If you are going to be a leader, a CEO for example, then you need to be able to stand and deliver a great presentation. A great example of a business leader who knows how to present to large audiences is Steve Jobs. The reason I like Jobs' presentation style so much is because he is not a professionally-trained presenter, he is just a business man sharing information and telling his story. The lesson we can learn from Jobs' style is not "to be like Steve," but rather to be ourselves. Jobs is speaking to 3000 people in the room and thousands more streamed live. Yet, his style is informal, relaxed, friendly, and personal. He is able to connect and to entertain while all the while remaining professional. His style is fantastic and very effective.
Watch Steve Jobs' June, 2005 WWDC keynote here in QuickTime.
Our speaking can not always be perfect in a presentation — we are human after all. But our slides do need to be perfect.
One small error that appeared in Steve's slides twice was the incorrect use of an opening quote instead of an apostrophe for the abbreviation of "2006/2007. This is a very common oversight and by no means a deal breaker, but it was surely noticed by many.
It was more important that the punctuation be correct in this case since it was only the apostrophe that visually told us it was "July, 2006" nor "July 6th." The date not the year usually appears below the month in this type of flip-page calendar. This is a small thing and did not detract from his presentation. But for us — regular business people presenting to skeptical audiences — every detail matters.
Ironically, I found that MS Word for Mac automatically flips a single opening quote into an apostrophe after numbers if you do not close the quote. Keynote does not do this automatically.
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