21. Presentation Advice from a Physician: Audience Advocacy

Power Presentations was recently honored by the presence of our first Nobel Prize winner. He is Dr. James E. Muller, the CEO and Chief Medical Officer of InfraReDx, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, company that develops novel photonic-based medical devices to improve the diagnosis and treatment of various diseases. Dr. Muller was one of three American cofounders of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW)—the organization awarded the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize.

He and his senior managers participated in a Power Presentations program to develop a financing pitch for InfraReDx. During the program, the team heard—as have countless teams and individuals before them—about the importance of focusing on the audience. We call this Audience Advocacy, a concept that asks presenters to advocate the audience’s point of view in equal measure to their own. This focus pervades every aspect of every presentation, starting with the development of the content and continues on to include the design of the graphics, the interaction with audience members, the response to their questions, and even extends to the use of presentation equipment.

At the end of the program, Dr. Muller remarked how Audience Advocacy resonated with the practice of medicine as he had learned it. His mentor had been Dr. Francis W. Peabody, who was instrumental in establishing the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital and the Rockefeller Hospital. During the early part of the twentieth century, Dr. Peabody lectured widely on the subject of physicians and patients. One of his most famous talks concluded with these words:

For the secret of the care of the patient is in caring for the patient.

The prestigious New England Journal of Medicine included Dr. Peabody’s lecture in one of its publications and commented:

These words burned indelibly into the minds of generations of medical students ... and the words have lasted well. The lecture, entitled “The Care of the Patient,” is reprinted in this book and deserves reading, particularly today, when medical technology focuses more on the disease than on the patient.^F21.1

Dr. Muller sent the historic quote to me in an email and concluded, “I would paraphrase it thus for the topic of Audience Advocacy: The secret of care of the audience is caring for the audience.”

Concurrent with Dr. Muller’s email, another publication provided a further resonance with Audience Advocacy from a sector as far removed from medicine as Venus is from Mars. You’ll read about it in the next chapter, “Presentation Advice from a Politician.”