Presenter Survival Tips For A Tech Meltdown

When the tech crashes, you shouldn't crash and burn with it when presenting. Absolutely ALWAYS get to the venue early and check the equipment. Remember, you are in an alien environment, being served by people you have never met before. Who knows how old the technology they have is or of what quality level is the equipment.  The people setting up the talk never give presentations.  They don’t understand that if the tech goes horribly wrong, the audience will blame the speaker, not the hosts.  They also don’t understand that public presentations are the arena in which reputations are built or destroyed.  They are just there to open the room up and move the chairs around. We should never rely on anyone else when we are the presenter.

 I find that bringing my own laptop and a backup USB tends to eliminate a few of the technical problems which can occur. I also bring hardcopies of the slide deck, which I can refer to before the talk, if the projector, monitor, USB or computer isn't working. I can reduce my stress, because I know what I want to cover. I have rehearsed the presentation, so I know the cadence I want to achieve and the order of the unveiling of the talk.

Now, importantly, in that room, I am the only one who has a clue what I am going to say and the order in which I am going to say it. If it happens that my point 6 actually followed point three rather than point five, then only I know the order was incorrect. I certainly won't be sharing that little morsel with the audience. I will brazenly charge on, as if it were all part of the bigger plan.  And that is what every presenter must remember – don’t flag problems the audience doesn’t need to know.

I am highly perturbed that top level CEOs of big corporations can't give a speech to a business audience without reading the whole thing. The content is usually put together by people in the Marketing or PR departments and maybe the CEO worked on it before delivering the talk. Great, but why do they have to read it? Don't they know their industry, their sector, their own business? It is pathetic in my view, to see a top business leader reading line by line from the speech script. Some can at least glance at the audience as they read it, so that is less pathetic, but still not good enough. 

Now if it super technical and no brain could retain the content, then reading it makes sense, but how many of those business presentations have you ever attended. In my case - none. If you are in the scientific community or some field so complex, that there is no possibility of remembering it all in your speech, then you are forced to read it. But we are in business and there are few super highly technical presentations that we will ever need to attend. They are usually more standard affairs where they talk about what is happening in their industry, the marketplace and what their firm is doing about it.

I saw a terrific example of no notes, but keeping the presentation going for three hours. Think about that - three hours and no notes. He had no visible notes, as far as we in the audience were concerned. This was a professor at Harvard Business School when I was attending a week long Executive Education course. Now this was an impressive feat and the first time I had seen such a thing. 

At the end of it, as we were filing out of the lecture theatre, I happened to notice that on the back wall behind us was a large sheet of paper with ten words written on it. I realised that this was the speech right there. The professor had his order on the sheet and he just talked to each of the ten prompt code words that were on that sheet. 

If we get to the venue and the tech is not working, we can do the same thing.  Just jot down some prompt words, in the order you need and elaborate on those for your talk. We don't need the tech to give a presentation. Now we can't describe what a graph shows or a diagram demonstrates as well as the original slide deck, but we can paint word pictures and describe trends to illuminate the point we are making.  We can also be telling stories that draw out the key differences, the reasons for the changes or the new insights from the data, rather than having to actually show the data.

So in your planning phase, always be prepared for a meltdown of the tech and be flexible about crafting your talk from the ashes. Always get there early without exception. Remember, only you know what is going to be covered in your talk and in what order you will roll it out.  Keep that secret information to yourself. No matter what happens, carry on and the audience will probably never know there was a problem.

Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at greg.story@dalecarnegie.com

If you enjoy these articles, then head over to dalecarnegie.comand check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.

About The Author

Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan

Author of Japan Sales Mastery, the Amazon #1 Bestseller on selling in Japan and the first book on the subject in the last thirty years.

In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.

A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.

Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.

How To Murder Your Personal Brand In Business In Japan

When you get up and speak in front of an audience, you are putting your professional and personal brand on the line. The event is advertised, people are alerted to the fact you are speaking and a proportion will bother to turn up to hear what you have to say.  They may be drawn in by the fact you work for a famous or powerful company, so their expectations are high.  What we often forget is that unconsciously, they are also turning up to hear how you say it.  Everyone is an armchair critic on oration and usually the level of intensity is diametrically opposite to their own level of speaking ability. 

When you get up to speak, it doesn't matter which prestigious University you graduated from or which mega corporate you work for. When you are on stage, your degree doesn't help you nor does your job title - you are on your own and you sink or swim accordingly. Our speaker on this occasion sank.

The sad part is there was no reason for that to happen. Our speaker made three key errors. Firstly, they did zero research on who was in the audience. The point of the talk may have resonated with someone working in another similar mega corporate, but there were few of those characters in the room that day. I know, because I was exchanging business cards and didn't run across too many brand name employer companies represented at the speaking venue. The degree of difficulty on checking on who is going to be in your audience is this hard: call the organisers and ask who is in the room, who do they represent, what is the gender balance, age balance, and what are the position levels they hold within their companies.

I think anyone could manage to do that and the results would impact how you prepared your talk. Our speaker didn't bother to do that, so the talk failed to persuade.

Another error was the speaker had obviously done no practice on the presentation before delivering it to the audience. Here is a simple rule - "never practice on your audience."  Sounds fairly straightforward, but few speakers run through any attempt at rehearsing their talk before they give it.  They just turn up on the appointed day and hour and away they go.  Fairly hard to work that thinking out, given the high level of attention which is about to be placed on your personal and professional brands.  We should all be running through our full length presentation at least three times before giving it.  We need to do that to work out the cadence of the speech and to check that we are on message. We know we have to be doing something to energise the audience every five minutes and we have to plan for that.

The speaker’s delivery was distracting us from the key messages.  The Ums...were coming thick and fast, the talk was low energy and the voice too soft, even with the microphone. They had obviously not checked the room or equipment before the talk started.  They were not speaking in a monotone but it was a pretty close thing. This was a very unimpressive, totally forgettable effort and it didn't have to end like that.

The third error was this person had not been coached on public speaking. The irony was that their company policy was to do all of their staff development work in-house. I know the speaker wasn't a product of any internal coaching because there hadn't been any practice done in the first place. As a professional trainer for presentation skills, I doubt the managers in that company would be adding much value anyway, even if they had done some coaching. A case of the half-baked leading the half-baked. 

Ironically, the speaker included the fatal words “Presentation Skills” in their LinkedIn profile, as one of the many skills they possess.  That proved to be a very bold assertion.  They were hopeless.  Watching their performance and reading the profile now makes you doubt their level of expertise in the other areas they listed.  Get the training and brush up your skills. It will just make such a tremendous difference.

Take every opportunity to speak in front of others because this is a brilliant way to promote your personal brand.  But plan properly, practice privately and be ready to add to and build your personal brand in the business community.  Getting training is a great idea because now you are lifted out of the limitations of your own organization.   We all need to have the best practice, professional ruler run over our abilities and get the right level of coaching to improve.

Avoid these three errors and you will do a much better job than our speaker did.  None of these ideas are rocket science, just common sense, yet supposedly "smart" people working for the megacorps get them wrong.   Take some of these some ideas and apply them toward how to accentuate, rather than murder your personal brand.

What Is The One Key Thing When Presenting?

I was talking with a friend, while we were having lunch at this very nice Italian restaurant he frequents, near his office.  Between dishes, we were talking about how he has to go to his US headquarters and join all the other representative Country Heads from around the world and give his report on how the business is going in Japan.  I was thinking that that must be a very high profile and pressure presentation. So I mentioned how great our High Impact Presentations Course was. In my own case, I wish I had done it 20 years earlier, because it would have changed my career trajectory.  Anyway, my friend was patiently listening to all of this and then asked me a very profound question,  “What is the one key thing when presenting?”.

What he was getting at was that if we had to boil it all down, what is the one most critical skill we need to be effective as a presenter.  This is a major question in business. After all, this is our personal and professional brand we are putting out there on show for all the world to see.  This is not something we want to get wrong.  I had no hesitation in telling him “focus on your audience”.

Great. What does that mean, because aren’t we all focusing on our audience when we present? Definitely, yes, we should be focusing on our audience, but often we are deluding ourselves.  If we break down the presentation and analyse it, we can see that focusing on your audience has major ramifications for your degree of success when talking in front of others. 

We may have what we want to say in our mind when preparing the talk.  We may be an expert in our field and have a whole bunch of stuff we want to share because we are excited by the content.  However, we may have not taken the trouble to think about what the audience would be most interested in?  Why would they turn up?  What will they be expecting to hear?  We may have not bothered to research who would be in the room.  What would be the age range, the gender mix, the degrees of expertise on the subject.  Did we do our research so we could focus the topic down to the slant most likely to impress our audience?  Or did we just talk about what we were interested in?

Who were we thinking about when we got up to speak?  We may have started our talk focused not on the audience but on ourselves. We were thinking how nervous we were feeling.  We feel captured by our high pulse rate, our sweaty palms, our dry throat, our weakness in the knees.  The focus is 100% inward not outward.

We may have been very deeply engrossed in the notes we were reading, such that we didn’t even look up at the audience.  Or if we did, we used one of those fake eye contact approaches, where our eyes look in the direction of the audience but we are not really looking at anyone. We may have decided to ignore half the crowd and only talk to one half of the room or maybe only the front row or maybe no one, because we are staring over all the seated heads at some spot on the back wall.  Or we may be skimming across the room looking at everyone for one second and therefore looking at no one.  We cannot engage anyone in the audience with a fleeting one second glimpse but we can try to give the impression of an attempt to engage with our audience. This is not a talk focused on the audience.  Do the audience members sitting there feel that we are talking directly to them individually and not to an amorphous mass.

We may have decided that the audience was pretty dumb, so we need to read the text on the slides to them. We might even do that by turning our back on the audience and staring up at the text on the screen.  We are so focused on the text and the content and not on those listening to us.

Just to drive home the lack of focus on the audience, we cram so much information on each slide, that they becomes impenetrable.  Analytical types love jamming ten graphs on the one slide or throwing up the entire text document on screen.   We may hit up the slide with five different colours in a florid mess.  Or we may have gone crazy, like an example I saw recently, where the presenter used four or more different fonts in the text.  This made it super hard to read for the audience members.   Where was the focus?  It was on the presenters “cleverness” to showcase so many fonts on each slide, even though it was a disaster. Not to really rub it in, but the Japanese presenter was delivering a two hour lecture to a local Chamber of Commerce on presenting skills.

We may be rambling, because we have a poor structure for the talk, so we are hard to follow.  We may not have applied a logical flow to the talk to make it easy for the audience.  “Don’t make your talk hard to follow” is a fundamental rule.     Or we may speak in a monotone to see how many people we can put to sleep.  By hitting key words we can emphasise key messages we want the audience to take away with them.  We may be umming ahhing like a legend, to really distract the audience from the message.  We have not done any work on polishing our presenting skills, because we are not focused on the audience but selfishly on the most friction free, time efficient approach.  That means no extra effort being made.

We may have spent a total time of zero minutes practicing the talk before we gave it.  We may have spent our time instead working on the slide deck.  It takes time to cram ten graphs on the one slide, with five different colours and four different fonts for the text.   This major effort will just suck up any potential rehearsal time before the presentation.  So where were we focused after all?

Even though we may imagine we are focused on the audience, we may in fact be missing the opportunity or actively working against that aim.  Take another look at whether you are actually focused on your audience or whether you are just imagining it.

Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at greg.story@dalecarnegie.com

If you enjoy these articles, then head over to dalecarnegie.comand check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.

About The Author

Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan

In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.

A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.

Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.

Don’t Be Boring When Presenting

Every week I get to listen to speeches from some of the top people in their field.  I belong to an elite Rotary Club here in Tokyo.  That description in itself is a bit of a problem, given the philosophy of Rotary as a service organisation helping society and connecting business people together.  When my fellow Rotarians from different parts of the world hear this term “elite”, they will be puzzled, but hey, this is Japan and we do things differently here.  My particular Rotary is brimming with the captains of industry, the commercial crème de la crème, the top shelf of corporate leadership.  One of these titans was giving a presentation recently. 

He runs a huge print media company with an eye popping daily circulation in the millions that is the envy of his Western compatriots.  This is a man whose whole career has been devoted to communication, capturing stories and gaining influence.  So my expectations were raised on a couple of fronts.  I thought here is a speaker who will have a lot of interesting anecdotes, given his organization has a global footprint and the fact that they have been doing this the 1870s.  I thought given all the changes going on in the media business, he will be able to provide insights into where the industry is going.  What a disappointment.

The first red flag that the quality of this presentation was going to be less than expected, was when he started reading his speech.  For someone in his position, with the many decades of experience he has, why on earth would he need to read his speech.  Everyone in that audience reads his media product on a daily basis without fail.  He is a fellow Rotarian so he is amongst friends.  There is no question time in this format so there can be no concerns about being ambushed by a tough question.  This would have to be one of the safest speaking environments on the planet. He could talk to his notes without having to read the whole thing word by word.

We all have some area of expertise otherwise we wouldn’t be given the chance to speak.  When we have experience with our area of knowledge we don’t need to read the script.  We can talk to the points and this allows us to engage with the audience in a more natural way.  Unlike our speaker, we won’t have our gaze transfixed on the sheet of paper sitting on the rostrum in front of us.  This forces our eye line to be looking down on the page and not up at our audience. This creates a barrier with our audience and precludes the opportunity to engage with them.  Our eyes are such powerful communication tools and we should be using them to look at individuals in the audience as we speak.  We should be switching our gaze around the room, holding that person’s attention for around 6 seconds before moving on to the next person.

The next red flag on the quality was his speaking speed.  When we are reading we can tend to speed up.  This gets worse when we get nervous.  I don’t know if he was nervous or not, but I do know he was whipping through his speech at a  rate of knots. Another reason for the speed can be trying to squash as much content into the delivery as possible in the accorded time. 

Slow down for clarity. I am a rapid speaker in both English and Japanese.  I have to really work on myself to slow down so that the audience can follow what I am saying.  This is especially the case when speaking in a foreign language.  Slightly different accents and cadence can be hard for the listener to catch and when you speed things up the degree of difficulty rapidly accelerates.  When we are flying along at speed we tend to lose the pauses. 

Instead it becomes a machine gun delivery that just runs one set of thoughts right over the top of the preceding ideas, making it very hard for the audience to keep up.  We need to give our listeners some little time to catch their breath mentally and digest what we have just said.  As he was speaking in Japanese, I would have appreciated a few pauses so I could process what he was saying more easily.

Were there interesting stories and anecdotes from his star studded career covering the major events of the last 40 years?  Nope. Were there interesting trends being revealed about the future of media in Japan. No.  It was boring and uninteresting and it didn’t need to be like that.  Tell stories from your own experiences – we  have a strong interest in that type of content. Lots of things happen in business and in life and we all have terrific episodes and examples we can weave into our talk to support the point we are making.

Think about your audience and what would be of interest to them about trends in your industry that will impact their business, the market or create future societal trends. Something that the broadest base of listeners can relate to.

We didn’t have any of that on this particular day but we should have.  It was boring.

Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at greg.story@dalecarnegie.com

If you enjoy these articles, then head over to dalecarnegie.comand check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.

About The Author

Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan

In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.

A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.

Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.

How To Facilitate When Presenting

Many presentations are one dimensional. The speaker speaks and we just listen, maybe getting a chance to lob in the odd question at the end. In many cases, with internal presentations, there will be a role for the presenter as a facilitator as well, to get the discussion going or to drive the decision making process. Very few speakers are trained to facilitate and so we more or less bumble our way through.

One of the first things we have to learn in our facilitator role, is to shut up and listen. When we gave our presentation, we had the limelight. As a facilitator, though, we want as many others as possible to share that limelight, which means we have to get out of talk mode and go into listen mode. Sounds easy, but it isn’t.

When we are revved up in presentation mode, it is hard to change direction and just stop making our points. When someone says something, our brain lights up with something clever we would like to say. In fact, we get the inspiration pretty quickly, so we tend to switch off the person who is speaking and what they have to say. We just concentrate on what we want to say. Effectively, that means we have now stopped listening. We might be better than that, but we may instead be doing selective listening. Only honing in on the points we like and ignoring the rest of what the speaker had to say. We need to really work on our listening skills as a speaker and allow others our full attention when they are contributing. If you find yourself cutting others off before they finish, then you know you need to ease off and just listen more.

Silence for a speaker can be a struggle. Japan has no problem with silence so there is no social pressure here to fill the airwaves with continuous talk. We should take a leaf out of their book and use silence more when facilitating. Ask a question and then become quiet, even when we get into that uncomfortable silence period. Some are shy to speak up, others are deep processors going down many layers of thought on what they want to say. We need to give them time to contribute, we may even need to ask the more boisterous types to hold their comment and allow others to talk for a change.

We need nerves of steel when we do this, because in Western culture, silence is seen as uncomfortable, an indication of the breakdown of communication, that something has gone wrong because people are not participating. No one in Japan particularly feels any of that, by the way, so it is all in our heads.

Also avoid rephrasing a question or comment, unless it is really necessary. People have their own styles of speech and we need to make them feel welcome to contribute. If we become “correctors” of other people’s comments, they get the message that they are not skilled enough in communication to be able to lodge their own original effort. From this point on they will simply stop contributing. We should also be careful about changing the subject, until everyone has had a chance to comment. As mentioned, some are shy, some are deep thinkers and just at that vital moment when they are about to launch forth with their carefully crafted contribution, we switch subjects and they are banished to silence.

We also need to have a poker face. If we hear something with which we very much disagree, our facial expression and our body language, can go into overdrive and convey our displeasure with other people’s views. Again, this acts as an inhibitor of participation. Bosses do this all the time and then wonder why the number and quality of ideas are so poor.

We need to be aware of when to use closed questions to drive clarity and agreement and when to use open questions, to stimulate discussion. It can be a good practice to disassociate ourselves from the question and ask it as if a third party was involved. For example, “some commentators have the view that the new financial year is the best time for launching new projects. How has been your experiences with this type of thing?”. By not attaching our name to the view, it makes it easier for others to put forward a contrary view.

When we are asking questions, there will be three common varieties. The fact-based questions are there to get out information and data and generally will have a specific, correct response. This type of question is better addressed to the whole group than an individual, to avoid the possibility of calling out someone who cannot answer and will be embarrassed.

Opinion-based questions help to get a sense of how people feel emotionally about a topic. It is important to assess the emotional climate in the room on some topics before we go any further with the discussions. When people are reluctant to offer their opinion, especially here in Japan, you need to use a different technique. Ask everyone to write down their thoughts, but don’t ask, “What do you think?”. In Japan, that is too confronting. Instead ask “What did you write down?” and people will speak up.

When we are speaking that is one role. When we move to facilitator mode we need to switch gears and make some adjustments to how we do things. Understanding the different requirements is key. As a facilitator, we want audience participation and their contributions. We need to set that up and make it happen.

Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at greg.story@dalecarnegie.com

If you enjoy these articles, then head over to dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.

About The Author

Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan

In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.

A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.

Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.