Episode #289: Simon Kuper's Excellent Advice to Presenters

I discovered the journalist Simon Kuper, when I started subscribing to the Financial Times newspaper (FT). I have a number of go to columnists in the FT and he is one of them. I like his intelligence, wit and writing style. He recently mentioned his experiences attending conferences after a long break. He outlined some advice for presenters thinking about addressing conference audiences, which I totally agree with. Let’s go through them.

1. Bored Audiences. Simon made the observation that the audience is bored even before you start speaking. This can easily happen. If the preceding speakers have been awful, they will have killed off your audience for you. Simon references redundant openings as a sure signal for the listeners to grab their phones and escape to the warm bosom of the internet. How we physically walk on stage, how we start, are going to indicate to the audience, if we are worth following or not. We need a power start, with no hesitancy or tinkering around with the laptop. Walk on stage with supreme confidence and launch straight into a gripper opening guaranteed to monopolise audience attention in those vital first two seconds.

2. One Key Idea. He noted that people won’t remember everything you spoke about. We have to be careful not to cannibalise our key message, with too many competing messages. Simon mentioned one idea, backed up with evidence and the use of anecdotes. He is actually talking about wrapping the points up in stories, because we will recall these more easily that just data.

3. Speak Less. Simon suggests that if we have a 15 minute spot, then stop at 12 minutes. His idea is that we don’t want to be blasting through our slides at the end in a panic to get through all the content. We have all seen this, haven’t we. The speaker skips what looks like the most important slides in the deck, because they are running out of time and we feel cheated. Less is more. This stop early discipline will force us to be more concise and clear.

4. Don’t Read Your Speech. His suggestion is to “memorise it by saying it out loud once a day for five days beforehand”. I disagree with Simon on this point. There is no shame or stigma to using your slide deck as the navigation for your talk. The same goes for notes. I witnessed a Harvard Professor give a three hour lecture during an Executive Education Course I attended in the Business School, with no notes anywhere in sight. It appeared he did the whole thing from memory. At the end, as we were filing out of the lecture theatre, I spied his secret. Behind us on the back wall, there was a large sheet of paper with 10 words written on it. These were the chapters of the talk, so that he could keep the order correct.

5. Be Visually More Appealing. Simon suggests that as we are boring to look at, we should move around on stage and look at the audience. I agree to a point. Certainly free ourselves from the confines of being trapped behind the podium. Walk around on stage, but do it with purpose, rather than your nerves driving you to wander up and down, becoming a distraction from your message. Move to the apron of the stage to have more eye contact impact with the audience closest to you. Move to the rear of the stage to make a macro point and use big gestures to try and engage the entire audience at one time.

6. Use Slides Or Videos. Again, I partially agree. Simon makes the point to not use slabs of text and that “your mouth is for words and slides are for pictures”. This is a good idea and certainly pictures are brilliant for engaging the audience. What we put on the slides can be tricky though. I watched the Japanese chief economist from one of the major global banks give a presentation on currency movements, which is a very topical subject here in Japan at the moment. He was a very smart guy and his talk was very good. Astonishingly, his slides were very amateur.

He made a very common mistake we often see here in Japan, of just putting up the content, without thinking about whether the audience can absorb it easily. The slides were too dense and there were too many graphs on the one page. He needed to simplify his visuals, such that we can get the message in two seconds. If it takes longer than that, it is too complex. Also, we should be careful of the visuals competing with us. They must be our slave and we must dominate the proceedings.

7. Avoid Cliché Jokes. Simon is right to say we should skip boring statements like, “I have the difficult spot after lunch” or introducing a panelist with “and finally last but definitely not least”. “Without further ado” is a pet hate of mine as well. Probably no one in the audience has any clear definition of what constitutes an “ado” and we should do a better job of getting proceedings underway.

8. Use Simple Language. Simon made this point in reference to non-native speakers of English, but I think it is something we should all adopt.

9. Forget Motherhood Statements. He pointed out the weakness of stock phrases such as “all stakeholders need to work together”. I laughed when he wrote, “don’t say things that are obviously false such as ‘We value all our employees’”.

10. Give Marcus Aurelius A Rest. Regurgitating well known quotes falls flat, because we all know them and there is nothing new on offer. I suggest you find a quote which is pithy and not so well known instead. We will learn something new and valuable and we will feel better as a result.

We instinctively know these points don’t we, but sometimes we get carried away with assembling the slide deck and we forget the medium we are operating in. The chief economist I referenced earlier was oblivious about his presentation’s impact, so there are still some major gaps in understanding on display here in Japan. Let’s take Simon’s points and work on them so that when it is our turn to speak, we are the outlier, the one person the audience will say made the whole conference worth attending.