Leading Meetings

As the start of school approaches at my university, there are often a number of meetings that faculty must attend.  There is definitely excitement as you see colleagues who you may not have seen all summer and as you meet any new faculty that were hired to begin this new year.  However, there is more [...]

Public Speaking

As I sat through an executive’s disastrous presentation last week, I was reminded of the importance of public speaking.  This top-level executive probably didn’t lose any accounts because of today’s presentation, but his credibility suffered.  I found myself thinking, “why would someone put him in charge of something?”  If you are less than confident in [...]

Delivering Presentations

I know in the last post, I ranted about skills-based education, but I wanted to address a particular skill that I think is important but hard-to-come-by.  I see students and professionals alike delivering poor presentations.  The ubiquitous PowerPoint slides are fine and the content may even be adequate, but the speaker stands at the front [...]

Tips for Teaching PowerPoint skills

I came across a web site with interesting ideas for using templates to teach students how to use PowerPoint. I am glad  more and more sites are appearing that emphasize that, despite how user-friendly PowerPoint is, you can’t stick someone in a room with a computer and Microsoft and expect them to figure out how [...]

The Need for Good Business Presentations

I looked at some of the stats for this blog the other day, and by far, the most popular post discusses PowerPoint presentations. And, by far, the second most popular post also talks about business presentations. I’ve blogged nearly 100 posts in the last 7 months or so since I started this blog, and so [...]

Be Careful with PowerPoint

PowerPoint has become the coin of the realm in many businesses and in most universities. I rarely have assignments in which I require a PowerPoint presentation, but I have found that most students prefer to deliver presentations using PowerPoint. From what I hear, the same is true in business—most people prefer to deliver presentations using [...]

Bad PowerPoint Presentations

Students in my classes are frequently making presentations during this time in the semester.  Unfortunately, many of these incredibly smart students do presentations poorly.  At some point in their lives, these students had a teacher who was guilty of what I call “PowerPoint” abuse.  You may have experienced this as well.  I had a professor [...]

How to Make a Good PowerPoint Presentation

Ever suffered through a PowerPoint presentation that almost made you question the will to live?  Many people think they have to use PowerPoint in order to be taken seriously (a myth), and too often, these people make simple bullet points out of what they have to say and then spend far too much time finding [...]