I learned of the new Apple laptop yesterday - MacBook Air. Very cool! And shortly after the product announcement in MacWorld, I read a post on the Presentationzen site summarizing 6 pieces of presentation learning from Steve Jobs' keynote. A great post. Thinking about the presentations in the banking industry, I find all these learnings to be very relevant. This is particular the case for the one about numbers. Garr said 'It's not about number, it's about what the numbers mean.' It is very often to attend presentation sessions in the bank which showed slides full of number. Good presenters will make sense out of the numbers for the audience. For example, we often tell the new-joiners that the bank now has over 20 branches and 4,000 employees in China. This is not enough. We got to tell (better, let them 'feel') what such figures mean to them. One message could be that you can be proud of the organisation you just joined. It is strong in China, and it is stronger than a lot of our competitors. It all goes to the question of 'WIIFM' or 'So what?'
These 6 learning points have a lot of relevance to training as well, especially the last one. Garr said 'Save the best for last..... People remember most the first part and the last part of your presentation....' This point is especially important for training since normally a training is longer in duration than a presentation. The Recency (and the Primacy) effect is stronger in training. For the same reason, we always advocate not to end your class loosely e.g. just finishing the evaluation form and letting participants go on their own. We should end our training with high energy and key points well emphasized!
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