Category: From work

Nancy Duarte’s book, Resonate, maps out the rhythm for an effective presentation with the idea of sparkline. It diverges from the conventional understanding of rising action, climax, and falling action. It’s more true in most business presentation as the products or solutions are not that different and audience lacks patience to build up the climax.

Some tactics to build the what could be and the what is.

WHAT-IS	WHAT-COULD-BE
– Pain point – Background information – Introduction to sections	– Product demo – Videos – Key feature – Advantage over competition

In most situation, the what-could-be are known facts, the so start with that. Begin with arranging the sequence of what-could-be appearances, then figure out making the what-is later. It’s often easier to create the relative low point than the highlight.

Product demo is engaging, fun, and risky all at the same time. One unexpected fail ignites the chill that sweats our back.

1. Cables, cables, cables

Sudden voice drop, mic caught on nearby conversation, unexpected low battery notice; the problem is wireless connections are not always reliable. We can’t guarantee cabled network connection, but keeping the power cable and headset minimize the risk of equipment not going our way.

2. Reboot

Give the device a fresh start so there’s no unused apps in the background occupying the RAM or hiccups from not closing the product app properly. Reboot solves most tech problems.

3. Check the screen mode

We’ve either seen this or done it ourselves, sharing the notes rather than sharing the slide. Each reattempt to share the screen is likely the audience switch to their Outlook or Gmail.

4. Close all social applications

Midway through the screen sharing, message preview pops up, and continues to fire in on the top-right corner. We can’t turn open the app, that’s just unprofessional. We’re left to click the “x” button to close the preview, hoping we did it fast enough that no one read the message and the trash talk stops. Make sure only the essential apps are open, the presentation, the product, and the meeting app so we avoid hell.

5. Check the webcam

Virtual presentation is hard to keep the audience engaged, so every engagement helps. Let people see your expression, gesture, nervousness; it makes the performance more human. Especially in an AI flooded world, this helps to keep them there.

I’m not a designer, and by no means am I trying to become one.

The objective of color is to highlight the information, and highlight is building contrast. I use 3 colors in my slide: grey, black, and one primary color. More colors requires more skills to maneuver, so I rarely do so unless I’m out of option.

Make the important information standout is the obvious approach, but it gives little room to highlight before red text, bold, italics, boxes, and arrows are added for indication.

Reduce the secondary information is the less apparent approach, but it’s often times simpler. Keep the important information as is and reduce the attention of secondary information with grey.

This works for general reports, which is usually mix of words and graphs, or any other simpler document.

Sugar and junk food rewards the brain, releases dopamine to make us feel happy. Eat it while we are working on a difficult task makes the task feel less stressful by building a reward loop.

To take advantage of dopamine release,

• Eat healthy most of the time to establish a baseline, when sugar high hits, it actually triggers the reward loop.
• Learn to distinguish difficult task. Some task are naturally more difficult, requires structuring of information, long process, or multiple hard decisions; sometimes mediocre tasks seem difficult because we feel tired.

Teams come in 2 sizes, lean versus volume. Former focuses on mission execution and the later focuses on strategic formation.

Recently, I traded 1 headcount in exchange of removing video production from the responsibility. The team becomes leaner and easier to focus on go-to-market planning, asset creation, and channel enablement. It made sense since video production is resource intensive.

It has, however, got me thinking if I naturally opted for a leaner team that dedicates on critical mission execution. It would eventually lead to a different career path since no Secretary of Defense ever came from a special operation role. Major management role requires overall strategic formation.

A leaner team also creates more personal relationships from the accomplishment of execution. This attachment could be contradicting in strategic planning; decision of sacrifice or letting go is more difficult.