44. The Kindness of Strangers
Stand and Deliver
Tennessee Williams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1947 play A Streetcar Named Desire and its 1951 Oscar-winning film version starring Marlon Brando is an American classic. The story’s characters and dialogue have become a familiar and recurring element in our cultural references. One of the most famous was a line spoken by one of the leading characters, Blanche Dubois, an aging beauty whose troubled life is going awry. At a pivotal moment in the story, Blanche says, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”
So famous is the line, many other authors have used The Kindness of Strangers as the title of their books, among them novels, travel books, and most appropriately, a 1997 biography of the line’s original author, Tennessee Williams.
Most of these references focus on the second part of the quote and, in doing so, shift from the original context of Blanche’s helplessness to the benevolence of others. In the highly competitive world of business, audiences occasionally—but only very occasionally—bestow benevolence on presenters.
One such person is Guillaume Estegassy, a Sales Strategy Manager at Microsoft Corporation, who said, “I have become so used to presenters who have terribly complicated slides and who do such a poor job of presenting them, I usually just stop looking at the slides and try to follow the story. I give them the benefit of the doubt.”
Mr. Estegassy is a rarity. In this high-speed, broadband fiber optic world where most people have the attention span of a firecracker, presenters cannot be dependent on the kindness of their audiences. Instead, presenters must anticipate how their audiences will react to their slide show, not just in the design stage, but in preview.
Just as baseball and football teams play exhibition games, Broadway plays do out-of-town tryouts, and software applications do beta-tests, you should do a preliminary run-through your presentation—and do it with a mock audience composed of your colleagues. In most business practices, this seemingly obvious step is often bypassed in the rush to completion.
Take a lesson from Deborah Landau, who directs the creative-writing program at New York University. In an article in the Wall Street Journal’s “Word Craft” column, Ms. Landau wrote, “Like many writers, I’m often too close to my work to see it clearly, and a fresh pair of eyes can be invaluable. Kindness is a luxury I can’t afford.”1
Steve Ahlbom, the Creative Director of Artitudes Design, a Seattle-based graphic design company, knows the value of a fresh pair of eyes. (Full disclosure: I have worked extensively with Steve and Artitudes in the creation of our Power Presentations website, and have great respect for their skills and professionalism. So does Microsoft Corporation, which outsources many of its presentation graphics to Artitudes.)
In working on a project for Microsoft with Steve, I showed him how I coach participants in the Power Presentations program: They stand and deliver in real time, and I role play their real audience, the presentation equivalent of a pre-Broadway preview.
A light bulb went off for Steve. He said, “We never do that! We just design the slides for our clients and then send them off! I’m going have all our designers stand and deliver the slides themselves!”
Stand and deliver your presentation several times before your next important event—and you won’t have to depend on the kindness of your audiences.