‘This is all crap”, yelled my boss. Just after I finished my presentation to him he was quite upset with me. I had put in a lot of effort in that presentation. And I was quite sure that it was a very decent, insightful and thorough presentation if not entirely ‘crap’.
Then he started explaining me his rational. He said you are not showing what the senior executives care about:
Where is the change you want to talk about?
Are you capturing the imagination of your audience through your slides?
Would they say ‘Aha, that’s the thing I was looking for?’
These were some of the key questions which just shook my mind. I realized I was missing them all the while. My presentations till now were aimless, just trying to cater to the task or the purpose at hand.
Since then (this happened during one of my internships), I had tried to always ask these questions on every slide I made, every deck I made. My story should always lead to answers to above questions. This is the so called secret to reach out to people’s hearts, to answer the things they care about and to make your some awesome presentations.