I am in and out of major American corporations as a consultant, a career which allows me to observe the good, the bad, and the ugly in presentation of self, and presentation of thinking.

I hate to get real tactical-practical on the presentation skills continuum, but somebody’s got to say something. People who jiggle their knees while talking are not doing themselves any favors.

I was sitting across a desk from a young guy and could see that his knee was going up and down like a hummingbird’s wing—so fast you could hardly see it. The rest of him—the part above the desk—was vibrating slightly.

When he got up to present, the amount of extraneous presentation movement detracted from his credibility as a presenter and limited my ability to listen to him. When I mentioned it to him, he said he couldn’t help it, that he’d always done it, that he was Venezuelan by birth, and that his parents had given him espresso from day one.

I said, “Let’s pretend you have no memory of your past. Just for a few minutes, all your memory chips are erased. Do it again, and stand still.”

He did much better. Then I said, “You are still water. You are calmness personified. You are so still you are like a Sphinx. Try it like that.”

Bingo. Even better. Then he sat down and started jiggling his knee again.

Oh well. Now he knows he can stop when he wants to. I have it on tape.

Sims Wyeth & Co. provides public speaking courses, executive speech coaching, presentation skills training, voice and speech training, speech writing, and courses that address stage fright, body language, presentation strategy, and effective use of PowerPoint, all of which contribute to greater executive presence and personal impact.

Occupy Wall Street has given voice to long-simmering resentments in our economy. But there is yet another dystopia that is giving rise to a rebellion, and strangely enough, it’s against elite software.

American business culture expects its white collared millions to use slides when they speak to groups. But many business presenters are beginning to lift their voices against the tyranny of PowerPoint. Crushed under the monopolistic power of the nearly ubiquitous Microsoft slide-maker, brave cubicle denizens have been heard to complain of their inability to utter a word on the public stages of corporate Amerika without filtering their thoughts through the sieve of slide designs and pre-fab layouts. As you might expect, the movement lacks central leadership, is disorganized, and lacks specific demands and messaging, but it is growing.

Let’s first look at what is good about PowerPoint. What does it bring to the meeting? Before a meeting it allows attendees to review presentation material, and after the meeting, those unable to attend can read the slides.

It rids us of the need to pay recording secretaries to jot in short hand the powerful points made by the speakers at the meetings, and then pay them again to circulate their apt summaries to attendees. It also stores information in a familiar format to refresh our memories, and thus allows us to reflect on the drift of the conversations in which we found ourselves engaged.

PowerPoint is also good because it provides a visual to focus the eyes of the listener while he or she is listening. People learn more when they simultaneously see images and hear spoken words (a fact proven by educational psychologists.) However, few business presenters use creative images on their PowerPoint slides, which may be one cause of their antipathy to the software: many corporate cultures have micro PowerPoint cultures based on the traditional bullet point model.

Senior executives want it done the way they did it in the past (a lethal number of bullet points), and thus newly minted MBAs cling to the same format, lest they be thought fringey by their superiors. We must also acknowledge that few business leaders are great writers, or skilled essayists, and I haven’t met too many MBAs capable of marshalling the language and sending it into battle. So bullet points, despite their lack of nuance and subtlety, seem to suffice for the guys and gals making the big decisions in the executive suites.

But the resentment, felt and expressed by a growing number of highly accomplished people, is real, even though it’s hard to measure the actual cost of using PowerPoint. So let’s do a little math. We know that American workers deliver an estimated 30 million PowerPoint presentations per day.

Let’s assume that the average length of a presentation is 30 minutes, the average audience size is four people, the average salary of those in attendance is $35K, and that one-quarter of the presentations are entirely useless, all of which are conservative estimates.

The cost to our economy is $250 million per day, and about $100 billion per year. And that’s just for those in the audience. What about all of us who struggle to create the presentations?

PowerPoint represents a staggering burden on our economy, and a troubling medium for speakers and audiences alike. It can give the illusion of competence, the illusion of simplicity, and the illusion of understanding.

It has also excused the great majority of our leaders from learning to use language as an incisive tool of leadership.

It is not all bad. PowerPoint can save us money, and store information. But as a tool, it is over-used and frequently abused by those who do too much public speaking and not enough private thinking.

Keep your ears open. The low grumble you hear in the halls may soon swell to a chorus, a cacophony, a crescendo of complaints. PowerPoint may soon be demonized as a tool of the devil, an instrument of dystopia, the destroyer of Western Civilization that wastes time, wastes money, makes us look and sound like idiots, and prevents us from flourishing in a state of high dudgeon when calling our listeners to action.

Sims Wyeth & Co. provides public speaking courses, executive speech coaching, presentation skills training, voice and speech training, speech writing, and courses that address stage fright, body language, presentation strategy, and effective use of PowerPoint, all of which contribute to greater executive presence and personal impact.

The Bush Doctrine on Speech Writing

In his entertaining memoir Speech*Less, speech writer Matt Latimer reveals something about the speeches developed for President G.W. Bush.  By the way, he was one of the speech writers.

‘I quickly discovered the answer to a question I’d been asked by people since I’d arrived at the White House:  why did the President’s speeches always seem to be so bad?  It turned out it was intentional.  On my very first day, Bill McGurn and Marc Thiessen both told me that the president was “okay” with a flat speech.  All he cared about was logic and organization, not eloquence.  As a student at Yale, the President had learned that all speeches should have an introduction, three points, a peroration, and a conclusion.  I didn’t even know what a peroration was.  The president wasn’t as insanely rigid about this approach, though, as Bill and the other writers thought he was. I’d read many of his finer speeches in his first term, and they rarely followed this pattern.  But pushing the President to like a speech that was written differently was too risky.  The writers all lived in fear that he’d blow up at them, which on occasion he’d been known to do.  So in the quest for rigid logic—point A to point B to point C to conclusion—language that satisfied the President in one speech would be cut and pasted into the next speech and then the next.’

Matt decides that, since he didn’t go to Yale but rather attended the University of Michigan, he was not obliged to follow the routine.

The Bush Doctrine of speech writing sounds suspiciously like the models I’ve seen being peddled to the business community.

Having a model is good, because it saves time and helps you think about structure.  But slavish devotion to models creates M&M: monotony and mediocrity.

Look for a way to use your model as a spring board to create an EXPERIENCE for your listeners.

Sims Wyeth is a speech coach in Montclair, NJ specializing in presentation skills and public speaking training in order to give accomplished people the knowledge and skill they need to become accomplished speakers. Learn more public speaking tips at www.SimsWyeth.com.