I read a book called Presenting to Win by Jerry Weissman. Let me share with you my thoughts as I read along during this trip.
The first insight is the ironic contradiction rightly pointed out by Jerry. Being a good executive is very different from being a good presenter because they ask for different quality. For example, a good executive should be able to recycle resources (in order to be resource-efficient) and multitask. But these 2 practices will just worsen your presentation. When you are asked to do a presentation, you retrieve an old powerpoint file to modify instead of think of a customized story first. That is ‘recycle’. And instead of having one message at a time, you overload your audience with too much information. That is ‘multitask’.
I have not thought of such contradiction before, but it is so true. This helps explain why good executives are not necessarily good presenters. Interestingly, it does along the book which I discussed before – ‘Why Business People Speak Like Idiots: A Bullfighter’s Guide’.
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