I’ve got to give a talk tomorrow.
In the best traditions of scientific conferencing the abstract submitted a month ago bears little relationship to what I’m actually going to say. (And in that tradition: What am I going to say? It’s only because I had to upload some slides to their server this afternoon that I even have my slides ready.)
But in recognition that I’m now Mr Dr Corporate, and that I’ll be addressing internet librarians internationale, I’ve decided against wearing my Levi’s with the RM Williams. I’ll still wear the boots, but smart trousers instead of jeans. By the way, don’t buy RM Williams boots if you can avoid it. They look good, but the build quality is surprisingly disappointing. I think they’re designed for riding dingoes around all day and shooting kangaroos, rather than walking to walk.
Where was I? Oh yes.
Talks given from the corporate side of the fence are subtly difference from those you might give as an academic, when you describe your research. For starters, unless you’re giving a terribly boring presentation on sales or ROIs or whatever, you can just make shit up have quite a bit of freedom in how you present, and indeed what you’re presenting. Your standard scientific talk takes a problem, gives you some background, describes what you did to answer the problem, shows some data and presents your conclusion (which is usually ‘it didn’t work’ or ‘we need to do more experiments’, or most frequently ‘give me a job. Please’).
I don’t have materials, methods, data or conclusions. I’ve got an interesting problem, sure, but it’s more ‘oh, here’s a fly-infested ointment; what’s being done about it and how might we tackle it?’. It’s not ‘gizza job’, nor even ‘buy our product’, actually.
I’m looking forward to it. Even if I have to dress a little smarter than usual.
Now, there are principles that apply equally to academic and corporate talks, such as the ’10-20-30′ rule, the ‘don’t talk to the screen’ rule and the ‘my God but Powerpoint is complete crap, isn’t it?’ rule. But I was reminded of one rule in particular a couple of days ago, when I received a really lovely Facebook message from a student back in Sydney.
Nurse Donovan said,
RPG you have left a lasting mark on me:
Once at mmb you came and looked over my shoulder at the slides i was making for my lab talk, and you said “the title of your slide should always be the conclusion of the slide”.
And I have never been able to forget it!
That’s not to say that all my slides now have great punchy all-conclusive titles, but it means that now when i make a slide that has some sort of an airy-fairy title or (slide-god forbid) an ellipsis, i feel this nagging sense of guilt…
Just thought i’d share that with you because i’m making some slides right now and there you were haunting me again!
Hope you’re great!
Isn’t that totally brilliant? I may be gone, but my smell influence lingers on.
And tomorrow, I’m going to totally break my own rule. Rather than show each slide with a conclusion, episodic-like, I’m going to continue something I started experimenting with in Sydney, and managed to pull off in Nantwich. That is, I’m going to stand there and tell a story, and going to use the slides behind me to illustrate what I’m saying, rather than being the focus.
I’m going to tell a story. With pictures.
What’s the occasion?
Oh, some conference for Librarians. It’s all about information handling, essentially.
I dunno to be honest. They just say ‘Richard, go to this conference and represent us.’ I turn up, say something and drink the free champagne, hand out a few business cards and bugger off again.
It’s official:
I turn up, say something and drink the free champagne, hand out a few business cards and bugger off again.
RPG has landed his dream job.
I like the title-should-be-the-conclusion rule – without knowing it, I’ve apparently been using it for years. Call it
flying by the seat of my pantsblind luckintuition, I guess.I hadn’t heard of the 10/20/30 rule, but found a nicely tongue-in-cheek explanation here.
Oh, and you’re in London now, so why not replace those RM Williams with some Doc Martens? Cool, classic, kicky and even a little corporate.
In your new capacity, you might therefore appreciate the presentation design tips over here.
I’ve always found it attractive, but somewhat too business-world-tinged for my use.
Otherwise, I agree with all your rules, and hope that of the many people to whom I’ve mentioned that the conclusion of the slide should be the title, a few have retained the message.
Interesting, thanks Heather.
I don’t remember whether the conclusion=title rule is original (I mean, that I thought of it myself) or whether I picked it up somewhere else.
So Nurse Donovan is the one writing talks titled ‘It didn’t work’ and ‘We need to do more experiments’. ‘Give me a job. Please’ is know for being a classic of its day (Friday, just before the bar opened).
No Bob, they’re her slides.
I think her talk is titled ‘Why I hate being a grad student’.
I think your RM Williams are falling apart because of too much walking around on concrete or tarmac in London.
They are, afterall, designed for striding around Australian farms (i.e. deserts and other assorted wastelands unsuited to agriculture).
The conclusion title rule- I’ve tried a similar principle for papers. The last sentence of the intro, the first and last sentence of the discussion and the title usually all express the one sentence message I’m trying to communicate.
Ironically, the boots (this is the second replacement pair) seem to be doing better here than in Sydney. The people in RMW there seemed to be surprised that they were dying so quickly. I’m guessing they’re actually not design for Sydney’s wetness.
But yes. The one-sentence summary in papers is valuable. And if you can’t say it in one sentence, perhaps a shorter paper is needed?
er … Nantwich?
Yah. Long story, thought I’d blogged about it. Apparently not.
Well I asked a question rather then tell a story, but the principles remain. Met up with Brian Kelly and Peter Murray-Rust too.
Oh, yes, the topic of slides. Who needs ’em?
I somehow managed an 8 minute talk last week with two slides. I’m breaking the addiction.
A good speaker should need nothing more than a blackboard and chalk, maybe not even that.
Perhaps though, looking at the thread “next door”:http://network.nature.com/people/UE19877E8/blog/2009/10/14/in-which-i-have-seen-the-future-of-science-–-update, they should be pretty.
Good show old boy. Your Twitter feed seems to indicate that things went well. I gave my first “corp” style talk back in March and it’s wicked good. I was still nervous as hell, but after a couple of minutes realized the wonderful differences between that & a science-talk.
Ah, and re:
Boots. DMs all the way. Picked up a new pair (8 hole, black matt) when i was in St. Albans last year. Wearing now with my black business suit actually.
Talks sans slides: when I was at Penn State we had an emeritus type come to give a talk, famous bloke etc. Anyway, slide projector (ahh…pre-LED and PowerPoint!) was bolloxed as usual, so he said, midst the panic of senior faculty, “Nevermind, we’ve a blackboard & chalk!” and proceeded to give one of the best seminars I’ve ever
sat thoughattended.Yah, thanks Ian. I’m slowly finding random things around the twittersphere about my talk. I was a bit miffed that no one tweeted my talk while I gave it, but then I discovered they did but the hashtag search wasn’t finding them all (and we had three hashtags and I only knew about two of them).
My comments on Web 3 seemed to be well-received, and my joke slides. I feel a blog post coming on, but not tonight…
What I want is some RM-style but better build quality. Used to wear DM shoes back in the day, and loved them.
I only gave two or three presentations in my industry job, but they were all to scientists, so I kept to a fairly standard scientific format. But you would not believe the hassle of getting the entire marketing, sales, and R&D departments to agree on the content of the final talk. I was told to have my first version ready a month ahead of time, and we spent hours and hours adding, deleting, reordering, and editing slides. Then they made me give about four practice run-throughs. It drove me crazy – in my research talks, I usually put the slides together a few days ahead of time at most and hated over-rehearsing. But it costs a lot of money to put on a catered corporate talk at a big conference!
BTW, I wanted to call my undergrad research dissertation “why my cells died”, but my useless humourless supervisor wouldn’t let me.
Good grief.
The only person in the company who knows what I said, or even what my slides looked like, was the salesman who accompanied me and only then because he video-taped the talk. Which will be on YouTube soon.
Did I ever mention how much I disliked that job?
No, I don’t think you did…
(and what is this ‘practice’ of which you speak?)
Oh, is it practise? I never remember which one is right.
Sorry Cath, I wasn’t dissing your spelling: I was asking what you meant by practising a talk…
Ah! Coming from you, I assumed the former.
Yeah, practi(c/s)ing doesn’t come very naturally to me either.
I can see why’d you’d assume that. Sorry. The downside of being me.
🙂
So, is it practice or practise? (The FireFox spell checker is flagging the latter as incorrect). Is it a verb/noun thing, or a UK/US thing? I’ve heard both…
Of course, I could just go and look it up.
Accord to the One True Dictionary, ‘practise’ is a verb, but it’s ‘practice’ in US English.
The truly great thing about being Canadian now is that I get to use whichever version of a variable spelling I happen to feel like that day.
You and Scurrylous would make a great couple.
It’s “practiscize”.
Hee! I like it. (Eva’s comment, not Richard’s. With no offense to Scurrylous).
Catheterize.
Corollary: Except in pitches. For some unfathomable reason, we pitch to pharma using bullet points and stuff. Considering that we are a whisker away from an ad agency, this seems odd. I think that the reason is that we never want to pin ourselves to an idea or do something surprising with a slide lest it is not EXACTLY what the client likes to see. So we inevitably go for a beige mush of bullets and flow charts. No-one ever got fired for drawing a flow chart.
I’d have thought that bullet points are pinned ideas? Or are you saying you don’t want to use something creative in the slide in case the client expects to see the same thing later?
You’re right, though. Some PR agencies have been pitching to us, and it’s funny that they’re trying to demonstrate their creativity in a very non-creative way, through the least creative medium ever devised.
I think what I mean is that is you showed a picture of a meteor crashing into a planet to make a point about impact, then the fear is that the client will think one of two things: 1. “Coooool!” 2. “What a blithering eejit.” In the effort to avoid Scenario 2, we miss the chance of ever achieving Scenario 1. With a two million pound contract at stake, it’s a game of chance that is never played. Instead we have a bullet that says ‘Impact.’, and a presentation that is a grey as an Aberdeen morning.
Ah… Enlightenment. I can’t comment–I’m not in Sales.
I think what I mean is that is you showed a picture of a meteor crashing into a planet to make a point about impact, then the fear is that the client will think one of two things: 1. “Coooool!” 2. “What a blithering eejit.” In the effort to avoid Scenario 2, we miss the chance of ever achieving Scenario 1.Nigel, you just summed up my 2 years in biotech marketing in a few short lines! I once had to write a script for a video highlighting a new product. I had a few jokes in there – nothing too intrusive, just a little recurring theme that popped up every 6 or 7 minutes – but the higher-ups took them out because “we all like it, but some people won’t. Anyway, the video is for scientists, and this is a little cheesy”. When the video was all finished and signed off, the sales reps (who know their customers, but got no input into the video) told me they didn’t like it because it was “too dull”. When I told them about the jokes that were originally in the script, they were dismayed that they’d ever been taken out.
And then that PCR song video came out, and the higher-ups decided that they should do a cheesy fun video, because that’s what scientists like. Course, I’d escaped by then.
I gave up on “practice/practise” long ago after the Canadian version of the One True Dictionary(TM) was unhelpful on that point.
Oh, and…
I was a bit miffed that no one tweeted my talk while I gave it, but then I discovered they did but the hashtag search wasn’t finding them all (and we had three hashtags and I only knew about two of them
It’s really amazing how language evolves, isn’t it?
Very. I heart neologisms.
Cath Ennis: We have a manager here who has a hilarious maxim: “If you just produced something that you think is really cool, delete it immediately and start again.”
Ha ha! We should get Kooij over here to comment on PR and the like. He has a healthy view of it all.