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 Great for speakers Aug 29, 2008
For my senior year of college we had a new university president. He liked to take a lot of the chapel time to talk about all the ways they were planning to spend our money on improvements to the school that we would never get to see. He also liked to use PowerPoint - a lot! After a few chapels, we were sick of PowerPoint.
Over the years I have been presented to with PowerPoint in a lot of different settings. Most of the time it was the same story of "blah blah blah." Too many people lean on the tool to enhance their presentation when all it does is illuminate the boredom. PowerPoint doesn't make presentations. People make presentations.
That's why I liked the premise of Paul Kelly's book The Seven Slide SolutionTM. I really found the first two sections interesting and helpful when it comes to developing a presentation using PowerPoint. Based on the way people's brains work, Kelly suggests that a presentation doesn't need to be any longer than seven slides. Anything beyond that is wasting your time and the audiences - they won't remember it. He walks you through the process of developing a story, from creating a premise to establishing conflict, adding tension, and ultimately providing a resolution to your presentation. The final section seemed to me a more hands on or reference to have handy when you are actually putting together the presentation.
Again, it wasn't exactly exciting or motivating, but I learned some good things. If you use PowerPoint very often, it might be a good book to take a look at. It's also a good refresher for putting together the basic elements of a story.
 Helpful Book Jul 05, 2008
This book does for presentations what flow charts do for good programming.
The author begins by depicting the all-too-familiar scene played out daily in most corporate presentations. He moves to an analysis of a better way to present material and provides an easy to replicate template to use when building presentations.
This template is very useful in helping the reader organize his/her thoughts and, in turn, make a better presentation in less time. I used this for the first time a couple of weeks ago to much success in presenting information to the managment of a joint venture. To my surprise, several people on both sides complimented my presentation and thanked me for making the information so clear, etc.
This book will help keep your presentation focused, clear, and clean. You still have to know what you are presenting and do your "due diligence" on facts. But it is definitely a good source to have at your fingertips.
2 of 2 found the following review helpful:
The generic becomes TM Jul 04, 2008
What makes a presentation compelling? According to the author here, it's the ability to tell a solid story and that, asserts the author, can be done in just seven slides.
I liked this book and yet, for me, I felt that the information had been presented before and done better in a couple of other titles: Beyond Bullet Points and Presenting to Win. Both of these provided clearer presentations of their own material (that is remarkably similar in some ways) than this particular book. One reason for that might have been nothing more than the text-heavy nature of this publication: it feels more weighty than the other publications and detracts from its simple message. While the publisher might have wished to estbalish this as a more serious handling of the topic, it lacks 'white space' in its own presentation.
The material here is fine: the 'story' is a natural format for presentations since we all, at heart, love conflict & resolution. If you've not read material like this before then this book will provide a good introduction. But there are other options that convey the same detail in a less textually heavy manner.
7 of 7 found the following review helpful:
an excellent road map for business presentations May 05, 2008
What is the best way to start a presentation? How to end it? How to solicit feedback? A methodical approach to these and many other related questions both saves preparation time and improves delivery. The only remaining problem is: what if the new methodology makes sense to you? Would you go through the pain to change your entire presentation style?
Kelly presents a simple three-stage methodology for building an exciting presentation in a minimal set of slides:
1. Build a story board
2. Select supporting facts
3. Elaborate in a set of seven slides
Internet has changed the way we process information and the way we communicate it. My audience is not interested in more statistics. It is looking for new interpretations and new business ideas. What is the right way to present them? If you do it right, you can help your listeners to come to the right conclusions, if not - you just wasted everybody's time.
So the reader has a choice: keep the old presentation habits or adopt the new methodology. Habit versus success. Comfort versus benefit.
This book teaches how to resolve this dilemma and adopt a winning methodology without suffering through change pains. You just need to follow five simple steps for the first stage (premise, conflict, tension, turning point, and resolution) and four steps for each slide (ask a question, evoke a sentiment, answer the question, and move the presentation forward).
Complete with detailed examples and clear illustrations, this is an excellent road map for business presentations.
Yuval Lirov, Practicing Profitability - Billing Network Effect for Revenue Cycle Control in Healthcare Clinics and Chiropractic Offices: Collections, Audit Risk, SOAP Notes, Scheduling, Care Plans, and Coding
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