Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, opened the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2018 with an energetic nine-minute keynote address. His presentation was very short, crisp and visual.  Here are 10 slides from his keynote address. Notice the amount of words on each slide and the visual appeal. Takeaways for your Presentations Make your important NUMBERS big and bold so they grab attention and are remembered by your audience. Use full-slide IMAGES for visual appeal. Choose a simple sans-serif FONT. You do not need fancy fonts. Do not use too many WORDS on your slides. Your slides are your visual aids, not your crutches to help you remember your message. Think DIFFERENT. Instead of writing $100 billion, Tim Cook's slide has a cheque. A cheque gets the message across better. The message being - The money that app developers have earned through the app store will top $100 billion! Is there anything else that you felt was good in these slides? Sha...

When I was in IIM (MBA institute) lots of companies used to arrive on campus and make presentations to students. It was an opportunity for them to talk about their companies and the roles they wanted to offer. It was also a chance to create a good impression among the students so that more candidates applied for these companies. These presentations mattered more for the new recruiters on the campus. If a company came on campus you would expect lots of students to attend its presentation. But it was never the case. Left on their own, students were just too lazy and would never attend more than a few presentations. That’s why the placement committee members would tip the company folks. “Offer pizzas because the students like it” they would say. This trick always worked. Hungry folks like me would attend any placement presentation from any god-forsaken company as long as there was free pizza. As our happiness with normal-crust pizzas started fading, the companies started ordering th...

We are in the age of convenience and speed. We want everything right now. Swiggy brings you food and BigBasket brings you groceries immediately. Cricket also reflects this trend. Indians in the 1980s and the 1990s were very comfortable watching a seven-hour one day cricket match. Not today. We live in the T-20 generation. The match duration has shrunk from seven hours to 3 hours! It reflects how our attention spans have shrunk too. Getting attention is a huge challenge for any marketer. It is the same for you when you present. I was attending a demo day event in Mumbai in 2015. A famous Indian start-up incubator and accelerator had mentored and trained a group of start-ups (called a cohort). At the end of the six-week acceleration programme these start-ups were being showcased to a group of investors. The hall was full of investors and one-by-one start-up founders were climbing the stage, making a 5-minute presentation (known as a demo day pitch), and stepping down. If you we...