I am on a holiday. I am in my home town right now. When I was packing my bags, my father called me to suggest we get some winter clothing (jackets, sweater, etc). He said it was cold here. He said, "It's 12 degree here." Hyderabad (where I work) was pretty warm then. When I landed here, reality struck. I was freezing. Coming from Hyderabad where winter was looking more like summer, this was a shock. Then my father smiled and said, "I told you it was 12 degrees here." It is getting cooler by the day. Today's newspaper reads, "Yesterday was the coldest day in the last 28 years. It was 10 degrees yesterday." When I was in Hyderabad I could not make much sense of what 12 degrees meant. I could not visualise. Was 12 degree too cold or just nice cold? Well, the problem is, numbers are dry and do not make much of a sense on their own . It is like saying the GDP of India is $1.85 Trillion or the per capita income of India is $1219 . What do I do ...

TED talks have become extremely popular. I must have already written a dozen posts about TED. Some of the best presenters and best minds are on display at TED. It has thousands of videos and one can never see all of it. That leads us to ask, "Which are the most popular TED talks ever?" Here is a list which was published on TED Blog in August 2012. The most watched TED talks ever are... Sir Ken Robinson (Schools kill creativity)* * Jill Bolte Taylor (Stroke of insight) Pranav Mistry (potential of sixth sense) David Gallo (underwater astonishments) Pattie Maes & Pranav Mistry (sixth sense demo) Tony Robbins (Why we do what we do) Simon Sinek (How great leaders inspire action)* * Brene Brown (Power of vulnerability) Steve Jobs (How to live before you die)* * Daniel Pink (Surprising science of motivation)* * The ones with the ** are my recommendations. If you cannot watch them all, watch these four atleast. I have added hyper links to these ...

Templates are used by most presenters. Most of us use the default templates available in MS PowerPoint. There are 40 templates in MS PowerPoint 2010. If you are slightly more interested, you might have used free templates from www.office.com . If you are in love with templates then you must have downloaded it from various websites (and wasted a lot of time as well). Every template has a default font. When you insert a text box on a slide, you are forced to use the default font. I find this very annoying because the template might be cool and awesome but the default font might not be so great. How do you change the default font of a template?

The names of two lucky winners are Bryan Alvare and Jeremey Donovan (both from the USA). Congratulations guys! Everyone else, who did not win but took the survey, thanks a ton people. The feedback has been valuable. By the way, this is the 400th post on my blog. Hurray!

When we talk of presentations, we almost always visualise one person presenting. Have you ever seen two people presenting together? Have you ever presented as a team of two? Not  one after another, like students present their project, but together. I saw, I think for the first time, two people present together a few weeks back at Nielsen Consumer 360 conference. It was pretty nice and gave me a lot to think about. What it means to present as a team of two? Let me clarify what it means to present together. Assume I am with you on stage. I am presenting Part 1 of the presentation and you stand with me. You keep asking questions, agreeing and disagreeing to what I say. Then you present Part 2 and I ask questions and seek clarification. That's what I call presenting as a team. Benefits of presenting as a team Come to think of it, there are many benefits of presenting as a team. One, higher audience attention. One presenter talking for too long can be boring. Two presenter swap...

Today let me share with you some good posts from December 2009, 2010 and 2011. How to cut short your presentation at the last minute? You were alloted 30 minutes. Because the conference started late, your time has now been cut short to 15 minutes. What will you do? Panic. What else? In December 2009 I wrote a post about this and gave three suggestions. One, do not panic . No one succeeded in life by panicking. Two, do not apologise to the audience and sound defensive . Do not say I had prepared for 30 minutes and now I cannot complete everything. The audience will only feel bad and pathetic about it. You might want to give it a passing mention but say that you will share the crux in 15 minutes and the audience can always connect with you after the presentation. Who is stopping you or them to continue the conversation? Third, skip some slides and focus on what is the crux. Do not increase your speed to cover more content. That is stupid. You might also want to cut the basic warm u...

You have a chance to win a book by participating in a small reader survey. There are only 6 questions and it takes 60 seconds to answer. Click here to fill out the form . The questions are very simple. Q1. Which software do you use to make presentations? Q2. You have been reading the blog since... Q3. What do you like about the blog? Q4. What do you feel can be better? Q5. What topics should I write more about? Q6. Your name and other details (will be kept confidential) I will randomly choose two winners from all the entries.  Go ahead, fill out the survey by clicking here and get a chance to win a book on presentations. This prize is for readers staying anywhere in the world. Survey closes on December 9.

Last week I attended the Nielsen Consumer 360 conference in Mumbai. I was there as a marketer looking to learn something new. It was a fantastic conference in two ways; as a marketer I did learn new stuff and as a presenter I saw some great presentations. It was a day long conference with a series of presentations on diverse topics. I kept noting down the good and the bad stuff presenters did at the event. I wanted to share it all with you. I will be sharing these over the next week. Here is one such instance. Mr. Ram Charan , the most influential consultant alive , gave an hour long talk. He is the consultant for some of the biggest names in the US and so you will expect him to throw a lot of jargon at young marketers like me. What happened was totally the reverse. Whenever he introduced a term like FDI or FII, he asked 'Does everyone in the room understand FDI / FII? To me this was awesome. One, it made everyone in the room comfortable.  Many people in the audience would ...

Dear friends I have a small request.  Please fill out my annual reader survey.  It has only 6 questions and takes 1 minute to fill.  Your feedback will make the blog more helpful to you.  It will make me fine tune the content to your liking and need.  Click here to participate. Please note: All questions are compulsory. 2 readers (from all over the world) will be randomly chosen and given a free copy of the book 'The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs' . I love the book and you will love it too. If you already own the book, how about another book; HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations . All I want is to make sure you read one of these books :-) Please share your correct email id for me to contact you (in case you are the lucky winner) Survey closes December 9, 2012. Thanks so much. Vivek