Weekend Language: Presenting with More Stories and Less PowerPoint

Think about it: on weekends, were all great communicators because our default is storytelling. When we go to a party on Saturday night, we dont talk about how we optimized our calendar last Wednesday to monetize our mission-critical, best-of-breed, seamless-solution-provider business. (If you do, thats probably why you havent been invited back to many parties). No, on the weekends our speech is conversational, simple, clear, and interesting. We speak in examples, anecdotes, and analogies. But then Monday morning hits. We step into the office and suddenly were full of feature lists and ten-point plans, high level terms and nonsense. As if that wasnt bad enough, we beat the snot out of our audiences with 118-slide PowerPoint presentations chock-full of text. Audience members typically dont remember anything from those types of presentations. But they do remember stories. The approach and techniques found in this book are designed to help you replicate your existing strengths as a weekend storyteller so you can drag them into your weekday presentations to and conversations with customers, partners, employees, and investors. That way, you can be a great communicator every day of the week.