presentations

Perfection is the enemy of authenticity.

A recent survey of Top Five Fears places public speaking alongside __dentity theft_ and __ass shootings._ In the 1980s, it completed with __uclear destruction._ In the 1970s, __hark attack.

In 7.81 square miles of vaunted black community, the 850 square feet of Dum Dum Donuts was the only place in the "community" where one could experience the Latin root of the word, where a citizen could revel in common togetherness. So one rainy Sunday afternoon, not long after the tanks and media attention had left, my father ordered his usual. He sat at the table nearest the ATM and said aloud, to no one in particular, "Do you know that the average household net worth for whites is $113,149 per year, Hispanics $6,325, and black folks $5,677?""For real?""What's your source material, nigger?""The Pew Research Center."Motherfuckers from Harvard to Harlem respect the Pew Research Center, and hearing this, the concerned patrons turned around in their squeaky plastic seats as best they could, given that donut shop swivel chairs swivel only six degrees in either direction. Pops politely asked the manager to dim the lights. I switched on the overhead projector, slid a transparency over the glass, and together we craned our necks toward the ceiling, where a bar graph titled "Income Disparity as Determined by Race" hovered overhead like some dark, damning, statistical cumulonimbus cloud threatening to rain on our collective parades."I was wondering what that li'l nigger was doing in a donut shop with a damn overhead projector.

Her favorite stepping-aside technique was to lay out a dizzying mountain of complex steps and then pronounce the conclusion self-evident. Excuse me? Things that are self-evident don't need you or the presentation anyway. Relying only on logic, on what can be factually established, may inform or intimidate, but it will rarely stir anyone into action or change.

Just as you can__ rehearse your way to success, you can__ design your way there either.

When preparing a presentation, it__ never a good idea to begin with a rule. If you do, you__e focusing on the appearance of good delivery and not the effect of it.

It__ hard to hold a conversation with people when you__e not seeing them.

We should just stop calling these things presentations altogether. Everyone gets hung up on that word. Wouldn__ it be easier to just call them conversations? That__ really what they are.

During the first few minutes of your presentation, your job is to assure the audience members that you are not going to waste their time and attention.

Improvement is achieved by the ripple effect of a few simple changes in approach, attitude, or habit.

A successful presentation needs to be both buttoned up (orderly) and free-flowing (a conversation). The tension between the two, the fact that both things are happening at once, defines the process.