• The Presentations Japan Series

  • 著者: Dr. Greg Story
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The Presentations Japan Series

著者: Dr. Greg Story
  • サマリー

  • Persuasion power is one of the kingpins of business success. We recognise immediately those who have the facility and those who don't. We certainly trust, gravitate toward and follow those with persuasion power. Those who don't have it lack presence and fundamentally disappear from view and become invisible. We have to face the reality, persuasion power is critical for building our careers and businesses. The good thing is we can all master this ability. We can learn how to become persuasive and all we need is the right information, insight and access to the rich experiences of others. If you want to lead or sell then you must have this capability. This is a fact from which there is no escape and there are no excuses.
    Copyright 2022
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あらすじ・解説

Persuasion power is one of the kingpins of business success. We recognise immediately those who have the facility and those who don't. We certainly trust, gravitate toward and follow those with persuasion power. Those who don't have it lack presence and fundamentally disappear from view and become invisible. We have to face the reality, persuasion power is critical for building our careers and businesses. The good thing is we can all master this ability. We can learn how to become persuasive and all we need is the right information, insight and access to the rich experiences of others. If you want to lead or sell then you must have this capability. This is a fact from which there is no escape and there are no excuses.
Copyright 2022
エピソード
  • How To Question Your Audience
    2025/04/14
    Presentations have become tediously monochrome. The speaker speaks, the audience sit there passively taking it all in. After the speaker’s peroration, they get to offer up a few questions for about 10 to 15 minutes or so and then that is the end of it. With the pivot to online presentations, the fabric of the presentation methodology hasn’t changed much. We sit there peering at the little boxes on screen, hearing a monotone voice droning on. We listen to enquiries from others submitted beforehand or we may actually get an open mic opportunity to ask our questions directly, although that has been rather rare. We may be directed to the chat to make our question known to the organisers. The formula is basically the same and has been the same since our antediluvian origins. Why can’t speakers vary their presentations to sometimes include more interaction? Why does it always have to be the same format? Obviously, we have to pick our moment to go off piste. The audience composition, the topic of the talk and the organiser’s latitude for doing something different, will be factors for consideration. One of the tricky aspects of asking questions of your audience is getting people to contribute and to do so in a way that they can be heard by everyone. The obvious answer is to have a team of your people armed with handheld mics, which they can ferry at warp speed to the individual asking the question. Here is a word to the wise. You should choose who you want to question, but also allow some free styling as well. Events where the guests are seated at round tables are great for this and long rows of schoolroom type seating are not. We are not switching the presentation to a continuous dialogue with the audience – that is a different type of presentation altogether. I am talking about livening up a standard presentation with more interaction with the audience. The reason you select the people is because it allows you to control the affair more closely. It is also more surgical. You know who is in the room and there may be some people who are very well informed, articulate and confident. That type of individual would be a prime target. We have five arrows in our question quiver. If we want a yes or no answer then the Closed Question is ideal. It might be regarding a fairly macro question, that would have relevancy for everyone in the audience. “Should Tokyo continue to pursue the holding of the Olympic Games this year?”, would be an example. In this case, we can ask the entire audience the question. We can ask for a show of hands as to whether they agree with the point or not? I have been to some events where two sided paddles have been distributed to each seat beforehand, with one side saying “Yes” and the other “No”. A simpler method is just ask those who agree to raise their hands, then after that, ask those who disagree to raise theirs. Everyone can clearly see the survey results immediately in real time. The Open Question cannot be answered by a “Yes” or a “No” and requires an actual answer. “What do you think about ….”, “How do you feel about …?”. This is why selecting your interlocutor is a good idea. If you select one of the punters at random, you may be putting someone on the spot. Next thing they are spluttering away lost and wholly embarrassed. They will hate you for it forever. If only you are selecting the people, then there is the suspicion you are using sakura or stooges in the audience, whom you have cunningly planted beforehand. So it is also wise to open the floor up as well to those brave and informed enough to offer their opinion. Don’t worry if no one goes for it, you have at least demonstrated your embrace of true democratic ideals of free speech. If the opportunity presents itself, we can ask a Follow-Up Question to take the discussion down a few more layers for deeper insight. Often people will give a high level answer and it is more interesting to get them to go further with their thinking, experience or detail. We have to be careful this doesn’t become a dialogue though between some person in the audience and the presenter. The danger is everyone else is sitting there bored out of their minds and feeling excluded. Probably one of those follow-up questions per talk is about the right distribution. From within these dialogues, we can take a person’s viewpoint and Floodlight it to the entire audience. We can ask those who have had a similar experience to raise their hands. Now we have switched from the micro discussion between two people to a macro level of involvement of the whole audience. This is a good way of overcoming the feeling of exclusion by those listening. We can also go the other way and Spotlight a question. Someone made a point and we can then call out someone else in the audience for their experiences. We have to be careful we don’t ignite a war of words...
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    12 分
  • Breaking The Rules By Choice, When Presenting
    2025/04/07
    Many people break the rules of presenting, usually unknowingly. They have Johari Window style blind spots, where others know they are making mistakes, but they themselves are oblivious and just don’t know. This is extremely dangerous, because when you don’t know, you keep hardening the arteries of your habit formation. It is diabolically difficult to break out of those habit patterns once formed because you become comfortable with sub-standard performance. On the other hand, breaking them for effect, is very powerful and can be a tremendous differentiator in a world of mainly tedious presentations. There is an old saying that “to break the rules, you need to know the rules”. Presenting is the same. Breaking them unwittingly or in ignorance is not the same thing as a conscious, well informed, professional choice. Let’s take some rules and break them on purpose. The “berserker stage fiend” is the presenter who wears a furrow in the stage as they pound across from left to right, over and over again throughout the presentation. This is normally derived through a combination of heightened nerves and low self-awareness. They are not tuned into how much all of this pointless striding backwards and forwards, is diminishing the power of their message. Moving with purpose is fine, but incognisant hyperactivity is not. We can however, for effect, suddenly explore dynamic activity on stage to drive home a point. For example, if we were to relate the story of the leadership teams’ panic over the nail biting 90% drop in revenues, thanks to lockdowns caused by Covid-19, we could suddenly start pacing furiously across the stage. We mimic and then exaggerate the emotions of that moment. We move on stage in this way with the intention to demonstrate the sheer scale of the dilemma and the psychological impact it was having on the leaders. We wouldn’t be doing this throughout the whole speech. That would engender an audience meltdown. For a minute or two, it is a dramatic re-enactment of the fear, frustration and sense of doom’s arrival, that everyone was feeling. Together we bring forth a dialogue of distress, fusing it with the frantic on stage pacing movements. The “galactic black hole” presenter sucks all of the energy out of the room. They completely break contact with their audience. This time the desired effect is one of total despair, all hope lost, no solutions available and facing massive unforgiving defeat. The speaker drops all eye contact, stares at the floor about a meter in front of them and drops their chin onto their throat, so that they are looking downward at an accentuated sharp angle. The shoulders hunch over and the body energy is reduced to a minus number. The voice is frail, catching, weak, whispering but still audible. You definitely need a microphone to pull this one off. With this “in character” rendition of the replay of the horrific experience, we exaggerate for effect. This is not something we should sustain for too long or do too often. It works best as a single, short duration, audience undermine effort. The “whoop and holler “presenter goes way over the top. Sometimes you will see comedians use this device. They employ the micro psycho rant, at top volume, to drive home the point. This energy rocket differentiates the point being made from all that has gone before. In this Age of Distraction and Era of Cynicism holding audience attention has become a zero sum game between the presenter and the punters’ hand held phones. Either we keep them with us or they slip into the magnetic field embrace of internet access. For these reasons in telling the story, we might want to imitate on stage, an explosion which took place back at the executive suite. Or it might be the re-enactment of a big client meltdown of epic proportions. We become overly dramatic for dramatic effect. Yelling at your audience isn’t normal behaviour. We have to set it up and then move into character to pull it off. It has to be a crescendo. It peaks then subsides back to normality. But for those few seconds, we are going all out to flag the key message we want to bring to everyone’s attention. Voice, gestures and body language are combiningg for the big combust. Pacing like a frantic madman, ignoring completely or totally yelling at our audience are radical ideas in presenting. These pivots break the rules, but when required, may help us to break through to our audience. It will depend on the context of the topic, the audience and the event, as to whether these big guns would be employed. At least we need to have them in our armoury should we want to call on them. Choosing them with purpose and doing them without intelligence are divergent universes. We know the rules perfectly, but we choose to break them, on our terms and at our pleasure. When fully congruent with the points we are making, they work for us in ...
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    12 分
  • The Incredible Leverage Of Speaking
    2025/03/31

    Bonseki is a Japanese art creating miniature landscapes, on a black tray using white sand, pebbles and small rocks. They are exquisite but temporary. The bonseki can’t be preserved and are an original, throw away art form. Speaking to audiences is like that, temporary. Once we down tools and go home, that is the end of it. Our reach can be transient like the bonseki art piece, that gets tossed away upon completed admiration, the lightest of touches that doesn’t linger long. Of course we hope that our sparkling witticisms, deeply pondered points and clear messages stay with the audience forever. We want to move them to action, making changes, altering lifetime habits and generally changing their world. In the case of a business audience, we are usually talking to a small group of individuals, so our scope of influence is rather minute. How can we extend the reach of our message?

    Video is an obvious technology that allows us to capture our speech live and ourselves in full flight. How often though, do you see speakers videoing their talks? It is not like people are constantly giving public speeches in business. Apart from myself, I don’t recall seeing anyone else doing it. You need to tell the audience this is for your own purposes and they will not be in the shot, otherwise you have to get everyone to give you their written permission to be filmed. You may get criticism about being a narcistic lunatic for wanting to capture yourself on video, but the only people who make that type of comment are idiots, so ignore them.

    With video, instead of a standard business audience of under fifty people, you can broadcast your message to thousands. The video is also an evergreen capture which allows you to keep using the content for many years. Video has the added benefit that you can cut it up and create snippets to take the content even further. You can have ten videos sprung from the original. This again extends the ways in which you can use the medium. People have different appetites for information, so some may want to feast on the whole speech, whereas others want the digest or just the part on a particular topic of most interest.

    Video has two tracks – the video and audio components and these can be separated out. Very easily you can produce the audio record of the talk. Everyone is a firm multi-tasker these days. I sometimes hear people pontificating that you cannot multi-task, blah, blah, blah. What nonsense. Walking, exercising, shopping and listening to audio content are typical multitasking activities. Busy people love audio because it saves them time and allows two things to be done at once. Now your audio content can be accessed by even more people.

    Did you know that back in August 2019 Google announced that in addition to text search they were employing AI to enable voice search too. This is taking a long while to roll out but audio books have recently overtaken e-book sales. The audio track can become a podcast episode and be on any of the major podcast platforms. Also we can produce a transcript of the talk. There are AI transcribing services that are very good today which substantially reduce the cost and time of this exercise. Now we have a text version, we can project the value of the content further. It may go out as an email, a social media post or be reworked into a magazine article, or it may become a blog on your website

    Repurposing of content is the name of the game. The video and or the snippets can be sent out to your email list, put up on social media and always sit there on YouTube. The same can be done with the audio track. Now what was a simple, ephemeral interlude in a room of fifty punters, has developed a life of its own and is being pushed out far and wide. The same message and messenger, but a vastly different impact and duration. If our object is to influence, then we need to make sure we are supporting the effort to give the speech with the tools available to maximise the results.

    This requires some planning and some expense. But as I mentioned, we are not leaping to our feet every month giving a public speech to a business audience. This is something we would be lucky to do two or three times a year. When you take that into account and consider how much we can leverage what we are doing, we get a lot more bang for our buck. We are going to give the talk anyway, so all the preparation is the same, yet the influence factor can be so much grander.

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    12 分

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