Alltop co-founder and former Macintosh evangelist, Guy Kawasaki, was profiled in The New York Times. While the interview focused on Kawasaki’s management philosphy, hiring practices and his experience in business, he did reveal a few gems that any speaker, presenter or communicator should take to heart.
Q. What should business schools teach more of, or less of?
A. They should teach students how to communicate in five-sentence e-mails and with 10-slide PowerPoint presentations. If they just taught every student that, American business would be much better off.
Q. Why?
A. Because no one wants to read “War and Peace” e-mails. Who has the time? Ditto with 60 PowerPoint slides for a one-hour meeting.
What you learn in school is the opposite of what happens in the real world. In school, you’re always worried about minimums. You have to reach 20 pages or you have to have so many slides or whatever. Then you get out in the real world and you think, “I have to have a minimum of 20 pages and 50 slides.”
If you would like to learn more about creating great presentations, the best way to learn is by seeing samples from real creative experts. In 2009 Kawasaki judged an online presentation competition sponsored by Slideshare.net. I wrote about it for BusinessWeek. You can read the article here. It also includes a link to the finalists.