The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs

Being an Apple fan/evangelist for almost all my life I experienced numerous introductions of cool new Apple products. Since the return of Steve Jobs to Apple in 1997 he delivered most of these product launches in his famous keynote speech (Stevenote) at MacWorld or WWDC. Anyone who has ever watched one of these events will admit that Jobs’ presentation skills are outstanding. Somehow he is able to deliver a performance that will fascinate you from the first until the last minute.

Now move over to the world of SAP and probably 80% (or more) of the presentations we attend. I watched the Vienna SAP TechEd keynote a few weeks ago through the live video stream. The speed of the presentations was very low and the slides were boring and stuffed with text. After a while people in the audience started to write tweets like:

Keynote #sapteched09 about speed of change? In stead of ppt with figures I like to see real SAP stuff, come on.

OK, we get the business case. Can we move on how attendees can use SAP technology 2 implement the business solution?

Ouch. Not good.

Luckily for us (and the guys at SAP) Carmine Gallo, a BusinessWeek columnist, wrote a great book on how to give a presentation like Steve Jobs. The book is overloaded with concrete examples from keynotes from the past. For example how to keep your slides simple and visual and why you should never, ever, use bullet points in your slides (it is actually the least effective way to deliver information). If Jobs starts talking about the Apple 2009 results, the slide simply says “2009”.

Gallo also shows that Jobs uses tons of short Twitter-like headlines that are easy to remember. At the introduction of the iPod, Jobs could have said something like:

Today we are introducing a new, ultraportable MP3 player with 6.5-ounce design and a 5 GB hard drive, complete with Apple’s legendary ease of use.

Instead he said:

iPod. 1000 songs in your pocket.

Feel the difference?

I found this video of Gallo in which he outlines the key topics of the book while showing some examples from actual Steve Jobs keynotes. You can find more info at Gallo’s BusinessWeek blog, at The Cult of Mac or at Amazon.

HackingSAP.com - Dec 7, 2009 | Books, Featured
Tagged | Apple, Carmine Gallo, Keynote, PowerPoint, Presentation, Steve Jobs