At an industry association meeting I attended last week the lunchtime speaker inadvertently demonstrated what not to do in order to give an engaging presentation:

• Begin with a lame self-deprecating joke ("They say I'm pretty fly for an old guy, but ...")
• Read and discuss a dictionary definition of a word in the title of the talk
• Plod through irrelevant facts and figures — statistics that would have required an almanac or encyclopedia to look up in past decades, but which now are two clicks away
• Offer a numbered list of platitudes as recommendations — none of which are actionable, measurable, or connected to the earlier parts of the talk
• Finish with more attempted humor ("I may sound like a MOTO, a Master Of The Obvious, but ...")

^z - 2013-04-25