Jim Endicott (pictured to the left) is a nationally-recognized
consultant, designer, speaker specializing in professional presentation
messaging, design and delivery. Jim has been a Jesse H. Neal award-winning
columnist for Presentations magazine with his contributions to
the magazine's Creative Techniques column. Jim has also contributed
presentation-related content in magazines like Business Week, Consulting
and Selling Power as well as a being a paid contributor for a number
of industry-related websites.
Geetesh:
Tell us more about yourself and Distinction Services.
Jim:
I've been involved with business presenters for 20 years. During
that time I managed a stable of computer artists and account
execs (in several companies) and saw the evolution from acetate
overheads, to 35mm film and finally electronic business communication
tools. I could never understand why companies would invest
hundreds of thousands of dollars in their websites and four-color
print only to finally get in front of an important audience
and pull out a lame presentation supported by marginal personal
skills. That motivated me to create a business that shifted
the focus away from the superficiality of simply "giving" a
presentation, to educating a marketplace on what it takes for
our audiences to actually
"get them." There's a world of difference between
those two philosophies.
Distinction came about when I was laid off from InFocus
in the Spring of 1998. Over the years, Distinction has
become three companies in one. We are a message consulting company
to help our clients better shape their important stories
specifically for the presentation medium. We are professional
presentation designers with a keen sense for how to
accelerate important business messages through creative
design and animation techniques. And finally, we train
managers, executives and sales teams so they can better
leverage their presentation tools while connecting at a
more personal and credible level with their audiences.
If someone truly wants to be a great business communicator
these days, they need all three areas working in tandem,
not just one or two.
Geetesh:
How important is it for presentation creators to be certified
in design.
Jim:
I'm not sure the rest of the world is convinced yet that this
medium requires a different set of design skills. The need
certainly resonates with those of us close to this medium but
we all face the same challenge. We are constantly fighting
a prevailing "good enough" mentality in the business
world towards presentations. The pool of professional presentation
design folks is growing but there's much education that needs
to be done with the business and education community to truly
understand the value we bring before "certification"
will mean as much to them as it does to us.
Geetesh:
From a slide creation program, PowerPoint has metamorphosed
into a multimedia tool. Tell us what you think about this transformation.
Jim:
There's no doubt that the ability to integrate, link, share,
multi-purpose and embed files has been dramatically improved
over the last few years but there may be a more pressing question.
If we can all agree that PowerPoint is primarily a communication
aid, why is it that its dramatic evolution has not necessarily
made business professionals better communicators? The answer
is that we can't separate the tool from the business process
it was intended to improve. Presenting will always be an intensely
relational business process that does not necessarily always
benefit from the integration of technology and software.
I had a carpenter do some work at my house while back. He
had all the latest and greatest tools. A new miter saw, a
shiny new hammer… but it didn't take long to see that
the quality of his work was horrible. I will take someone
with good messaging know how and solid design skills over
the latest software any day.
Geetesh:
If you had to mention one feature that PowerPoint lacks,
what would it be?
Jim:
I'd say the "common sense" wizard. (I may have to
wait for this one.) Despite the vastly expanded feature set
of PowerPoint, people can still create some pretty bad presentations
with messaging that makes no sense whatsoever. There's no way
to eliminate through software the really bad choices many presenters
make.
Geetesh:
Let's assume there's someone who is just starting with PowerPoint
- what would be the best options available to them in the form
of help, books and other resources. Also, what is it that they
should not do?
Jim:
I tend to believe that mentorship with great design folks can
help advance someone's skill set quicker than years in a classroom
or with a book. Because presentations are intended to actually
interface with real human beings, we need to be much more than
software and design folks these days. We need to understand
what kinds of visual content gets through to pre-occupied audiences.
How the brain processes visual information. Understand how
to stage and animate information so audiences actually "get" important
concepts more quickly because of the approaches we use. You
won't get that off a website on in most books. A month with
a company like Duarte Design would be worth more than a year
in a classroom.
Geetesh:
Lately, there's been a school of thought that considers
bullet points as not essential. Can such broad thoughts be
put across as guidelines?
Jim:
The pendulum will always swing on this question. On the
one side you have some people have abandoned PowerPoint all
together (bullets and all) in favor of simple human interaction
while others, without regard for their audiences, fill the
screen with a sea of bullets. The problem is this. Presenters
generally conceptually think through what they want to say
as logical, methodical left-brain activity. Outliners and
PowerPoint layouts create a natural extension to this pre-planning
process. Now the bad news. By staying in that bullet, sub-bullet
format, presenters all but guarantee that the recall of that
information will be near-zero. To be remembered, it needs
to transition to more right-brain, visually rich and interactive
information backed up with good relational instincts.
This may be the strongest justification for presentation
design professionals who know how to adapt information so
audiences truly can understand it. There are many ways to
communicate text information besides bullets. Look at a high
quality company annual report. You won't see many bullets.
Geetesh:
Could you share any trivia
about an unconventional use of PowerPoint, an unknown nuance
or something funny?
Jim:
I'm
always amazed at what people try to get PowerPoint to do because
it happens to be the one and only software tool they've "mastered".
(In most cases, it's a poor substitute for Director, Dreamweaver,
After Effects and other more appropriate tools). I had a marketing
VP call once and tell me about how one of his people had created
an elaborate set of PowerPoint presentations intended as an
interactive product brochure. That person had spent months
working on this thing. Then one day they left the business
and no one could figure it out. I soon found out why. They
sent me 10 extensively cross linked PowerPoint presentations
(350MBs worth!) with nearly ever slide embedded with 16-bit,
stereo voice-over audio. It was an absolute nightmare to unravel.
The lesson here is simple, use the right tool for the right
job. Badly designed PowerPoint converted to Flash only makes
it a really bad looking Flash file. Convert that same marginal
looking PowerPoint to HTML and now you have an ugly web page.
It seems to come back to the essential role of the presentation
design professional in doing it right in the first place.
The world is just now beginning to understand that we really
can make a difference.
