Do you hate your job and want to be fired tomorrow? One sure way to move to the front of the line for dismissal is to deliver a suicide-pill presentation. Use any one or more of the following methods to deliver your career ending presentation. Use these presentation tips today and say hello to unemployment tomorrow.
1. Don’t prepare. Forget about research, rehearsing and logistics planning. Preparation takes thought, effort and time. Why invest in those efforts if you think you can wing it. Think of all the leaders in any field who winged it. Yeah, I can’t think of any either.
2. Start your presentation by whining about how little time you had to prepare. Your presentation was scheduled for next week but today’s speaker got sick and you have to fill in – so please bear with me. Or whine about the cold coffee, the weather or room temperature. Mimic Homer Simpson – blame others for your presentation and performance shortcomings.
3. Read your presentation. That’s right. Stand up there and read your presentation word for word from a printed text. That’s boring for your audience and will demonstrate a complete lack of knowledge and conviction. You can always cry to your spouse that at least you got all the words right.
4. Write your entire speech in PowerPoint. Write your speech in PowerPoint because it is easy to do. It’s not effective – but it’s easy. Show how lazy and inconsiderate you are. Then read your presentation from the words on the PowerPoint slides. Yes – show people how stupid you believe them to be. They can’t read. That’s why you will read every slide to them. Even if you only read every second slide that demonstrates that you think that they are half stupid. Read every third slide to demonstrate that they are 1/3 stupid.
5. Be very casual in your appearance. Deliver your presentation while seated, leaning on your chair or sitting on the boardroom table. Why stand when you can sit or loaf? Dress down so you are the worst dressed in the room. Tattoos and piercings are really cool so flaunt them. Do your Al Bundy impression – thumbs in pants stance.
6. Play it safe. Give tons of statistics and data. Pretend you are an encyclopedia. In fact read information from books and technical reports. What could be wrong with that? Don’t give your opinion, recommendation or relevance of the information. Just dump information. Yep – that’s boring.
7. Spew techno babble, clichés and vague wording. Think outside of the box, embrace the paradigm shift and raise the bar. Empower staff. Jump the shark – you’re done like dinner.
8. Don’t look at your audience. Refuse to make eye contact. Treat them as the enemy. Instead look at your notes, the screen, the floor, the wall or the boardroom table. Look anywhere but into the eyes of your audience. Don’t let them see the whites of your eyes. They might recognize your fear.
9. Tell jokes. It works for the late night TV talk show hosts. So deliver your top ten list, a sexist joke, or racial insult. When talking to a group of lawyers be sure to pull out all your lawyer jokes. Show them your best Don Rickles or Red Fox imitation.
10. Run overtime. You were given 20 minutes to speak. Why not give them more by speaking for 48 minutes. Surely that’s what people want? Disrespect other peoples’ time – that’s a good career ending strategy.
11. Don’t conclude. Finish without telling people what you want them to do. Make them guess. After all they have all the time in the world to figure out what the heck you were trying to say. Why make it easy on them?
12. Insult and embarrass your audience – especially your boss’s boss. Perform your impressions of your coworkers. Make fun of their appearance, culture or vision. Demonstrate your sarcastic wit. Preface your comments with, “obviously” and “you probably never heard of this”.
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©George Torok is the Speech Coach for Executives. He helps business presenters deliver million dollar presentations. Read daily Presentation Tips at http://Twitter.com/PresentationsGo Visit http://www.SpeechCoachforExecutives.com for more free career saving tips. Arrange for presentation training and private speech coaching by calling 905-335-1997
Executive Speech Coach, Business presentation tips from George Torok, the Speech Coach for Executives.
1 comment:
George,
I cringe at reading your list, not because I disagree with any one of your suggested methods, but because I see more than a few presenters using so many of them in a single presentation.
I was going to comment "oh, that's my favorite (or least favorite) one," but it's too hard for me to pick one that I hate more than the others.
Thanks.
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