Seminars

Through the years working as a consultant I was some good presentations and a whole lot of bad ones. The problems are typical. People either don’t know how or are scared to:

• Tell interesting stories
• Make clear and concise slides
• Talk to people watching them in the eye.

Over the last several years I’ve been conducting seminars and master-classes addressing precisely those problems. Among my clients are MTS (one of the world’s largest telecom companies), Yandex (Russia’s leading search engine), Intel (needs no introduction) and Skolkovo, Russia’s premier business school. Contact me if you want to arrange a seminar with me.

Structure

Most of the presentation training workshops I ever been to focus of the “hows” of public speaking. People seem to live under impression that how you speak is more important that what you say. They try to polish your voice, posture, gestures — but not the content. The goal of this training is to make you an actor, somebody who could deliver any — even most controversial — text fairly confidently.  The problem is that actors’ training requires literally years of painstaking work. Most people are not actors. They are professionals in very different domains. When they start acting it looks insincere.

The alternative is to focus on creating a good story, which would serve as a foundation of your delivery skills. This way you have a much easier task of crafting a story for the person, not the person for a story. You need to be a scriptwriter rather than an actor for that. The good news is that most people could learn to do it. Teaching storytelling, the art of structure goes through 3 key stages:

• Setting goals
• Creating a controlling conflict
• Working on a plot, the sequence of events

Slides

Corporate traditions force us to create sleudoments — PowerPoint documents with lots of unnecessary information which we insert “just in case”. It is very difficult to present with those kind of slides. The audience is always confused: does he wants us to read or to listen? But even reading those slides isn’t a very pleasant experience: they are badly designed both from conceptual and aesthetic standpoints. After all, whoever did them was not a designer, right?

I teach people how to do slides that are pleasant to look and which aid the delivery and not “kill” it. The key is simplicity, deleting the supplementary information, moving it to the hidden part or handouts. I insist on always asking the question “What’s the goal of this slide?” and to remove anything that doesn’t lead us towards the goal. Other topics I touch in my workshops are:

• Explanatory diagrams
• Data visualisation
•  Design basics
• Typography
• Use of photos

Rehearsals