Monday 27 April 2015

Sainsbury’s shows how to reduce the impact of your communication – just add a negative.

A weekend trip to Sainsbury’s reminded of the way that negatives impede communication – because your brain needs to unscramble the message before its meaning can be properly understood.


When I am coaching business people in presentation skills I explain that, if I were silly enough to give a small child a tray of drinks, saying: “Now, don’t drop it”, the way their brains would take in that instruction is as follows. 

Main concept: drop; specific in this case: don’t.

By which time, they probably have dropped it, because that was where the focus lay. If, instead, I had said: “Hold it steady”, that would been a clear, positive instruction they could act upon, as well as visualise.

So why don’t Sainsbury’s get straight to the point and say ‘Remember to re-use your bags’? It might even leave them enough space to say: ‘Please remember to re-use your bags’.

It’s actually quite hard to provide firm proof of this principle, but I can provide a couple of pointers. First, if you had been a bit slow to fill in your Census form back in 2011 you might have received one of these through your letterbox.


I reckon they must have thought to themselves: ‘Hang on a minute, why are we saying “don’t” when we want them to do something? And why are we saying “forget” when we want them to do the opposite of that’? I say this because the follow up leaflet that arrived (not at my house, of course) a week later read like this.



Finally, many years ago my son received a half-term report that concluded:



He was in tears. His little 11-year old brain couldn’t or wouldn’t unscramble what his teacher was saying. I had to explain that what she actually meant was ‘with success’.

Tuesday 21 April 2015

Presenters need to be ready for both VGA and HDMI to be sure of getting connected

For anyone who prefers to present from their own laptop, let’s get just a little bit technical for a moment. It may make the difference between you delivering your presentation successfully - or being deprived from doing so. The deciding factor could be whether you find VGA or HDMI connections when you arrive.

I always recommend using your own laptop. You are completely familiar with its workings, and compatibility can be assured. You just plug it into the projector or screen when you arrive and away you go. It’s been about as simple as that for around 20 years because the standard for connecting a laptop to a projector or screen has been VGA plugs. It’s a bit different if, like me, you use a Mac because Apple have their own connections, but you simply use a little adapter that used to come with the Mac itself and is easily obtainable if not.

The potential problem for presenters is emerging at the other end – where the cable connects to the TV screens that are rapidly replacing the old projector/pull down screen set ups now that super-sized TV screens have become so affordable. TV screens used to have VGA connections but now tend to have HDMI only. So if you arrive geared up for VGA you are not going to be able to connect your laptop to the screen.

My advice, therefore, is to be ready for both VGA and HDMI. As a Mac user this means I have two adapters – one to put a VGA lead into my Mac, one for HDMI.  If you use a PC it probably has a VGA connection on the side, so you just need an adapter that converts VGA to HDMI.

While you are getting yourself kitted out treat yourself also to a couple of ‘gender changers’ which, as I have said before (here), are invaluable for joining one lead to another.  This means you can set yourself up where you want to be (ideally left-to-right in the audience’s view), rather than wherever the cable provided happens to stretch.

L to R: VGA adapter, HDMI adapter (for Mac); HDMI and VGA gender changers
All of these devices can be found online for just a few pounds each, or rather more if you visit one of those beautiful Apple stores. Speaking of which, those shops will now offer you a brand new, thinner-than-ever MacBook Air which has just one connection for everything including the power. Let’s go there for the moment!

Tuesday 7 April 2015

Steve Jobs’ most important presentation secret remains under wraps

Steve Jobs remains, without any doubt, my greatest presentation skills hero. It certainly helps that his work is so readily available on the internet, but no other business leader I have seen comes anything like as close to epitomising the presentation skills that I espouse in my coaching sessions and my book Presentation Magic.

Many studies have been made as to what made Jobs such an exceptional presenter, but I believe the most important answer is hidden from most of us and it remains hidden, despite an insightful new biography from Brent Schendler entitled Becoming Steve Jobs.

That secret is the time, effort and thought that Jobs put into the preparation of his presentations. This is truly important because it’s the one aspect of presenting that most business people fail to grasp fully, if at all. They always have other duties they perceive to be more important, to the extent that that many high-ranking executives get someone else to do most of the work for them and then ‘look through it on the train’. Even those who know or suspect they are not giving enough time and attention to preparation seek to justify their lackadaisical approach, perhaps by protesting that they want it to sound ‘fresh and off-the-cuff’. This usually produces unsatisfactory results, if not actual disaster.

The author of the latest biography got about as close to Steve Jobs as anyone outside his immediate circle, so I was really hoping for the ‘missing link’ to the secrets of his presentation skills. When coaching business presenters I often show them videos such as the launch of the MacBook Air. I point to various ways in which Jobs communicates like all the very best magicians wrapped up into one. Then I have to speculate, as I say: “Notice how it’s all beautifully relaxed and conversational. But don’t be fooled by that. I bet he wrote many, many drafts and then rehearsed it over and over again. He would have known how many paces he needed to walk to pick up the MacBook. He would have known which way the string was tied on the envelope – he couldn’t afford to get in a muddle at that point. He will even have practiced sliding it out of the envelope – props, he knew, could be your enemy, and he didn’t it want it falling on the floor at the big moment or maybe coming out upside down!”


So we still don’t have the definitive answer on Jobs-style preparation, but Becoming Steve Jobs does offer a few hints such as references from his wife to the way he agonised over his legendary Stanford address. Best off all, perhaps, is a tantalising insight, from Bill Gates no less:

“I was never in his league….I mean, it was just amazing to see how precisely he would rehearse. And if he’s about to go on stage, and his support people don’t have things right, you know, he is really, really tough on them. He’s even a bit nervous because it’s a big performance. But then he’s on, and it’s quite an amazing thing.

“I mean, his whole thing of knowing exactly what he’s going to say, but up on stage saying it in such a way that he is trying to make us think he’s thinking it up right then….” Gates just laughs.


In other words, the sort of attention to detail that Steve Jobs applied to, say, the development of an Operating System, examining progress ‘pixel by pixel, feature by feature, screen by screen’, according to the book, was replicated in the preparation of his presentations. Until the rest of us put in that sort of time and effort we will never know how good we can really be.