Many people are familiar with Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint from back in 2005. At SlideGenius on April 18, 2020 there is an article about it titled Guy Kawasaki’s 10-20-30 Rule of Presentation: Is It Still Relevant?
Recently I have been reading Guy’s 2019 book Wise Guy: lessons from a life. In his Chapter 10 on Skills there is a Section titled Public Speaking Wisdom with this advice:
“….Ask for a small room. It’s easier to entertain and inform an audience that’s packed into a room, so try to get the smallest venue that you can. It’s a mental game. You will think, People are so interested in my presentation that it’s standing room only. The audience will think, He’s such a good speaker that there’s standing-room only.
Befriend the audio-visual team. Don’t treat the people in the back of the room and behind the screen as if they are your minions. You want them to want you to succeed, because they can ruin your presentation, if not your career.
Pre-circulate. Before you speak, don’t hide in the green room or backstage. Get out and circulate with the audience – especially the people in the front rows. When you are onstage, you want to look out and see familiar, friendly faces. You need the positive energy of those people who want you to succeed.
Customize your beginning. Use LinkedIn to find connections to the people in your audience – schools, companies, interests – whatever it takes. Use this information to break the ice. If you’re talking to a company whose products you use, mention that – or better yet take a picture of yourself with the product. You can also show a picture of yourself traveling in the country where you’re speaking.
Take off like an F/A-18 Hornet fighter jet, not an Airbus A380. The fighter jets that take off from an aircraft carrier get into the air from a runway that’s approximately one thousand feet long. An Airbus A380 needs approximately two miles. Good speeches take off like a fighter jet and don’t rumble along for two miles before making it into the air.
Use a maximum of ten slides, if you use slides at all. You’ll be lucky to get ten points across in a presentation. Less is more. There’s a reason David Letterman didn’t use a top twenty-five or top fifty list: no audience can handle more than ten key points.
Make the type size on your slides bigger. I suggest at least 30 points. FYI: Steve Jobs used 190-point text. The bigger the text, the fewer words fir on a page, and the more you’ll communicate. Keep cutting words until your text fits your slides. Less is more.
Limit your presentation to twenty minutes. This is because meetings often start late and end early, and you may not be able to make your Windows laptop work with the projector in a timely manner. TED talks are only eighteen minutes. It’s better to end early and have time for questions and answers than the end late and not cover your key points.
Tell stories. Always tell stories. Use them to illustrate your key points. Stories are ten times more powerful than bullshit adjectives such as ‘revolutionary,’ ‘innovative,’ and ‘cool.’ I believe in stories so much that this book is a collection of stories.”
In his Chapter 6 on Values there is a section titled There’s Dishonor Too. In it he discusses having been screwed twice by speaking agents. The way things are supposed to work is that the client pays the speaking fee before the event occurs. Afterwards the agency keeps its 20 to 25% commission and then the agent pays the balance to the speaker. Guy said both agents instead ran a Ponzi scheme - they used the payments from Guy’s speeches to pay other earlier speakers, and then stiffed him.
The silhouette of a public speaker came from Openclipart.
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