Partner Article

Japanese Chatter

With Simon Raybould of Curved Vision

I guess I’m like most people in this region, in that my Japanese is poor… but I’ve just learned the word for “chatter” because it’s the name given to a new style of PowerPoint presentation. The rules are very simple. You can use 20 slides and have them on the screen for only 20 seconds each. Then you have to sit down.

Simple.

Now, I’m not suggesting that we all adopt this style for our presentations (which seems to me to be to presentations as Haiku are to poetry!) but it’s well worth thinking about in terms of the discipline it imposes in your presentations. That’s the key word, of course - discipline - because having such a very short period of time to say anything forces you to think about what the audience need to know and giving them that… and only that.

And almost every presentation I’ve been called in to work on recently would have benefited from that discipline! So today’s tip? Simple - before you think of your presentation as being ‘ready’ go through it one more time and see if there’s anything (anything at all) you can strip down without losing your core message.

(Of course, that means you have to know what your core message is first…)

As usual, any questions or comments are welcome to sme@curved-vision.co.uk.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .