Customer Reviews

Advanced Presentations by Design: Creating Communication that Drives Action

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Professor Abela has compiled a step-by-step guide to how to plan and deliver compelling presentations. Let me dissect that praise:

* Plan: Professor Abela walks you through the important questions you need to consider before you open up PowerPoint and begin pulling your slides together. This includes analyzing your audience, enumerating your objectives for the presentation and establishing a story structure through which you can marshall and convey your evidence. This is far and away the best framework of the many I have seen for pre-design work. The great thing about Professor Abela's framework for planning is that the framework is just as useful for meetings and speeches in which you will not be speaking to slides. Clearly the objectives, story and evidence are more important than the content of your PowerPoint slides. Wouldn't it be great to have a way forward if you are left with only 5 of your scheduled 30 minutes to present or the projector breaks down? Use Professor Abela's planning framework and you'll be ready.

* Deliver: Not all venues are alike, and Professor Abela takes the best of Tufte and other visualization experts to lay out guidance for designing presentations for a ballroom and a boardroom setting. Abela provides workable guidelines for using charts and layout to visually augment your message. This book includes a number of standard charts that easily and clearly represent the basic concept you are trying to convey on each slide. As much as I enjoy Tufte, Abela's book gave me direct actionable guidance that I needed to augment my spoken message with visual evidence.

Recently I applied the "Extreme Presentations" methods to a talk at a professional conference. The presentation itself (ballroom style) stood out as more visually informative than the standard corporate fare delivered by the other presenters. More important, though, is that I had clearly mapped out the change in mindset that I wanted to see in my audience. I had properly structured my talk to marshall the appropriate evidence in sequence and make the case successfully. As I created my problem-solution and anecdote outline I actually became excited for the opportunity to make my case to my audience. Following the presentation several attendees approached me to comment that I had changed their mind on the critical insight that was my goal.

Using "Extreme Presentations" to create a presentation takes longer than the standard corporate presentation (at least my first presentations developed in this model have taken longer). The quality of the visuals and the reception by the audience really does deliver a worthy return on that time investment. It's clear to my audiences that I've taken the time to think about them, consider their interests and taken care to create a good-looking and relevant set of visuals. This quality makes it clear to my audiences that I care about them, and that goes a long way towards making the audience care about what I am communicating.

This book lays out a methodology to create presentations that make a real difference. And the method works - my company subscribes to Corporate Executive Board, a industry best practice research service that follows the methods in this book. CEB is one of the few companies that I make time to attend their presentations because they are worth my limited time. And not only is the research solid, the information is presented in a way that makes it understandable and makes an impact with executives and managers. The method is repeatable, simple, and can make a difference right away.

I know. I've given a half dozen presentations using just some of the methods and have noticed my feedback scores increase. I've had people ask me for advice on presenting. That's results.

This book isn't about presentations, flashy graphics, or even the Zen of presenting. It about communications. And it debunks a lot of presentation myths with solid research. Its worth its weight in gold (even at today's prices!) to people who need to get their point across to groups of any size.

It's not every day I see a book offering chapters with names like "Marshalling your evidence" and "Assembling the anecdotes that will illustrate your evidence". Abela answers the question "What does the evidence say about presenting evidence?" This book analyzes the building blocks of effective presentations in a way I've never seen.

Abela provides specific evidence of what's most likely to work, and why, when you want people to *act* on something you present to them. But the book is more than a recap of scientific findings: It's written from the perspective of a marketer and business manager, offering practical, evidence-based advice about how to focus on a problem your audience has, and how to show them you can help solve it. Three key topics are:

1. Structuring stories. Abela presents a SCORE method for sequencing evidence: Situation, Complication, Resolution, Example. The aforementioned "Assembling anecdotes" chapter talks about three types of stories we can use: 1) One that relates directly to our situation, 2) a hypothetical story, or 3) a more metaphorical one.

2. Using graphics. The book provides numerous examples of charts and other graphics, explaining which can help you best present your data. I've heard plenty of discussions of visual presentation -- Abela goes into more detail than most, staying focused on interpreting the hard evidence about how to engage an audience.

3. Setting goals for your presentation. Abela talks about setting measurable objectives for what you want your audience to think and do differently after your presentation.

I highly recommend this to anyone who wants to present convincing evidence in a business environment.

I've read many books on how to present complicated information, but on first reading this looks to be among the best. Its approach should be especially useful to me because of its emphasis on understanding the personality types among your audience, using the Myers-Briggs types. In particular it makes clear how I, an INTJ who loves exploring all the details, need to bring out the big picture for those in my audience with different personality types. I look forward to trying the approaches recommended in this book for my next presentation at work.

Also, the author very wisely advises thinking through the content and organization BEFORE starting to make actual slides; he says in so many words do NOT even open PowerPoint until Step 8 for several reasons. First, planning first will probably lead to a better presentation. Second, planning first may prevent wasting time making slides that don't end up getting used. Third, and perhaps most important, he says if one belatedly realizes a slide that took two hours to make doesn't work for the purpose of this presentation, there is a strong temptation to keep it anyway simply because of all the work one has invested in that slide. I have been there and done that; it's very hard to give up on a slide that no matter how elegant just does not work for this situation!

I just finished this book and I think it was a very good investment of my time and money.
I think it is a very different book because:
* It is very well supported, it has an admiring list of references about research made on all sorts of ideas and rules of thumb regarding presentations;
* It help us think deeply about the objectives of a presentation (before this book, most of the time, when I thought about objectives I came out with a list of things to do, to present, a kind of agenda for the presentation. Abela reminded me "But what we need is a way to set objectives that are all about the audience, not the presenter.")
* It help us sequencing our information to tell a compelling story (I loved the SCoRE method to define and sequence the main points of a presentation)
* It speaks, and I never saw anything of this kind in others books, about two kinds of different presentations: ballroom presentations and conference room presentations. Most of the books about presentations are about ballroom presentations, then, when we have meetings, when we have commercial presentations we tend to use the same kind of slides and techniques we use and see being used in ballroom presentations with audiences of more than one hundred persons ("Good ballroom style presentations should have minimal text, perhaps just a brief title, and rich, relevant visuals" on the other side "Good conference room style presentations should have lots of relevant detail and text, and should be handed out on paper, never projected"). This is great stuff, I never though about this, laptops and projectors are everywhere, so we tend to use them for whatever reason, for all kinds of occasions, but if we want to be effective we should think before on what kind of presentation style is the most useful.

this is 'the' book on presentations, full of indispensible information in every chapter. It would be hard to find a more comprehensive guide. If you've ever had trouble keeping an audience's attention during a presentation then you need this book. It doesn't just cover the basics but gets to the how's and whys of what makes a good presentation, how to understand & read an audience, how to plan and cater to it -with some clearly tested and effective methodology from someone who really knows.
This is the definitive guide.

Other reviewers have commented on the book's contentsand layout.

I am very interested in Dr Abela's distinction between Ballroom and Conference Room presentations. I believe that there is a fundamental difference between the two and that other books focus far too much on the Ballroom style presentations.

I think it is also important to note that this is published for training and HR professionals, another area not examined as fully in other presentations books.

Finally the bibliography and annotation of research into the effectiveness of certain aspects of presenting is comprehensive and up-to-date.

An excellent resource together with Dr Abela's website.

I found Advanced Presentations by Design in my university library over 2 years ago when I was working on my Master's thesis. I immediately found that this approach was head and shoulders better than any of the others I had previously used to build presentations. What I like about Advanced Presentations by Design is that it takes you through a concentrated, logical and concise process for 'structuring' your presentation for maximum impact on the intended audience. I found step 2 (Objectives) the most eye-opening for how it gets you to think about what you want your audience to think/do differently after your presentation. Dr. Abela advises using a From-To Think-Do matrix which is easy to apply and effective for thinking through and articulating the mindset/perspective that you would like to change with your presentation. I think this is the crux of the approach because it requires you to think deeply about the message you want to deliver and why it's important to a specific audience.

Altogether the guide outlines a process for designing a well structured presentation, tailoring it for a specific audience, and marshaling evidence to support and deliver your message through the presentation. I recommend this approach since it is the most coherent one I have found since I first learned it over 2 years ago. I intend to use it throughout my career.

Most successful PowerPoint books talk about PowerPoint as visual support for a speaker in a large audience presentation. Advanced Presentations by Design is one of the first that smartly addresses PowerPoint for the boardroom.

First, the book talks about slide design, not with rule-of-thumb advice, but from a research-based perspective.

Second, the book is not just a collection of ideas, but a 10-step method starting from analyzing your audience through to choosing a layout that passes the squint test.

The SCoRE method, which involves moving through a presentation by introducing and resolving conflicts, also appears interesting. The method is clever, and based on insights found in Henry Boettinger's marvelous Moving Mountains. But I feel this approach is most appropriate for external audiences and for sales presentations. Still, it's one framework of many you might consider.

There are some areas I would have liked to have seen covered more. For instance, should I use color on my slide? How much? Which colors? How do I make my slides look more attractive? How do I make better looking charts? There are several practical questions any business person would have that are not addressed in the book.

Overall, Advanced Presentations by Design is part of a new wave of thinking about PowerPoint slide design based on research, not folk wisdom. Other books with a research-based approach include my own (Speaking PowerPoint: the new language of business), and Dr. Stephen Kosslyn's Clear and to the Point.

This book presents research evidence to back up its claims and also to debunk some of the common myths that abound when it comes to presentations created with PowerPoint, Keynote, etc.