221 of 230 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Helpful Points -, September 22, 2009
This review is from: The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience (Hardcover)
"As soon as you move one step up from the bottom, your effectiveness depends on your ability to reach others through the spoken and written word." Peter Drucker
"Steve Jobs is the most captivating communicator on the world stage," says the author in his opening sentence. The book is divided into three sections: 1)Create the story. 2)Deliver the experience. 3)Refine and rehearse. The material lacks direct input from Jobs, is overly fawning vs. Jobs, and is somewhat repetitive. Nonetheless, given the importance of the topic and the value of the material, the book is well worth reading. The following summarizes some of its suggestions for planning and preparing a presentation.
1)What is the one big idea you want to leave with your audience? It should be short, memorable, and in subject-verb-object sequence.
2)Identify why you're excited about this company/product/feature, etc.
3)Write out the three messages you want the audience to receive, and develop metaphors and analogies in support.
4)Include a demonstration if your product topic lends itself to such. (Eg. pull the product out of your pocket if it is 'pocket-sized.'
5)Invite partners and customers to participate.
6)Include video clips if helpful, but limit to three minutes or less.
7)Answer the "Why should I care?" that's in the audience's mind. Have a passion for creating a better future.
8)Having an enemy (eg. IBM, Microsoft) helps visualize 'the problem' you're solving.
9)Simplify your presentation (and products).
10)Make numbers meaningful - eg. "Stores 1,000 songs," not "5 GB memory."
11)Don't use 'bullet-point' style visuals; instead, use short phrases that accompany your talk, or pictures.
12)Practice, practice, practice - and ask for feedback.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
60 of 62 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A book a speechwriter can love, October 30, 2009
This review is from: The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience (Hardcover)
The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs is a book that a speechwriter can love. Gallo quotes from sources such as Nancy Duarte's
slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations and Garr Reynolds'
Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery. He even has a sidebar on JFK speechwriter Ted Sorensen's influence on Barack Obama titled, "What the World's Greatest Speechwriters Know."
The message of this book is that Jobs' extraordinary impact is based on his authenticity and his passion for his company's people and products. Most presenters can't claim to be the CEO of an archetypically cool Silicon Valley company.
Neither can they get away with wearing faded jeans, sneakers and a turtleneck onstage. But simply everyone with a product or service that improves people's lives has a story to tell. Gallo's book explains in detail how Jobs presents his story so that his passion shines through and ignites the audience. It's Gallo's claim that anyone can learn how to deliver an "insanely great" presentations.
The "secrets" that make Jobs so effective onstage include the usual stage tips taught by presentation coaches: Make eye contact with the audience, use vocal variety and know the power of a well-timed pause. But the majority of the book analyzes the structure, rather than the delivery techniques, of major keynotes Jobs has given at Macworld and elsewhere over the years. This makes the book of inestimable value for anyone who needs to understand the nuts and bolts of writing a speech.
Performance piece
When Steve Jobs takes to the stage he often tells dramatic stories, so it's appropriate that the book itself is structured as a three-act play. Act 1 tells how to create the story, Act 2 tells how to deliver it, and Act 3 stresses the importance of rehearsal. Gallo adds "Director's Notes" that summarize each chapter (or scene), and he introduces a cast of supporting characters.
Organizing the book in this way also reinforces the importance of telling a story in three parts; of delivering a speech with three messages. In fact, Gallo concedes, the chapter on the effectiveness of breaking a speech into three "could easily have become the longest in the book."
Speechwriters' playbook
The book is a playbook for writing a great speech. Jobs and his team start scripting a speech long before firing up PowerPoint or, in their case, Keynote software. They settle on an attention-grabbing headline ("The world's thinnest notebook"); then they decide on the three key messages; develop analogies and metaphors; and scope out demonstrations, video clips and cameo guest appearances.
Next they develop the "plot" of the speech, setting up an antagonist (Microsoft or IBM in the early days), dressing up numbers and including plenty of "amazingly zippy" words. Finally, they script a memorable "holy smokes" moment that people will talk about long after the event ends. The slides they eventually create are heavy on images and light on text and bullet points.
Live action video
A book alone will go only so far. If you've never actually seen Jobs present in person, then you haven't experienced the "reality-distortion field" his charisma and eloquence creates in the auditorium. Gallo has this covered.
The book's end notes provide URLs for some of the 47,000 [...] video clips showcasing Jobs and clearly demonstrating the techniques discussed. Viewing the videos compensates for the poor-quality monochrome photos of Jobs onstage-the one disappointment in the book.
Learning from his mistakes
To counteract any feelings of inadequacy you might have after watching Jobs deliver a flawless keynote, do a quick search on YouTube for "Apple Bloopers" and you'll see that, even for Steve Jobs, things don't always go well onstage. Demos fail, screens freeze, and he stumbles over words. But as with any masterful presenter, Jobs remains calm.
Even if the speeches you write or deliver are not destined for "insane" greatness, they'll be much, much, better for having read Carmine Gallo's insanely great book.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
79 of 84 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not The Best, February 8, 2010
This review is from: The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience (Hardcover)
If you haven't read Presentation Zen, slide:ology and/or Brain Rules, then maybe you will find some interesting bits in this book. I can't complain about the messages in this book - everyone needs to learn how to be a better presenter. But like many business books, the twelve rules here could have been done in a long article instead of a short book. Then at least the author could have embedded video. There's a lot of fluff or irrelevant content (pictures of Jobs, tables of talk transcripts) that do little but pad the book. I'm a big Apple fan, but large parts of this book reads more like a Jobs love-fest than a presentation how-to.
Steve has a luxury most don't: he controls everything about his presentations and has the resources to present in the manner he finds will best get his message across. The vast majority of us do not have those luxuries. While there are a lot of great rules in the book, unless you are presenting something that is highly visual and have the artistic resources to procure vivid imagery, a lot of the particulars of the keynote's will be irrelevant.
There are simply better books on this topic elsewhere.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
