The take-away:  be creative, innovative and visual with your slides. The only requirement is that you concretely connect the visual with your message. If you do that, you and your message will stand out and be remembred.

Al Gore Captures The World's Imagination...A 90-Minute Presentation Can you imagine a 90-minute presentation that keeps you engaged from start to finish?  If you're like most people in the corporate world, your answer is probably: " Uh...no." Al Gore's Academy Award-winning presentation, "An Inconvenient Truth", actually manages to do this.   By framing global warming, an otherwise dry and very technical issue, as a life and death drama, Gore grabs his audience and shakes them.   He brings it to life with human stories and illustrates these stories with fantastic visuals. What is so very striking, is that his visuals are just that: VISUAL.  He uses minimal text. He tells the story.  The visuals simply help him to tell a more effective, powerful story. When Gore was a politician, he was famous for being a boring expert on many issues. Often times, his audience would tune out because he gave them technical details that even other experts didn