Great Guide for Great Presentations

Tom Peters has a terrific post on giving great presentations. There's a link to a PowerPoint slideshow in his post with 59 points on how to consistently make great pitches. You absolutely need to know how to effectively communicate your ideas and goals, even if you never give a pitch to a group larger than your five member development team. The two most important points to me are #15: "No more than THREE key points! Come at them in several different ways." and #17: "Slides: NO CLUTTER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (no wee print/ charts/graphs)" If you can only remember two things on how to form your next presentation/pitch/briefing, remember these two. I've sat through too many briefings and presentations where the speaker hadn't thought out a clear story -- we were overloaded with far too many important points. Worse yet are the folks who think that more graphics == more clarity. Bullpuckey. The only thing you're doing is showing that you didn't take enough time to distill your point or issue down to the essence. Even worse, your audience may think you're trying to pull a smoke and mirrors act by splattering crap all over the screen. As Glenn Reynolds would say, read the whole thing.