We’ve learned a lot about charisma and effective speeches by studying President Obama’s delivery this year. But Steve Jobs, Apple, Inc. CEO, also knows how to take charge of a room, and work the audience to his advantage. In The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, author Carmine Gallo, a Businessweek.com columnist, dissects Jobs’s presentation skills, and provides a road map to making a better impact on your audience.
Steve Jobs works on his speeches as he does his brand, where he turns Apple prospects into customers and customers into evangelists.
Most people fail to think through their story, resulting in, at best, an uneven delivery of their message. Jobs works hard at the elements of a good presentation, before creating any slides, focusing on stories, characters and story-boards. His success comes from thinking, sketching and scripting, rather than filling in a boring bullet-point template.
Presentation software makes it far too easy to overload the brain. Gallo cites neurology research that proves bullet points are the least effective way to deliver important information “The brain is fundamentally a lazy piece of meat,” says Gregory Berns in Iconoclast.
Gallo includes an interesting section titled “Bullets Kill” about over-reliance on PowerPoint templates to tell and sell your story. There are actually nine elements of a great presentation, including your “passion statement,” the use of metaphors, and crafting your message to deliver three key points.
Things in threes is a big part of Jobs’s communication strategy. People are overwhelmed with too much detail and can easily focus on just three specific points. A narrative delivered in three parts provides direction for your audience, and if you’re as talented as Jobs, you build drama with each point.
Gallo uses the rule of three to break down presentation development into three parts as well: Create the story, deliver the experience (not the presentation), and package the material.
Introducing sexy new technology to Mac lovers might seem like an easy sell, but just imagine the fallout if Jobs didn’t get his core message across. If thousands of people left a MacWorld convention with wrong information the result would be confusion in the market, dissension among fans, and a lot of bad press to re-spin. Jobs knows how to deliver a sound bite right, such as the introduction of the MacBook Air, saying: “It’s the world’s thinnest notebook,” instead of saying "The MacBook Air is 0.16 inches thick.”
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