How to Make Your Point Without PowerPoint


Book Description

The art of presenting needs a serious shake-up. Presenters are constantly on the lookout for fresh ideas to get their message across, but mistakenly believe PowerPoint is the right medium to do so. This often results in uninspiring presentations consisting of countless lackluster slides which their audience are forced to sit through – sometimes at the expense of their own sanity. In How to Make Your Point Without PowerPoint, renowned public speaker Douglas Kruger aims to end the tedium of the PowerPoint medium. He offers 50 practical suggestions to enhance your presentation skills – including the kinds of formats you can use, different methods of delivery and some alternative visuals – so you and your team can trade in the slides and get brainstorming. This book proves that it is possible to do an excellent job, even a superior one, without slides, by learning to truly engage and persuade. In this way, you will stand out every time and, as the presenter, have an entertaining time of it!




Presentation Zen


Book Description

FOREWORD BY GUY KAWASAKI Presentation designer and internationally acclaimed communications expert Garr Reynolds, creator of the most popular Web site on presentation design and delivery on the Net — presentationzen.com — shares his experience in a provocative mix of illumination, inspiration, education, and guidance that will change the way you think about making presentations with PowerPoint or Keynote. Presentation Zen challenges the conventional wisdom of making "slide presentations" in today’s world and encourages you to think differently and more creatively about the preparation, design, and delivery of your presentations. Garr shares lessons and perspectives that draw upon practical advice from the fields of communication and business. Combining solid principles of design with the tenets of Zen simplicity, this book will help you along the path to simpler, more effective presentations.




Confessions of a Public Speaker


Book Description

In this hilarious and highly practical book, author and professional speaker Scott Berkun reveals the techniques behind what great communicators do, and shows how anyone can learn to use them well. For managers and teachers -- and anyone else who talks and expects someone to listen -- Confessions of a Public Speaker provides an insider's perspective on how to effectively present ideas to anyone. It's a unique, entertaining, and instructional romp through the embarrassments and triumphs Scott has experienced over 15 years of speaking to crowds of all sizes. With lively lessons and surprising confessions, you'll get new insights into the art of persuasion -- as well as teaching, learning, and performance -- directly from a master of the trade. Highlights include: Berkun's hard-won and simple philosophy, culled from years of lectures, teaching courses, and hours of appearances on NPR, MSNBC, and CNBC Practical advice, including how to work a tough room, the science of not boring people, how to survive the attack of the butterflies, and what to do when things go wrong The inside scoop on who earns $30,000 for a one-hour lecture and why The worst -- and funniest -- disaster stories you've ever heard (plus countermoves you can use) Filled with humorous and illuminating stories of thrilling performances and real-life disasters, Confessions of a Public Speaker is inspirational, devastatingly honest, and a blast to read.




Rule the Room


Book Description

Rule the Room is the product of Jason Teteak’s twenty-year experience as a trainer and coach. His thoroughly tested advice covers every presenter’s concerns, from hooking the audience immediately to entertaining them, and from overcoming your fears to handling questions. He covers every base—content creation, delivery, audience management— with an overview plus step-by-step instructions, review exercises, and scores of specific and practical tips. Whether you want to persuade, motivate, teach, or inspire, Rule the Room can be your guide.




How PowerPoint Makes You Stupid


Book Description

With over 500 million users worldwide, Microsoft's PowerPoint software has become the ubiquitous tool for nearly all forms of public presentation—in schools, government agencies, the military, and, of course, offices everywhere. In this revealing and powerfully argued book, author Franck Frommer shows us that PowerPoint's celebrated ease and efficiency actually mask a profoundly disturbing but little-understood transformation in human communication. Using fascinating examples (including the most famous PowerPoint presentation of all: Colin Powell's indictment of Iraq before the United Nations), Frommer systematically deconstructs the slides, bulleted lists, and flashy graphics we all now take for granted. He shows how PowerPoint has promoted a new, slippery “grammar,” where faulty causality, sloppy logic, decontextualized data, and seductive showmanship have replaced the traditional tools of persuasion and argument. How PowerPoint Makes You Stupid includes a fascinating mini-history of PowerPoint's emergence, as well as a sobering and surprising account of its reach into the most unsuspecting nooks of work, life, and education. For anyone concerned with the corruption of language, the dumbing-down of society, or the unchecked expansion of “efficiency” in our culture, here is a book that will become a rallying cry for turning the tide.




Is Your Thinking Keeping You Poor?


Book Description

‘Thinking like a poor person will keep you poor. Thinking like a wealthy person will make you wealthy. I would like to show you exactly what the differences between the two ways of thinking are and how you can use them in your favour.’ – Douglas Kruger - Douglas Kruger Being rich is not normal: most people never achieve wealth in their lifetime. The very word ‘rich’ describes a state beyond the median, and therein lies an important lesson. To become rich, you will have to think radically differently from the way most people around you think. Do you know what those specific differences may be? Business and wealth guru Douglas Kruger strips away the feel-good hype and gets right down to the practical principles. He leads you through the types of thinking that hold individuals, families and businesses in generational cycles of poverty. He explores the dramatically different approaches of the self-made rich and super-rich, showing you which behaviours to begin practising and which behaviours are traitorous to your wealth potential. Escape poverty. Raise your value. Change the trajectory of your story. It all begins with the way you think.




They’re Your Rules ... Break Them!


Book Description

‘Rules are not sacrosanct. They are human constructions, imposed upon the world. When these constructions are not useful to us, we can and should transcend them, because results matter more.’ – Douglas Kruger They’re Your Rules, Break Them! offers 50 innovative ways of looking at your business as a long-term, dynamic, progressive entity. Here you will find 50 ways to ditch the atrophying forces and create an exponentially achieving, high-performance culture in your organisation. Disruption is everywhere. Rather than suffering its blows, what if you could institutionalise it into your business? What if, rather than being rigid and rule-bound, you could make your business ‘ever changing’ within? Some rules help us, but some don’t. Do you know which ones to ditch? And do you know how to create a high-performing, dynamic, learning culture that doesn’t rely on blind bureaucracy? Elon Musk did it with Tesla and Space-X. Pixar does it too. The Israel Defense Forces and US Navy SEALs have been doing it for decades, and their results have been astonishing. In a world of exponential organisations, rule-bound dinosaurs will fall and fade. But you don’t have to. They’re your rules. Break them!




Relentlessly Relevant


Book Description

Brace yourself ... the rules of consumer engagement have changed. Your customers no longer care about legacy – what matters to them is how you are innovating into their world today. The classic ‘solve a problem’ approach that industry giants have always employed is no longer relevant. Consumers want switched-on, creative responses to their needs and desires. In Relentlessly Relevant, business guru Douglas Kruger explores the field of innovation, reducing its subject matter to the simple starting points you need to become an industry trendsetter. It pinpoints the levers within your own business crying out for innovation, as well as the areas you should leave alone at all costs, and it teaches you to change your traditional way of thinking, altering how you relate to your customers’ immediate reality. Using examples from local and international brands, this book shows you don’t have to be a tech giant to innovate, but you do need to know how to think in the right patterns. This is a business imperative. Innovators of today will own their industries tomorrow by constantly asking, ‘How can we become relentlessly relevant?’




PowerPoint Surgery: How to create presentation slides that make your message stick


Book Description

Sometimes when things get really bad, surgery is required. Bad Powerpoint* (and boring presentations) are everywhere! it appears that they have almost become the norm and very few people seem to want to talk about it. It doesn’t have to be that way. Bad presentations are costly. They can cost money, jobs and reputations, don’t let your slides ruin your pitch. In this funny, cut-to-the-chase and down-to-earth book professional speaker Lee Jackson will wean you, and your workplace off bad slides forever. He’ll also teach you how good presentation slides can work for you and help you stand out from the crowd. Using these simple techniques we can kill death by bullet-point once and for all. JOIN THE FIGHT TODAY! (N.B. This book is a colour paperback and illustrated with full colour slides.) “ Lee takes a clever and refreshing approach to presentation mastery. ” Nancy Duarte – author of ‘Slide:ology’, ‘Resonate’ and principal of Duarte (creators of the slides/visuals for Academy Award-winning film, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’) “ Powerpoint Surgery is an invaluable resource...and I highly recommend it... ” Jeremy Waite – Head of Social Strategy, Adobe EMEA “ Lee Jackson takes PowerPoint presentations from boring to brilliant. ” Alan Stevens FPSA – Past President Global Speakers Federation and co-author of ‘The Exceptional Speaker “ ...a masterclass of creating sublime slides & presentations, but be warned, you may never be able to sit through a presentation again without thinking of Lee Jackson! ” Geoff Ramm – President 2013 Professional Speaking Association UK and Ireland “Jackson has got a bl***y nerve asking me to write a testimonial for his book. You see, I am a proudly militant Anti-PowerPoint Bigot, but somehow, he has turned the Indefensible into the Indispensable! ” Graham Davies – best selling author of ‘The Presentation Coach’




My Buddy Knows...Letters


Book Description

Say GOODBYE to boring old “A is for Apple” books and say HELLO to the exciting, playful world of “My Buddy Knows Letters” by Keith Wheeler. In book 1, My Buddy Knows Letters, children are introduced to our buddy, Josh. This blue-haired, sharp-dressed character will introduce the reader to an item with the catchphrase, “My Buddy Knows”, then a picture of the item, followed by “starts with…”. The reader then decides what letter that item starts with. Once they think they know the answer, they can flip the page and see if they’re right. My Buddy Knows the answers…Do you?