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Welcome to Prison.  PowerPoint Prison 
"Oh my God!  It's like being trapped on Alcatraz!"

Be the first to break out of the PowerPointPrison

 Think about the millions of corporate presenters who turn their audience into brain-dead PowerPointZombies by showing slide after slide  filled up with data, bullet points, graphs and text fields.
Their colleagues, customers, and anyone else unfortunate enough to come to their meeting fight to stay awake.

 After the fifth slide, the brain gives up and tunes out.

 The Blackberries come out, the texting begins: "OMG!! I'm trapped in the meeting from Hell!  All the slides look the same and the s2upid presenter is reading them to me aaaaaa!"

 Think about how much you would hate to be trapped in that kind of presentation.
Ask yourself if what it would be like to break out of the PowerPoint Prison.

 While you may not be able to stop others from using PowerPoint as an instrument of Evil, you can make sure  your own presentations catch and keep your audience's attention by following three simple, yet radical, rules:

 1.  Make sure your content is useful for your audience.  If you can't answer the simple questions:  "Why should they care?  What concrete benefits do they get?  Would I listen to me if I were in their shoes?", chances are your audience will never tune in.

 2.  Make sure your content is relevant to their needs, priorities and problems.  In other words, if it's not about them, they don't really care.

 3.  The most radical rule is this:  Don't Use PowerPoint.  Simply not using PowerPoint will grab their attention and make you stand out because corporate presentaiton audiences so rarely see anything but PowerPoint.
Use a flip chart, whiteboard or other medium to help you tell your story and sketch out your key ideas, numbers, etc. 

 By the way, presenters who don't use PowerPoint get to the point faster and are more memorable because they have much more direct contact with their audience.  This is because not using slides makes the presenter the center of attention, not the slides.

 (Yes, you can and perhaps should have your PowerPoint slides ready to go in case someone really needs you to show them, but that can be done in the Q&A.  Moreover, you should send everyone your slides before or after your presentation so they have the details.)

 Think about it.  If you are well-prepared, you give your audience content they really can use, you address their needs, and you totally stand out because  you have broken your audience out of the PowerPoint Prison.

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