Registration for this popular D+B lab reached capacity within hours of opening up, and now I know why. Presentation guru Hanna Phan captured our attention right away with her présumé (a résumé in presentation format), which she used SlideRocket’s own software presentation tools to ultimately land her a dream job at SlideRocket. After we agreed that 99% of presentations suck, we learned about the three elements about a great presentation: creating a great story, supporting with visuals, and delivering by you!
Great stories can come from the most unexpected ideas, and we had a small exercise (with colorful post-its, of course) to explore some of these untapped ideas. We were tasked to describe “SELF HELP” either through pictures or words. Artistic MBA students made up a huge population in the room, and more than 50% of the brainstorming post-its were drawings rather than words. One student used two post-its and drew a very detailed picture of a guy slowly, but surely, climbing his way out of a well. Another idea that stood out was a picture of a bomb; we’re assuming it means some drastic self help measures (we’re also hoping this guy gets some self help .. soon). It was a great exercise to get our creative juices flowing, and imagination can go far once we take the time to think outside of bullet points. We also shared our ideas with our peers, learning that through collaboration, we can further explain and expand on each other’s ideas.
Hanna also emphasized simplicity and big ideas for creating powerful presentations. A simple idea, visual, and typography can be so much more powerful than the usual charts, maps, and essays we see crammed into presentations these days. Many of Hanna’s slides consisted of one thought-provoking question that filled up the entire slide or of a very simple statistic used in place of many mundane bullet points all iterating the same point. We ended the workshop with applying some of these concepts to our own presentations that we had submitted to SlideRocket earlier in the week.
Everyone walked away from the workshop with a few good tips on how to make presentations more impactful. I know I was definitely inspired by Hanna’s présumé; my next stop will be to OCD later this afternoon to figure out how to drop présumés instead of résumés.