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1、 There are three steps to making an IBM presentation: Plan It offers advice on organizing your message, sharpening your focus on what you want to say, and arranging it in a manner that audiences can follow. Prepare It is a resource for constructing graphic support materials in Freelance Graphics (Po
2、werPoint is also supported). You will find instructions on how to include elements such as text, charts and graphs in a style that will be consistent to all our audiences - an IBM look, in much the same way that our advertising and marketing materials have a distinct appearance. Present It offers ti
3、ps on how to deliver what youve prepared effectively to an audience. Presentations are not about showing a series of slides; they are about you, communicating a message, with visual elements in a supporting role. Where to begin Heres what you do first: Stop. Take some time. As Thomas Watson Sr. used
4、 to advise, famously: Think. You are about to mount an argument. What do you need? Dont succumb to the temptation of collecting every apparently relevant item into a jumble and then trying to reshuffle them into a coherent order. (Jim has a nice chart on this, and Lisa has some good market data, Ill
5、 get those.) Thats the flawed technique behind many of the more overblown, leaden presentations youve ever dozed through. Thats working backwards. Instead, start with nothing. and work forward. Ask yourself this: What is my point? Every presentation is an attempt to communicate something. It may be
6、a complex topic, with lots of supporting data, but fundamentally there will always be something simple you want to say. It might be IBM understands your business, or This technology is the best for our requirements or We need more time to do this job right. Figure out what youre trying to communicat
7、e, in its simplest, clearest, most concise form. Write it down, in one sentence. Does it make sense? Does it really cut to the heart of what you need to convey? If not, rewrite it. If you only could deliver this one sentence to your audience, with no charts or any supporting information, would this
8、be the one youd choose? Composing this basic sentence might take two minutes, or it might take an hour. It doesnt really matter which. Just get it right. Without a clear point of view, you are navigating without direction. Get it wrong, and youll struggle the rest of the way. Get it right, and the p
9、ieces will begin falling naturally into place behind it. Build your case In her book Secrets of Power Presentations, Micki Holliday suggests answering the following questions as a first start to organizing your presentation: What does the audience need to know? What does the audience want to know? W
10、hat are the possible benefits of a successful meeting for this audience? (Whats in it for me?) What questions might the audience have? OK, youre clear about the point you need to convey. But its safe to assume that your audience is not prepared to accept your message on faith. After all, if everyone
11、 in the room already knew what you wanted to tell them, and agreed with it, there would be no point whatever to your standing up and talking. The purpose of your talk is to move your audience to your point of view. So you will have to build your case. You need to organize your argument. Make a rough
12、 flow chart of the information you are going to present. Just sketch it out on paper - this isnt going to be a chart youll show, and youll probably have to revise it a few times anyway. The organizing principle behind this is a pyramid: each statement you make will have one, or more likely several,
13、supporting pieces of information under it. As you build your presentation in this outline form, a pyramid will form, with your basic statement at the top and everything else arrayed beneath it. Dont worry yet about the order in which youll actually present each item. Just get them all down on paper
14、to look at. The Pyramid Principle book listed in our recommended reading list is devoted to this method of organization, and its a useful resource. But the basic idea is really common sense, merely a way of laying out your information so you can arrange and, later on, present it logically. Lets take
15、 a look at a hypothetical presentation and how you might organize its various elements, using this technique. From the top down Lets assume your basic point is: IBMs solution is your best option, because its combination of products and services is integrated and flexible, and because we understand y
16、our business challenges. Now, put yourself in your audiences position. They want to know why they should believe this. They expect proof. You have, lets assume, four reasons. First, IBM products work together. Second, IBM offers the flexibility of open systems. Third, IBM services tie everything tog
17、ether. Fourth, IBM has experience in the customers industry. This is the heart and framework of your pitch. Lay it out graphically. You now see that youre going to open by stating your main point, and youre going to proceed through your presentation by offering facts and data in these four areas. Do
18、nt worry yet about which will come first. Take each of your supporting arguments and do the same again. Build another pyramid under each of the four. Under products work together you might have information about each of the elements in the solution: servers, middleware, storage. You might want to ta
19、lk about inter-divisional efforts in IBM to integrate technologies across our product lines. It would look something like this: For this example, we dont need to bother creating all the pyramids that build downward, but you will want to do this for your entire presentation. Organize all the informat
20、ion that you might want to include. You will then have a pyramid that encompasses everything you need to convey. Now, play with it. Look at the big picture. See whats most important. Take out things that, while you might think theyre important, just wont resonate with or be understood by your audien
21、ce. Move things around. Add or delete, but keep the organizing structure intact. Once you have a pyramid that seems to represent your theme and the various points you need to get across, youre ready to start creating the materials you will actually show people: bullet points, charts, graphs. Instead
22、 of organizing on-the-fly, youve organized first. Congratulations: you now have a clear picture - literally - of what information is relevant to your presentation, what points it supports, and where it should go. Unfortunately, many people dont bother to begin with this formal, structured approach.
23、Although you havent even created your first slide, the most critical (and often botched) work in creating your presentation is complete. If this all seems too plodding, too restrictive and structured, dont worry: it isnt. By the time you have a presentation ready to show, the underlying organization
24、 will fade from view, leaving behind merely a framework that helps your audience focus more easily on your message, and enhances your own mastery of the material, since you understand thoroughly how it all fits together. Now, lets take your graphical, pyramid outline and prepare a presentation. Fall
25、en Pyramids Some people find it helpful to use a pyramid on its side, with the topic in the left-most box, and building the pyramid out to the right, instead of below it. If you use this method, youll notice that the pyramid more closely resembles a classic outline structure. Unlike an outline, howe
26、ver, the relative equality of the boxes make it much easier to restructure and re-order your presentation and establish new relationships to item without altering the entire organization, as often occurs when creating an outline. Where to begin Visual elements such as graphs, charts, and text can en
27、hance your ability to communicate, helping your audience follow your message and quickly understand various types of information. Used thoughtfully, they can be valuable tools. Used indiscriminately, or constructed poorly, however, they can actually detract from your message. They can clutter your p
28、resentation and confuse your audience. This template will facilitate the preparation of your presentation and will help to continue establishing you as one of the best expressions of the IBM brand. It reflects IBMs corporate design style, which also influences our advertising and marketing materials
29、. It is straightforward, clean, and simple. Its flexible enough to accommodate a variety of uses. Some may use it with little or no graphic elements, while others might need to convey far more complicated data. Its simple to use. Although communications specialists and graphic designers have worked
30、to create this template, anyone in IBM should be able to use it without any special skills or software beyond what is already available. Dont automatically assume you need to use presentation software to make your presentation! Some of the most effective sales jobs are done just by speaking directly
31、, sincerely and informatively about the subject, without hiding behind charts. In Say It With Presentations, noted presentation designer Gene Zelazny gives three basic types of media you should consider if you need visuals to help convey your message: Lap visuals, so called because each member of th
32、e audience receives his or her own copy of the materials at the start of the meeting, if not before. Best for small groups, their use can open up discussion and help everyone participate as equal partners. The downside is that they may read ahead and start asking questions you would prefer to deal w
33、ith later in the discussion. And you can also miss opportunities for eye contact if everyone is looking down reading. Easels or white boards. Great for increasing interactivity among 15 or fewer people, since youre recording the audiences ideas as they come up. Downsides: Avoid spending all your tim
34、e with your back to the audience; perhaps deputize a member of the meeting to help write down points so you can concentrate on their comments and reactions to you and each other. On-screen presentations. While less personable than the other two methods, this is by far the most polished and suitable
35、for large audiences. Since this is also the medium with the greatest pitfalls, this is the type of presentation well be working on in this section. Title screen By using a standard title chart and following the style consistently, we will add a professional touch not only to our individual presentat
36、ions but collectively to all of IBMs face-to-face communications. The title slide is a straightforward element, and generally requires only that you include your name, IBM organization, and speaking topic in the places provided. However, the template allows for other elements that might be required,
37、 and its important to follow the guidelines if you will be using these. More text (if you must) The template also provides a format for longer blocks of text. You should use blocks of text very sparingly. Yes, once in a while there might be a longer passage that is relevant, and valuable. For instan
38、ce, you might have a quote from an analyst or customer that is particularly striking: If you are going to make your audience read something, make sure its worth their time and effort. More important, make sure its worth your time, since you dont have much available and youve just turned some of it i
39、nto a small reading assignment. Dont overdo it Before you begin, keep in mind some key points: Visuals are not your presentation. You are the presentation. Your audience has not gathered for the purpose of reading your Freelance (or PowerPoint) pages; they have come to hear you communicate. Use visu
40、als to support your message. Less is more. A graph that shows (for example) levels of customer spending on certain technologies can reveal at a glance trends in the market, but it remains your task to explain that datas relevance to your audience. A single, well-constructed graphic, supported by you
41、r thoughtful explanation, is more effective than a series of charts that the audience must decipher. Projected visuals have severe limits. They are constrained by the resolution of a computer screen, which is far lower than the printed page. They are limited further by being projected onto a screen
42、that people must read from a distance. For this reason, we want to keep visuals simple and bold. More complex graphics are better suited for inclusion in printed materials. Lets take a look at the main elements of the IBM Presentation Template that you might need to include. More possibilities and v
43、ariations are available in the presentation templates themselves. But understanding which you need, and when, is the first step. Bullet-point text Your audience is ready to listen and to look, but they dont want to read long passages of text on a screen. And you dont want them too, either reading ta
44、kes their attention away from what you are saying. The most effective way to use text is with short phrases that can be read at a glance. Presented this way, text can remind people of your key points, or help them follow the progress of your presentation. Heres an example of text poorly used: That i
45、snt a bad-looking page, and it isnt too difficult to read. But it can be improved. This would be even better: The first example tries to present your message. The second example merely provides cues to the messages you are discussing. It engages the audiences time only for a moment, and demands that
46、 they listen to what youre saying as you explain the points. Of course, even when you reduce your message to a bullet-point phrase, you can still defeat yourself by cramming too many onto a single page. Thats why you should limit any page of text to no more than five items (and even five is pushing
47、it). Youll see that the template reflects this limit. This limit of five is not a matter of how much text will fit onto a page while remaining both legible and visually pleasing, although these are important considerations. Rather, its a question of how much information someone can easily retain at
48、one time, especially while listening to you speak. But what if you have more than three or even five points to make about IBM servers? Perhaps you want to talk about the technologies that give our servers their price-performance edge, and cite some benchmark studies as evidence. You have more to say
49、 about management capabilities, too. It simply wont fit into five lines. No problem. If you examine your information, you are likely to find that it will arrange itself into groups of details that support more general points. (If youd prepared your information carefully, according to the pyramid str
50、ucture described in the Plan It module, this should already be clear.) The solution is to create another page which focuses in greater detail on one of your topics. In our current example, you might progress to this: Here again, you are giving your audience a limited, manageable amount of informatio
