While attending an academic conference held at Waseda University, the importance of good communication and presentation seemed to have been totally forgotten. I listened to speech after speech of people who are extremely knowledgeable in their field, but don’t know how to make a point let alone excite the audience.

In his book, Presentation Zen, Garr Reynolds talks about “death by powerpoint.”I think educators take this to an extreme. Writing paragraphs of data and literally reading from a manuscript. The point it is, if you can’t interest of excite your audience, whatever product you are trying to sell or idea you are trying to spread just won’t matter. They will never hear you.

Related Links

• Scobleizer — Tech geek blogger » Blog Archive Presentation Zen … – Presentation Zen says “just talk to me”. This is an honor. Presentation Zen, er, Garr Reynolds, gives the good and bad of corporate presentations he’s seen and then gives me a compliment (while teaching us how to do better business …
• comment on every small business needs a little presentation zen by … – if a slide or printed piece does not tell a useful part of the story, dig it out and throw it away. ditto for the spoken portion of the presentation. as a teacher, i did a lot of ‘chalk talks’. that required minimal graphics, …

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