Don Valentine of Sequoia Capital, the legendary venture capitalist who introduced me to Cisco, sits through thousands of presentations every year, most of them made by shrewd entrepreneurs in search of funding for their new business concepts. Don is continually shocked by the failure of most of these presentations to communicate effectively and persuasively.
He once summed it up to me this way: “Jerry, the problem is that nobody knows how to tell a story. And what’s worse, nobody knows that they don’t know how to tell a story!”
This problem is multiplied and compounded 30 million times a day, a figure which, according to recent estimates, is how many PowerPoint presentations are made every business day. Presentation audiences, from the Midas-like Don Valentines to overbooked executives sitting through run-of-the-mill staff meetings, are constantly and relentlessly besieged with torrents of excessive words and slides.
Why? Why wouldn’t every presenter, seeking that clarion call to action, be, as the U.S. Army urges, all that he or she can be? The reason is that the overwhelming majority of business presentations merely serve to convey data, not to persuade.
When I moved from the world of television to the world of business, I saw immediately that the problem in those massive transmissions of information down one-way streets to passive audiences was not at all communication . . . with the emphasis on the co- . . . they were one-way streets that ground to a halt at a dead end.
In the television medium, ideas and images are also broadcast in one direction over the air, cable, or satellite, but there is a return loop, a feedback, an interaction that comes barreling back at the broadcaster in the form of ratings, critics, sponsors, letters, telephone calls, emails, and sometimes even regulatory legislation.
In the Medium that Marshall McLuhan analyzed in his classic book, The Medium is the Massage (yes, that’s correct, he called it “Massage”), when the message is not clear, and when the audience’s satisfaction is not manifest, the foregone conclusion is sudden death: The television series is canceled.
In business, when the point is not crystal clear, and when the benefit to the audience is not vividly evident, the investment is declined, the sale is not made, the approval is not granted; the presentation fails.
In the Power Presentations programs and in this book, you’ll find the media sensibility applied to the business community . . . a set of prescriptive techniques and services that will enable presenters like you to achieve their clarion call to action with their audiences, to get them to Aha!