According to Microsoft, there are over 30 million PowerPoint presentations given every day. Nearly all of them are PowerPointless.

I started my career at a Fortune 500 company that had over 40,000 employees. I then moved to Brazil to work for a company with 50 employees.

Regardless of the size of the company, geographic location of the employees, or the language that colleagues spoke, the overwhelming majority of the presentations I was forced to endure were terrible.

The reasons for this vary. If you’ve been in any kind of environment where colleagues have to present on a regular basis I’m sure you can relate. As a simple experiment - think about all of the workplace presentations you’ve sat through in your life. How many do you remember? How many were a complete waste of time?

Although some of this post will discuss how PowerPoint has made presentations suck for everyone (sorry friends at Microsoft), that won’t be the main focus.

Instead, it will be to help you and your colleagues give better presentations with little to no extra effort.

Below are 5 simple rules that have helped me become an award-winning Toastmasters speaker, national sales competition finalist, and put tens of thousands of dollars into my own pockets as well as those of my colleagues.

Me with hair! And one of those big checks everyone wants to hold. $10,000 largely due to speaking skills.

For thousands of years the most important speeches of all time have been given without the use of slides. Try to picture Abraham Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg address or MLK Jr. giving his “I have a dream” speech... with a slideshow. It’s absurd.

All business before 1987 was conducted without PowerPoint. No horrendous charts, crappy colors, uneven shapes and poorly aligned text boxes…it existed! And people still succeeded at conveying messages!

Ask senior colleagues what they did before PPT and they will tell you they actually had to PREPARE for presentations and condense their messages down, rather than create 150 slides for a deck that wouldn’t ever see the light of day again.

Preparation starts well before the presentation itself. Here are some quick tips:

1. Research your audience. Understand who will be in the room and how the room is physically set up. You don’t want to be caught off guard by someone you didn’t expect to show up, or in a room that was supposed to have a functioning projector but doesn’t. -

2. Begin with the end in mind. If your audience only walks away with ONE message, what would you want it to be? Tie everything you present into that. If it helps, think about a little airplane flying around the room with a banner attached to the tail - what would the banner say that you want everyone to remember?

3. Be thoughtful about your use of slides. People can read, so putting a bunch of text on a slide isn't helpful. Slides should add something to the presentation that an e-mail or hand-out cannot like video, audio, GIFS, etc.

Most people who give presentations think about themselves first. They think about things like:

What do I know about this topic?
What can I talk about?
What slides should I use?
What information can I put on a slide?

This is a self-centered approach that leads to lots of shitty presentations (and in many cases, terrible PowerPoint slides):

Why has PowerPoint become the default when someone gives a presentation? Because it's easy. It's simple. It's lazy. It takes little to no effort to copy/paste and create flowery charts and smear data on a slide. It makes YOUR life easier, NOT the lives of the audience.

If you are creating slides like the one above you don’t care about your audience. And you really don’t care about them comprehending the message you’re trying to convey.

Let’s reframe the self-centered questions to focus on delivering audience-first presentations:

- What do I know about this topic? -> Who is attending the presentation and what is important for them to know?
- What can I talk about? -> What does my audience want or expect me to talk about?
- What slides should I use? -> Will slides help my audience understand my message? (A majority of the time they do not).
- What information can I put on a slide? -> Does my audience even need more information? Will this really help them make a decision?

The moment you go from a self-centered approach to an audience-first approach is the moment your colleagues will stop dreading that Outlook invite and look forward to attending your meetings.

General Electric has a secretive leadership training camp in NY called Crotonville. GE pays training companies big bucks to work with aspiring executives on developing skills like executive presence, negotiations, finance, and many others.

One of the most influential sessions I attended was taught by Rob Brown, a world-renowned networking and public speaking expert. He taught us a very simple lesson: to be an effective business executive you must train yourself to speak clearly, simply, and concisely. It's not easy. It takes practice.

I'll never forget his mantra, which didn't make sense to many of us when he first said it:

'Why use a policeman in an automobile when a cop in a car will do?'

In other words, why use fancy and excessive words when a much simpler message will work?

Many of us immediately thought, 'No shit, Rob... GE paid you how much money to tell us not to use fluffy language when we speak?'

But the idea goes far beyond that. As you can tell from the 'policeman and automobile' line, you have options. Cop in a car is the simplest. A uniformed officer in blue from Montgomery county perched atop his leather seat inside a pearl white cruiser is another.

Forcing yourself to 'cut the crap' and get to the heart of an idea does many important things:

1. It forces you to think clearly about the presentation, project, or challenge you are working on and find helpful, simple solutions.

2. It reduces the risk of miscommunication among colleagues, ESPECIALLY for those who are working remote or are working in a non-native language.

3. It is actually more impressive, not less, to avoid using buzzwords and corporate jargon.

Using excessive vocabulary and lengthy sentences does nothing but waste people's valuable time in a meeting that's already running 5 minutes over.

Here's a challenge: Force yourself not to use the words or phrases 'perspective, at the end of the day, standpoint, synergy, capture, boil the ocean, bandwidth, etc...' for an entire day.

Encourage your teammates to stop you when you do and make you start over again. See how it goes. I bet it's much more difficult than you thought.

I was introduced to the concept of ‘talking headers’ during a business communications course in the first year of my M.B.A. Mikel Chertudi, our professor, hammered home the importance of creating a one-sentence takeaway at the top of each slide that summarizes the main message you are trying to convey.

Take a look at the example below:

Which would you prefer? The answer is obvious. The slide with the talking header, 3.2% of Japanese are Obese, is much cleaner and gets the point across INSTANTLY… with far less brain damage.

When people see this example I often hear, “But the table is important! I need to show the numbers/excel/graph/chart etc. because my executives want to see it!”

That’s fine, print it out (see Rule 1 - prep). Don’t put it on a slide. Send them a handout in advance of the meeting so they can focus on details before you present. You are then free to focus on the big picture and to help them make decisions when you’re in the room together.

The other response I hear is that the alternatives to PowerPoint are much better, i.e. Prezi, RocketSlide, Keynote… I get it. I've used them. They’re not better. They don’t help the presenter focus on the fundamentals - concise messaging, good storytelling, and an emotional connection with the audience.

Fancy presentation tools only put lipstick on the proverbial pig, not turn the pig into a princess.

Which brings me to our final presentation no-no: talking too much. Most presenters are uncomfortable with silence, but the best moments of the presentation often happen during the quietest moments.

Silence is when you allow the audience time and space to reflect without being burdened by having to listen to you. Silence is when people draw conclusions. Silence is when people are able to think, breathe, ask questions, and really digest what you’re saying.

The fact is this: people can't pay attention to two things at once. They really can't.

They can’t be listening to you, staring at your graph that's too small to read, whispering to a coworker about when the god-awful presentation will be over, and checking their phone all at the same time.

Don't be scared of pauses. Don't be scared to wait for people to pay attention to you. And don’t be scared to use silence instead of ‘filler words’ (um, uh, like, so).

The best way to break yourself of these habits and to embrace silence is to use a technique we learned in Toastmasters - the ‘um/ah’ counter. Have one of your colleagues keep a running total every time you use a filler word.

By your fourth of fifth presentation you will be much more cognizant of how often you are talking just to talk. I remember one member of our group who used an average of 200+ filler words over the course of ten minute presentations. After the first five presentations he gave and had tracked, he was down into the mid-single digits.

So there we have it, the 5 rules that will make your life so much easier when it comes to presenting.

To recap:
1. Give yourself a prep talk
2. Ask not what your audience can do for you, but what you can do for your audience
3. Forget the flowers
4. Talking headers > talking heads
5. Silence is golden

Michael Brennan said it best - “Someone once told me that most PowerPoint presentations have neither power nor a point. I cannot recollect, in 30 years of work, a single PowerPoint presentation I saw or gave that altered the course of anything.”

Don’t be one of the 30 million presentations each day that nobody remembers.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also want to read about the Ten Commandments of Zoom - how to look & sound better on video calls.