71% of business managers have either been sleepy or fallen asleep during presentations

Back on October 31, 2005 Infommersion, Inc. put a press release on Business Wire  about an online survey titled Business Executives Admit to Dozing Through Boring Presentations. (They also said that 43% of them had caught other people dozing).

On November 23, 2013 Patti Wood posted on her Body Language Expert Blog about that survey with the misleading headline Research shows that 71% of executives admit falling asleep during a presentation. Her first bullet point in that post says instead that:

“Results released this week from an online poll by a data visualization software company reveals that 71 percent of business executives surveyed have fallen asleep or felt sleepy during dull presentations.”

There is a big difference between just feeling sleepy and actually falling asleep. Her headline lost me as a possible fan. Also October 2005 sure is a long way from being last week.

When I clicked Patti’s link to Infommersion nothing happened. So, I did a Google search and found out why. On November 1, 2005 there was a press release on Business Wire about how another firm called Business Objects had acquired Infommersion .

Other interesting results in that Infommersion press release about their survey were that:

“The most difficult types of presentation to remain fully awake through were individual speeches (35%) followed by training sessions (23%) and then general meetings (16%). Webcasts revealed themselves as the easiest type of conference to stay alert throughout, with only 11% of respondents saying they found this difficult to sit through.

Survey participants agreed that the most important ingredient for success was an 'animated and enthusiastic' speaker (51%), with an 'interesting and interactive' presentation gaining 36% of the votes. Finally, 3% of those polled said it helped if the presenter was 'good looking'.”

The yawning man came from a painting by Mihály Zichy.