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Book Review: 15 Minutes Including Q&A
brothke writes "When I initially read 15 Minutes Including Q&A: A Plan to Save the World From Lousy Presentations, I enjoyed it and thought it was a good book. It was only a few days later, sitting through yet another tedious vendor briefing, when I reread it and truly appreciated how awesome a book it really is." Read on to see what Ben has to say about this book.
15 Minutes Including Q and A: A Plan to Save the World From Lousy Presentation
author
Joey Asher
pages
112
publisher
Persuasive Speaker Press
rating
10/10
reviewer
Ben Rothke
ISBN
0978577620
summary
Great book on how to make your presentation heard
Author Joey Asher's premise is quite simple and intuitive: if you as a salesperson (or anyone trying to get a message across) can't state your case simply and succinctly, no one is going to get it or care. He notes that a major problem is that far too many salespeople and speakers waste their time on areas they think is important; but not on what the attendee wants to hear.
Asher notes that every day, businesspeople bore listeners with presentations that ramble on, make no clear points and fail to address the attendee 's key concerns. His book lays out a plan for eliminating lousy presentations.
The introduction asks the basic question, why do most presentations stink? The answer Asher gives is that they ramble on, fail to make any points, try to say so many things that they become unwieldy PowerPoint death stars with no impact and ignore key audience concerns.
Asher's answer to the problem is this: keep the presentation short; leave ample time for Q&A and work to get a compelling dialogue and interaction with the attendees. That is the premise of the first two chapters.
The book is divided into 3 sections. Part 1 is about preparing a seven-minute rifle shot presentation. In essence, tell your entire story in about seven minutes. While counter-intuitive at first; the book shows how this can be achieved.
The focus of chapter 3 is to start by focusing on key business challenge. Asher warns against starting a presentation by giving a bunch of background information about the approach. In addition, don't tell the history of the project or do anything other than shine a light on the attendee 's key problems. He suggests using short stories to succinctly illustrate the issue. Just think of how many presentations you have been in where the speaker did not get to the point until 25 minutes and 20 slides into the presentation.
Chapter 11 is titled creating slides to support your message. The book astutely notes that preparing presentations has to a large part become an exercise in preparing PowerPoint slides. The reality is that it should be an exercise in figuring out how to tell your story. Asher notes that if you want to use slides well, you should only prepare your slides after you have figured out the story that you plan to tell your audience. The failure of many presentations is that the PowerPoint drives the story and not the other way around.
Part 2 is about allowing listeners to fill in the blanks and raise questions with Q&A.Asher suggests in chapter 12 to make Q&A a major part of your presentation strategy. He notes that Q&A allows the audience to guide the message and fill in missing information. It also gives the speaker the chance to persuade by responding to objections. And finally, it improves the speaker's communications style.
While he may not realize it, Asher has uncovered what is the Achilles heel of many project problems and failures. It is that the salesperson sells an obtuse problem to a clueless customer who is oblivious to what they want or how they are going to deploy the solution.
The beauty of Q&A is twofold: first, it requires the salesperson to clearly articulate what they are selling, and the customer to articulate what their specific problems are. The answer should be a clear understanding of the issue and how the product can solve it. But the reality is that many companies will deploy expensive hardware or software solutions (often costing millions of dollars) without really understanding why they are embarking on such a venture.
The book concludes with part 3, on delivering the presentation with intensity. Part 3 moves away from the PowerPoint and into areas such as eye contact, voice energy, rehearsal and other important points. These are critical areas as even the best presentation delivered without intensity can turn into a fruitless endeavor.
While the title 15 Minutes Including Q&A: A Plan to Save the World From Lousy Presentations may border on hyperbole, the reality is that the term death by PowerPoint is a real problem. The book shows a clear path in which to stop that. At 104 pages, Asher writes like he talks, clearly, succinctly and to the point. For many people, it is only after reading this important book when they will truly understand how much of their lives are wasted in by viewing pathetic PowerPoint's and listening to rambling sales monologues.
The truth is that Asher's points don't have to be limited to PowerPoint presentations exclusively. Be it e-mail messages, memos, status reports, proposals and more; if you can get to the point, and get your point across, you are often more likely to succeed.
At $7.95, the book is about as inexpensive as they get, which means you can also give ample copies to numerous people in your organization. In fact, it should be required reading to anyone who will be using PowerPoint and giving presentations.
Ultimately, the value of 15 Minutes Including Q&A: A Plan to Save the World From Lousy Presentations is best summed up by Scott Leslie who suggests that one keep extra copies of this book in their briefcase at all times. Next time you re forced to listen to someone laboriously narrate bullet points, quietly slip a copy in the presenters briefcase without them noticing and sign it: "Thought you might enjoy reading this. That way, maybe your audience will enjoy your next presentation. "
Ben Rothke is the author of Computer Security: 20 Things Every Employee Should Know
You can purchase 15 Minutes Including Q&A: A Plan to Save the World From Lousy Presentations from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Asher notes that every day, businesspeople bore listeners with presentations that ramble on, make no clear points and fail to address the attendee 's key concerns. His book lays out a plan for eliminating lousy presentations.
The introduction asks the basic question, why do most presentations stink? The answer Asher gives is that they ramble on, fail to make any points, try to say so many things that they become unwieldy PowerPoint death stars with no impact and ignore key audience concerns.
Asher's answer to the problem is this: keep the presentation short; leave ample time for Q&A and work to get a compelling dialogue and interaction with the attendees. That is the premise of the first two chapters.
The book is divided into 3 sections. Part 1 is about preparing a seven-minute rifle shot presentation. In essence, tell your entire story in about seven minutes. While counter-intuitive at first; the book shows how this can be achieved.
The focus of chapter 3 is to start by focusing on key business challenge. Asher warns against starting a presentation by giving a bunch of background information about the approach. In addition, don't tell the history of the project or do anything other than shine a light on the attendee 's key problems. He suggests using short stories to succinctly illustrate the issue. Just think of how many presentations you have been in where the speaker did not get to the point until 25 minutes and 20 slides into the presentation.
Chapter 11 is titled creating slides to support your message. The book astutely notes that preparing presentations has to a large part become an exercise in preparing PowerPoint slides. The reality is that it should be an exercise in figuring out how to tell your story. Asher notes that if you want to use slides well, you should only prepare your slides after you have figured out the story that you plan to tell your audience. The failure of many presentations is that the PowerPoint drives the story and not the other way around.
Part 2 is about allowing listeners to fill in the blanks and raise questions with Q&A.Asher suggests in chapter 12 to make Q&A a major part of your presentation strategy. He notes that Q&A allows the audience to guide the message and fill in missing information. It also gives the speaker the chance to persuade by responding to objections. And finally, it improves the speaker's communications style.
While he may not realize it, Asher has uncovered what is the Achilles heel of many project problems and failures. It is that the salesperson sells an obtuse problem to a clueless customer who is oblivious to what they want or how they are going to deploy the solution.
The beauty of Q&A is twofold: first, it requires the salesperson to clearly articulate what they are selling, and the customer to articulate what their specific problems are. The answer should be a clear understanding of the issue and how the product can solve it. But the reality is that many companies will deploy expensive hardware or software solutions (often costing millions of dollars) without really understanding why they are embarking on such a venture.
The book concludes with part 3, on delivering the presentation with intensity. Part 3 moves away from the PowerPoint and into areas such as eye contact, voice energy, rehearsal and other important points. These are critical areas as even the best presentation delivered without intensity can turn into a fruitless endeavor.
While the title 15 Minutes Including Q&A: A Plan to Save the World From Lousy Presentations may border on hyperbole, the reality is that the term death by PowerPoint is a real problem. The book shows a clear path in which to stop that. At 104 pages, Asher writes like he talks, clearly, succinctly and to the point. For many people, it is only after reading this important book when they will truly understand how much of their lives are wasted in by viewing pathetic PowerPoint's and listening to rambling sales monologues.
The truth is that Asher's points don't have to be limited to PowerPoint presentations exclusively. Be it e-mail messages, memos, status reports, proposals and more; if you can get to the point, and get your point across, you are often more likely to succeed.
At $7.95, the book is about as inexpensive as they get, which means you can also give ample copies to numerous people in your organization. In fact, it should be required reading to anyone who will be using PowerPoint and giving presentations.
Ultimately, the value of 15 Minutes Including Q&A: A Plan to Save the World From Lousy Presentations is best summed up by Scott Leslie who suggests that one keep extra copies of this book in their briefcase at all times. Next time you re forced to listen to someone laboriously narrate bullet points, quietly slip a copy in the presenters briefcase without them noticing and sign it: "Thought you might enjoy reading this. That way, maybe your audience will enjoy your next presentation. "
Ben Rothke is the author of Computer Security: 20 Things Every Employee Should Know
You can purchase 15 Minutes Including Q&A: A Plan to Save the World From Lousy Presentations from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
If it's one thing that almost every presenter needs to learn, it's the power of brevity.
If you're putting more than 50 words on a slide, you've fucked up.
If you're putting more than 30 slides in a presentation, you've fucked up.
Unless you audience is highly technical and specifically looking for a highly in-depth presentation, you should never be violating those two rules.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
15 Minutes Including Q&A: A Plan to Save the World From Lousy Presentation
Your comment violated the "postersubj" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition in the subject line.
I think you might have a little bit of an output escaping bug there, /.
Brian Tracy has a series of lectures about exactly that point (selling).
If you list the good features of your product no one will care. Worse, no one will give you the 10 minutes you need to describe the product.
Example1:
a) Our copier can produce 40 pages per minute ...has a 500 GB disk ...has networking capabilities ...can sort, collate, and staple
b)
c)
d)
If you put the product in terms which are advantageous to the listener (usually money), then you spark their interest.
Example2:
Mr manager, if you purchase our copier you can reduce your costs by $2000 per month.
Would you like me to explain how?
It's obvious when you think about it.
Brevity is important if you are trying to communicate decisions that have already been made and cannot be questioned, or if you are doing a sales presentation for a product that cannot be altered as part of the contract. If you're trying to work with a group (for example, Test, Development, and Build/Release) to make a decision that everyone can support, trying to be too quick about it will destroy any progress possible. Same if you have a highly customizable product you are trying to sell while gaining information from your customer.
Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
suggests that one keep extra copies of this book in their briefcase at all times
I've never owned a briefcase, you insensitive clod!
Hard to come by, but not impossible or expensive - radio comedian Fred Allen's Treadmill To Oblivion covers the workings behind a radio show in the 1950's. Plan to do a show in 30 minutes, have some ideas, write them down, rehearse, remove what doesn't work, add in what would work better. Comedy or business, it's about getting the attention and holding it, you've got about 20 minutes before people start to fidget and look for a clock. It's better to test on an audience before going live, particularly an honest one who will tell you what your are missing - never overlook the obvious, what IS your point here?
I'm sure the book is great, but tightening up a show for a fixed amount of time is a pretty old science by now.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Goatse man is not amused.
Isn't the book's title a pretty good "executive summary" of the book itself? How do you fluff that out to 104 pages?
Help! Help! I'm being repressed!
Also: Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds. Including pretty pictures!
n/t
Set your phasers on "funky"!
It's harder to write short, succint points. It's much easier to ramble, especially because a lot of people equate long and wordy points with being smart. Orwell ranted about the problem.
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
50? Seriously? Unless you're showing a screenshot, listing some code, or pulling a quote, the magic number is seven. In general, if you have more than seven words on a slide, you've fucked up.
More than that, and the presenter is usually just reading the Powerpoint deck. And in that case, why are you wasting my time, when you could have just emailed it to me in the first place?
can I get a summary of the review. Too long to read.
Nether 236 (as of time of the writing) slashdotters that got goatse in their face are... Sure you all have seen it, but it is still annoying....
Anything presented to an audience should have the same characteristics as a woman's skirt.
Long enough to cover all the important details.
Short enough to keep our attention.
I actually heard that the first time from my apparently gay college english teacher. *shrug*
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
The Cognative Style of Powerpoint Essay
* http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_pp
Also
PowerPoint Does Rocket Science--and Better Techniques for Technical Reports
* http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB&topic_id=1
While these are all good points for a technical presentation, say, at a conference, they are not applicable to a sales presentation. Describing exactly what your product does is precisely what a good salesman wants to prevent. The reason for that, of course, is that if that were to happen, the customer would realize he does not need it, or that he can already get it cheaper elsewhere. "But my product is great!" I hear you saying; well, if it were, you wouldn't be giving a sales presenatation about it. You'd be too busy packing and shipping orders.
Makes us stupid
~Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps~
256 victims now - that's just perfect
As a rule of thumb:
A sentence in the title and carry on in the body, but for some reason capitalize the first word in the latter so the body looks like a sentence but isn't.
- Forrest Gump
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
for a book that emphasizes brevity and clarity.
The can't be that awesome if he still has to endure tedious vendor meetings in spite of it. May I suggest a Gameboy and a pair of discrete earphones instead?
For far too many PowerPoint presentations, the presenter has apologized with "sorry this is an eye chart." If you have to apologize for it being too small, you are doing something very wrong. If there is any supplemental detail you'd like to provide, stick it in either a report or slide notes. (I routinely deliver 15-slide presentations backed by a 40-60 page report stuffed with the relevant technical detail; it works WAY better than a 60-slide presentation with the details right there in the slides.)
My general rule of thumb is to go to the next slide if PP has to shrink the font size.
Also, don't use complete sentences; complete sentences means that either your audience will either be reading the slides and not listen to you, or if you are a really lousy speaker, you'll start reading the slides. Nothing makes me tune out a presenter faster than one who reads his/her slides. I can read WAY faster than you can talk, and it means that I'm simply going to read your slide, and then ignore the words rambling out of your mouth until the slide changes.
And for goodness sake: Dump animations and slide transitions. They usually add nothing other than a lousy presenter waiting for them to finish before speaking again.
Lastly, Death to Clip Art and Stock Photography! It's usually easy to spot a mile away, and again adds nothing to your presentation.
15 Minutes Including Q&A
Knuth's Volume 4 only got 9/10 recently, obviously because it is soooooooo wordy.
And the book is out of stock at amazon.com, and doesn't exist at amazon.ca. How am I supposed to buy it again?
Eliminating adverbs works better.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
You said you're a programmer here many times. So let us try your work and see it so we can verify it then. I saw a thread here recently where you bragged about a program you say you wrote that has 50,000 users (relatively small amount really). So prove it, show us and let us try it, since you said you need or, rather demand, verifications and proofs of others. If you don't then you're just doing your pot calling the kettle black crap you have already been seen doing.
If you can help it, stop using PowerPoint. I do a lot of user group and technology evangelization presentations and I'm doing my best to stop using PP. Sometimes I don't have a choice as I can't control the presentation system (large presentations like VMworld, for example). But when I can I'm using Prezi. It really breaks you out of that bullet point process. You throw your talking points and ideas out on a "canvas" and build your thoughts from there. After making the move I've gotten a LOT of positive feedback on it. Even if you can't use Prezi you can get out of bullet points. When having to use PP I stick to a "conversational" style presentation. Very few bullet points and statements, graphics, simple sentences, etc. The slide is about a thought, not a list of points.
Thanks for the review. I'll grab a copy of this as well.
I tend to prepare an elevator pitch of what I want to say, then decide how I bring it best in context with the audience, and after that I will create / find any images if I think they will help (if it's not technical you should think about images as setting the audience's mood).
In my experience, people really pay attention if you mention you have set yourself the task of making your point in 15 minutes or less - it's fun to start a session with a self-imposed challenge, and it keeps questions at bay until you hit Q&A. What's more, 15 mins worth of material you can keep in your head, so you can focus on your audience instead of reading slides..
BTW, nobody ever complained about a presentation being too short. Instead, they will actively seek you out afterwards to ask questions - you don't have to seek them out. Everyone wins..
Insert
+
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Can't normally have a comment this short
Joey Asher also wrote "Even a Geek Can Speak" - a book I give to just about anyone starting out giving presentations. This book looks just as awesome - can't wait to pick it up!
Random Musings
What's the general consensus on supplying hard-copies at the start of the presentation?
Do you find some audience members reading ahead and (seemingly) not paying attention to the verbal presentation?
Or worse yet, asking questions about slides you haven't yet reached?
On the upside: it's great for note-taking.
Einstein circa 1905 could simply have said:
Special Theory of Relativity:
e = m c ^ 2
QED
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
and would like to show you some powerpoint slides explaining why
"Outdated business models" is code for "I don't like paying for things, but want them anyway"
Prezi doesn't need to be installed on any computer. You can run it from a browser if there's wi-fi or play a downloaded version when there's no internet access.
Haiku? Where?
Like 99% of foreigners what you screw up an essential part of haikus.
A haiku must have an indicator of season / time in the first line for it to be a haiku which is called a "kigo", go and research.
Otherwise you just look like a prat.
The more you know