Less is More

I went to a seminar this week on getting new business. The speaker made several interesting points regarding presentation slides. Here's a short recap...

- Most presentation slides have too much stuff on them. He called the typical tiers of bullets "son of bullet" and "grandson of bullet." His advice is to never have bullet grandchildren.

- If everything you say in your presentation is on the slides, then the listeners may assume that you're not so smart. Anyone can read a slide. But, if you just have a few words on a slide and then you can expound on the topic, then you look smart. And, the beauty of it is that if your presentation time gets cut short, you can easily shorten the amount of time per slide just by providing less detail in your voiceover per slide. You can't do this as easily if every slide has a long slew of copy on it.

- There should be just one key takeaway per slide. Get in, make your point, and get out. Next slide.

I thought this was good advice. It reminded me of a Business Week article earlier this year called "Deliver a Presentation Like Steve Jobs." The article recommends creating visual slides. It said, " Inspiring presenters are short on bullet points and big on graphics."