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Public Speaking & Presentations

September 22, 2009

Your Next Presentation Should Borrow from Broadway

On a recent trip to New York City, I was walking down Broadway just as thousands of people were pouring out of the theaters. They were smiling, laughing, and talking ...

September 8, 2009

Borrow from Home Depot's 'Free' Expertise Strategy

Several years ago I trained Home Depot (HD) employees who were designated television spokespeople in their local cities. The company knew that the key to garnering ...

August 25, 2009

How to Give a Lousy Presentation

Giving truly great presentations requires skill, work, and practice. Giving catastrophic presentations is far easier. So if you want to take the easy way out and look ...

August 11, 2009

Get Personal with Your Audience

Layoffs, scandals, and scams are taking their toll on employees' trust and customers' trust of businesses large and small. But with every presentation, business ...

August 4, 2009

What Matters Most in Any Presentation

Last month the New York Times ran a front-page story on the health-care debate. The first two sentences read: "What's in it for me? On the subject of health-care ...

July 14, 2009

Unleash Your Inner Larry King

CNN's Larry King is the consummate interviewer because he listens more than he talks, asks smart questions, and comes across as genuinely interested in people. ...

July 7, 2009

Don't Let Poor Delivery Sabotage Your Pitch

Since 2004, angel investor and Chapman University entrepreneurship professor Richard Sudek has been conducting a series of classroom experiments on the effectiveness ...

June 30, 2009

'Let Me Tell You a Story'

During a business trip in Reno, Mario Moretti Polegato took a walk in the Nevada desert. His feet began to hurt in his rubber-soled shoes, so he took out a pocket ...

June 23, 2009

The $200,000 Presentation

Over the last few weeks I've been working with a division of a Fortune 500 company on a $200,000 presentation. That's not a typo. Part of the reason the presentation ...

June 16, 2009

Sell More by Saying Less

When selling, the fastest way to turn off a potential customer is to talk for too long. I once asked New York real estate queen Barbara Corcoran, founder of the ...

June 9, 2009

Enhance Your Brand with Video

In March, Zurich Financial Services (ZURN) CEO James Schiro embarked on a worldwide trip to reassure employees that the company was healthy, despite all the bad news ...

May 19, 2009

How to Sell More Than a Product

The coffee wars are brewing. Boiling over, actually. If you've read a newspaper or watched TV in the last few months, you know that Starbucks (SBUX) and McDonald's ...

May 12, 2009

Delivering Happiness the Zappos Way

"Happiness in a box." That's how one customer described the feeling of receiving her shoe order from online retailer Zappos.com. Much has been written about how Zappos...

May 4, 2009

E-mail Newsletters That Customers Actually Read

I recently received an e-mail that had me riveted from start to finish. It contained a true story about two men aboard US Airways flight 1549—the one that crash-landed...

April 28, 2009

The Two-Hour-Plus Presentation

In the age of YouTube (GOOG), texting, and tweeting, your audience's attention span is shrinking. It's becoming harder to keep your listeners engaged for more than 90 ...

April 14, 2009

Put a Human Face on Your Presentations

Attaching a patient's photo to his or her file makes radiologists feel "more connected" to the patient. The radiologists, in turn, provide "longer, more meticulous ...

April 7, 2009

Making Your Presentations More Relevant

American Idol's newest judge, Kara DioGuardi, tells contestants on the popular TV show to "be relevant." She says audiences respond more favorably to artists who are ...

March 24, 2009

Presentation Lessons You Didn't Learn in B-School

I recently gave a seminar on presentation skills to a group of Fortune 500 marketing professionals, many of whom hold MBAs from top business schools. After the seminar...

March 3, 2009

Restoring Confidence, One Presentation at a Time

Most business presentations end with a call to action. This column begins with one: Stop delivering a message of defeat and desperation. It won't win you investors, ...

February 17, 2009

Bill Gates: The Great Communicator?

Microsoft MSFT co-founder Bill Gates, who is considered a brilliant technologist and a leading philanthropist, has not been known for his public speaking skills. His ...

January 20, 2009

How to Handle Tough Questions

Last week, I spoke to a group of auto executives who were looking for advice on how to answer tough questions about new cars they would soon be introducing in ...

January 13, 2009

Presentation Tips from Macworld and CES

Last week, some of the world's most prominent business leaders gave presentations at two major annual tech conferences, Macworld and the Consumer Electronics Show. As ...

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