Chapter 4. The Pantheon of Presentation Gods

I'm familiar with the cynical sports purists who live among us: the know-it-alls who walk around crushing competitive cheerleaders' dreams, emasculating Nascar drivers, and begrudging soccer players their shin guards while applauding the armor plating that ensconces modern football players. The sports they know are the ones that matter.

No sport has been victimized by such so-called "purist" exclusivity than presenting. Yes—presenting. The sheer volume of pit sweat involved in this activity justifies an automatic Olympic event; the hoisting of a speaker challenges the celebrations of any victory in history. If gymnastics' menagerie of confusion, referred to as the "floor," can be a sport, then we presenters certainly deserve a place, too. I'm not asking for prime time major network coverage here, just a berth on a non-double-digits ESPN network.

Though securing ESPN9 or better may be one of the final achievements of the Presentation Revolution, that doesn't mean we can slack off as if our 2012 Olympic hopes are ruined. In the previous chapter, we discussed the value of humility from the stage, a statement that needs to be qualified as follows: You want the audience to think you're humble. Your will to crush the competition (in this case, other speakers, presenters, or companies) represents the furious passion that makes presenting one of the most exciting new sports to watch since little Western kids started rolling old wagon wheels with sticks. (One need only imagine a decades-long entertainment drought to understand just how exciting that might have been.)

So why are we competing? And what are the rules? These questions are meaningless for presenters. A breed focused on excellence, professional presenters are trying to win even when nothing is being played. They pour their hearts out, training for hours on end to master the technical skills and build up the strength to deliver ideas with true, contagious enthusiasm. Like Ron Burgundy, they are "gods among mere mortals," sucking the marrow out of life with the ferocity of a wolverine. (It's far less frightening to witness in real life than I've made it sound here.)

So who are these people? Where is the list of the world's best, the most potent iterations of communications mastery today? Sadly—and this may be one of the principle reasons Presenting will not have a team at the 2012 Olympics—there isn't one. Believe me, I've looked.

I want a top 10 list of the world's best presenters as much as the next guy, but we don't work in quantifiable figures like goals, saves, home runs, and so on. We're talking heart-and-soul economics, making people feel things. A casual journey through a Washington, DC, newspaper is enough to show that sometimes we say we felt what we didn't, and other times that we didn't feel what we did. In other words, it's tough to quantify who's winning in the sport of presenting, even if it's easy to know whose great and who's not great.

You would think that you could take a listing of international leaders and statesmen, combine it with a current Forbes Richest People in the World list, and end up with a more or less accurate picture of those people in the world who are presenting well—at least in the sense that nearly every idea they have is implemented wholeheartedly by the people who hear them. However, you would be wrong.

Though some degree of wealth and power tend to follow a consistently solid presentation performance, they are not directly correlated. Influence and impact are more accurate depictions of the fruits of great presenting. Presentation skills are difficult to measure. Like the Supreme Court in less savory matters, we know it when we see it; just (please) don't ask us to define it.

What we do know is that there have been presentation feats achieved throughout recent history that clearly show a standard of excellence across the entire sport. Some of these presentations have "gone viral"—despite the fact that they were given decades before going viral was even possible. Others illustrate the unique, changeable nature of the sport and demonstrate how capitalizing on new technologies and tools can yield glorious results. Here are some of the best moments in recent presentation history: