| Why Keynote could be Apple's enterprise Trojan Horse - or what Google could learn from Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead" | | Date Created: 11 Nov, 2007, 09:20 PM |
 A few, pre-Leopard, weeks ago, I wrote of Al Gore's success in sharing the Nobel Prize for Peace.
I asked the readership to consider how successfully Gore's message would have been received if he'd conformed to the traditional cognitive style of Powerpoint, which is to boringly reduce complex ideas into fractured bulletted selling points.
Indeed, I said I was preparing to use two images of Gore, one with him presenting about Hurricane Katrina using Keynote, and the same image of Gore Photoshopped in front of a bullet-point slide, using the usual blue background, in a presentation on Presentation Skills to a group of business people. (Scroll down to the previous blog entry to see).
They were invited to attend a business breakfast presentation in the Melbourne seaside suburb of Elwood, in a restaurant called "Sails" (below, right), with its own special meeting facilities. |
 This was to be a one hour presentation to CEOs, national sales managers, property developers, lawyers and accountants, and various business owners, all of whom employed presentations in their work, with internal and external clients.
And as I was to discover after the presentation, none had heard of Apple's Keynote, none used Macs, and of course all used various flavours of Powerpoint.
It requires no genius to guess that inviting a cross-section of the business community to such a presentation would offer up that 100% used Powerpoint.
It was in that vein that I prepared my presentation, one that I have given numerous times this year around Australia, but which changes each time so as to reflect recent events to give the presentation more currency, and thus raise its "engagement quotient".
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While the beginning and conclusion will vary, the middle section contains favourite elements (groups of slides that tell a story) in order for me to get across my main messages:
1. How to engage audiences using what cognitive neuroscience tells us how we orient, learn and remember.
2. What makes my way of presenting different from the 30 million Powerpoint presentations Microsoft says is offered up each day. And why it is based on evidence, rather than tradition and social conformity.
3. Slides that provides categorical and undeniable evidence as to why my method works, engaging the audience in its own learning process using visual and other illusions that deeply impress the audience. It conveys to the audience both my expertise and my sense of fun - a rare combination.
4. That I am doing the walk and the talk at the same time - the talk is not just about the slide content (issues related to text, images, colour, movement, etc), but about how to make the technology go front and centre when it's needed, and then have it get out of the way when I resume centre-stage. To this extent, whenever I play a movie (I played several in the talk), I don't stand near the screen or the Powerbook, but I sit down with the audience, watching their reactions, which might form part of what I'll say next when the movie stops and I need to describe and elaborate on perhaps the more subtle aspects missed on first seeing some of the videos.
(See my blog entry about Paul Potts and story-telling. I showed this video and had senior managers verging on tears as many had yet to see it).
In fact, let me share one of the the videos that early in the talk set the pattern. It was about patterns, and how we are pattern-detecting creatures, and this ought to form the basis for our slide creation. A few weeks before, I'd heard the esteemed Harvard psychologist, Steven Pinker, interviewed by WNYC radio host, Leonard Lopate, a favourite podcaster.
Lopate began his interview with Pinker by reminding him of his encounter with the comedian Stephen Colbert, on the faux Fox News-style The Colbert Report.
Colbert comedically put Pinker on the spot by asking him, "Ok, describe how the brain work - five words or less."
Caught momentarily off guard, Pinker caught his breath then magically ad-libbed:
"Brains.cells.fire.in.patterns".
Brilliant! And exactly the neuroscientific message I wanted my audience to see. So I tracked down the Colbert Report (February, 2007), clipped the section I wanted, saved it in Quicktime format, and embedded it into a plasma screen in a Keynote slide (See below). It played perfectly on cue, and deeply impressed the audience. |
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That said, I made one monumental error.
I mistimed the talk, and stopped at the appointed time with this slide: |
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I looked up and saw that we had only 5 minutes of question time, and this section, despite me trimming it down, would take at least 20 minutes. And this was really the "money slide": many of those attending really wanted to know about charts and graphs as they spent so much time developing and analysing them in their businesses.
Now I could have commenced my presentation with the Charts section. But without the theory and examples I had offered as to why an alternative to Powerpoint's traditional bulleted text style is needed - and how there is an evidence base to this - I would have neutered its impact.
So I took a risk: I said to the assembled group that I had committed one of the cardinal sins of presenting, asked for their forgiveness, and suggested we return very soon for a follow-up breakfast, where, following a brief recap, we would spend exclusive time on charts and the visual representation of information. And if they wished they could send me their own Powerpoint slides and I would offer a critique of how they could be altered to make them impactful - if they needed it.
This retrieved the situation and many after expressed a desire for the talk to be expanded into a three hour training session.
For me, this meant that many had "got" what I had tossed up in a high-risk play. As one soon-to-be-CEO said during the question period, "We think we do great presentations, but you've raised the art of presenting to a whole new level!"
This is music to a presenter's ears, isn't it? |
 In the aftermath, as people were packing up to go about their morning's work, quite a few came up to me afterwards, and asked what I had used to perform the presentation.
These very experienced presenters knew it wasn't Powerpoint. The clarity of the minimal text I used, the sharpness of the illustrations, the different transitions handled with devastating smoothness by Keynote, the ease with which movies played embedded in the slide without dropping into Windows Media Player or Quicktime, and how it all worked together to reinforce and illustrate what I said, all screamed,
"This is not your father's Powerpoint!" |
Think for a moment what these various experienced presenters - for whom presentations really count (we're talking multi-million dollar contracts in some cases) - encountered.
They were challenged to consider that their trusted and much used means to convey information was based on tradition, social conformity, and the vagaries of Microsoft's software engineers (yes, I showed them pictures of Bill Gates' recent presentations to make my points).
That was the theory. Then they had to experience the challenge of seeing and hearing a different style of presentation, fuelled behind the scenes by Keynote's ineffable qualities. I made no mention at all of Keynote, or that I was using a Mac (which could have been using Powerpoint for OS X).
But these experienced presenters came up and asked what I had used. I said aloud, it's a software program from Apple with an educational price of $79:
"Great, Les! Is it available for PCs?"
"Um, no. Sorry." |
And therein lies the sting in the tale (sic).
Apple doesn't need to write specialised applications to help it gain access to the enterprise setting, nor offer up different versions of Leopard to satisfy PC-dominated IT departments. Nor kill its marketing mien by porting OS X to the PC, despite the noisy clamour of the crowds.
It can get to the organisational "C" level, vaulting over the IT department lackeys, by helping get the focus on the bottom line where Boards of Directors need to see how a company's strategy will play out.
Go along to any stockholders' AGM and watch the CEO give his or her Annual Report, and die another Powerpoint death. Perhaps a graphics department has prepared the report (perhaps using Macs) but you can be pretty sure it will be delivered in the familiar style of Powerpoint. |
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Notice this screen shot (above) of a CEO's 2007 AGM speech online, which cleverly incorporates his slides. Notice how, while employing the company''s logo and brand colours, they are the usual "stiff" slides, mirroring the CEO's stiff presentation style. The company is Nordea, a Nordic bank of 10 million customers.
Around the world each day, there are probably scores of such dry dull CEO speeches being given: passionless number regurgitation using passionless Powerpoints.
It's at this point I reflect on an important, influential film I always watch when it makes it occasional appearance on the Turner cable network. It never fails to remind me that running against the social conformity of crowds and following your passion is my preferred way of acting (both as a psychologist and trainer of presentation skills).
This is the movie adaptation of Ayn Rand's, The Fountainhead.
Featuring Gary Cooper as a rebellious architect named Howard Roark (with strong overtones of Frank Lloyd Wright), it also stars Raymond Massey as a newspaper magnate (think William Hearst) publisher of "The Banner" and Patricia Neal, playing the newspaper's Design and Lifestyle journalist.
There are other more unidimensional characters, such as the newspaper's architecture critic, played by Robert Douglas and a fellow architect graduate of mediocre abilities who is used despicably by the critic in order to belittle the creative genius of Roark, who threatens established architecture with its conservative adherence to Classic Greek facades. More importantly, his rampant individualism strikes at the heart of the conservative establishment as well as the hoi polloi to whom The Banner panders.
Roark is initially mentored by an architect who has come up againt the conservative architectural community, and takes over his practice... where he waits ... and waits... including labouring in a quarry, and doing small jobs. Eventually he gets noticed and admired by self-made individualist entrepreneurs, not beholden to Establishment forces. |
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When he does eventually get an important commission for an apartment block by a visionary CEO, his life changes. While innovative parts of his work are admired, and co-opted by the Establishment, he knows (nor cares) that his body of work will never be accepted, unlike his mediocre school contempory, Peter (played by Kent Smith).
Roark, like Frank Lloyd Wright, and more recently, Frank Gehry, feels unbound by tradition. He breaks through with new materials, new ways of thinking about the integrity of buildings and their purpose in people's lives. (Yes, this is where you start to think - if you haven't already - of Steve Jobs and Jon Ives. As an aside, Wright was approached to design the building illustrations to be used in the film, but Warner Bros. rejected his financial terms).
When he secretively wins a huge commission to design a housing facility for disadvantaged populations, by allowing Peter - the darling of the Establishment - to take credit for it, he is then bewildered and angered to learn that his individualist approach has been overtaken by an architectural committee so that all may have a role in the building's construction.
This is where you think Googlephone, by the way. A phone or its software designed by committee, compared to the laser-like focus brought by Apple to the iPhone. Maybe Sergei and Larry ought to be sent a Fountainhead DVD to think about how each product they design needs to have its own purpose and intregrity and design-by-committee doesn't work.
In the Fountainhead, the committee-rejigged housing project is a disaster, far removed from its original purpose and design intelligence.
Roark is so angered he dynamites the yet to be completed development.
(This then allows for a very Ayn Rand court scene, above left, where the main protagonist has many pages of script to expound Rand's Objectivism philosophy).
What's the point of all this?
Well, to paraphrase Roark, a presentation has its own purpose and integrity, tailored for each audience, matching the qualities of the presenter. You can't take the company message, branded by the PR and Marketing department, laying out the company's dreams in bullets, and expect to deliver it with passion, gusto and engagement.
As a for instance, last weekend, I gave a scientific presentation to psychologists on something called "heart rate variability" and how to use the underlying science to help their patients. Within the workshop, I used some Powerpoint slides given to me by one of the world's leading authorities from a previous all day workshop he had conducted in Melbourne.
But it wasn't me. It was full of typically academic tables and poorly formed graphs, and the difference between my initial slides setting the stage and his scientific slides was like night and day. I felt like continually apologising, as this group had seen me in action a month before, and wrote to say it was the best presentation they had ever experienced.
They accepted the slides' limitations, but it required me to work hard to explain the slides' essential messages.
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Let me come back to conclude this entry with a brief further discussion of my presentation to the CEOs and others at Sails recently.
Doing the presentation as I did, saw several CEOs and national managers express a desire to follow up with some inhouse training. They were able to admit, afterwards, that they too are thoroughly "over" the traditional presentation style, and would dearly love an advantage over their competitors by doing it differently.
Perhaps I was lucky, or in particularly good form that day, but there was almost complete agreement amongst those present that I had achieved the outcome touted on the publicity flyer prepared fo the event: that at its end, they would be compelled to think differently about how they presented.
Word in fact came back a week later from one lawyer who had later that day attended a senior presentation by a revered member of the legal fraternity, partly fell asleep during the Powerpoint (complete text and bullets) and then spoke to him about my presentation and how it was in a different league.
That's also what a presenter about presentations wants to hear: others proselytising your work. And along the way sooner or later Apple's Keynote will get a mention for its ability to allow the audience to fully experience the impact of the theory and practice I demonstrate during my talks.
The question however will always be asked: Cannot the same result be effected with Powerpoint?
Probably.
And, I'll believe it when I see it.
For now, like Howard Roark, I'll gently peddle my message to whomever wants to hear it, in the belief that out there are business leaders ready for a change, who are not beholden to an IT Establishment who poo-poos the Mac as only being for the arty types, and who care about doing it differently, without fear of hide-bound criticism from their conservative Boards.
Got some comments to make? Use the comments section, but please, this is not about Powerpoint versus Keynote per se: it's about a style of presenting, of sharing knowledge.
And finally, I am soon moving my presentation ideas to its own blog. Blogwavestudio (what you're seeing now) doesn't play nice with Leopard. And in preparation for my presentation on Keynote at Macworld January 2008, it really needs its own space on the web.
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