Stu Downes

I’ve recently finished reading Speaking PowerPoint by Bruce Gabrielle which I would recommend to anyone who needs to present information in order to reach a decision or build trust. The book is the first presentation book I’ve read that deals with the full range of presentation styles (reading decks, business decks, conference decks) and helps you understand how to formulate your arguments into a cohesive message that looks superb.

In a great easy to read format, spoiled only by the lack of colour, the book helps on how to build a story based on the evidence you have, how to present the story and then on the slides themselves includes excellent guidance and recommendations for using the correct style of title, the correct layout, the right amount of text, the appropriate use of colour and all of this without creating “powerpoint shock”.

The book incorporates many real world examples of how presentations and presentation slides could be improved. The book also reminds us why it is so important given that even back 2,300 years Aristotle recognized that decisions were made based on logic and emotion. This book certainly has helped me present information more logically and use the look and feel of a presentation to win the emotions too.

I’d recommend you purchase the book. If you do I’d recommend you print the colour images before reading.

Other links:

speakingppt.com

LinkedIn Group

YouTube Videos

 

First recommended purchase is a Pogo Sketch Stylus for the iPad. I bought this to use with apps like notes plus which offer a magnified writing pad and a wrist pad. I still find capacitive touch screens are nowhere near as good as a pen based Tablet PC but the pogo is worth it for the iPad if you like to sketch or can tolerate the handwriting limitations.

Second top non-tech technical purchase of 2011 was my backpack. I stumbled across The North Face Surge in an outdoor shop, the point of sale was awful in terms of helping me understand the bags potential. Five minutes and one bored Mrs Downes later I’d bought it, it is the first bag I’ve owned which ticked all the boxes. It will carry a small laptop (15″) which suits me, plenty of room for the iPad, a pocket big enough for me to last a couple of days from one bag (big bonus for flying), a third pocket for pens, papers etc.. A fourth pocket has plenty of small zipped storage for my mouse, cables and small USB peripherals. That last pocket and a fifth pocket are easily accessed when the bag is laid flat on a desk, the fifth pocket being that for a power supply. It’s just a really well designed bag which also has elastic pockets either side for water / umbrella making it excellent for commuter journeys (for me mainly off the train at Euston and onto the tube). Well recommended, but you’d probably not pick any of that up if you went to The North Faces web site or visited an outdoor shop. This you tube gives a good overview:

 

please let me know whether you like or dislike it.  I’m not sure it will survive the week at the moment.

 

We all live in a world where managing information is key.  If I look back 20 years I got most information from books and libraries, research involved paper and general announcements and news came through in trade magazines.  Its an area that has been completely turned on its head, and continues to change.  I thought I’d spend a few minutes jotting down how most information arrives at my door and what I do with it.

• Email: is generally where colleagues suggest information, partners email me and general update newsletters arrive with links.  These either generate a file or a URL.  Files if I class as personal knowledge are off into Evernote and corporate knowledge off to the appropriate repository.
• Web pages: either arrived in an email, via twitter, within RSS feeds or from direct searches.  Most web pages get read and ignored.  Some get read and instantly stored to Evernote or Instapaper (Evernote when I know its needed for good and Instapaper when I need to read later or take time to digest).
• RSS: is still a great source, and like twitter tends to be where I keep up with industry news and announcements.  What I love about Google Reader and Instapaper is there is a clever tool that takes all starred items and automatically posts them to Instapaper.
• Instapaper: is absolutely excellent.  It allows me to read on a number of platforms at a time that suits me.  The new features to have friends and share favourites is excellent.  It means I get wisdom from people much cleverer than I.  The other feature I love is all my favourites flow automatically into Evernote.
• Evernote: is ultimately my resting place for content and knowledge.  I know when its there its indexed and searchable, its available on numerous devices and from the internet.  I know wherever I am I‘ll be able to find information when needed.

It’s a far cry from the first job when I graduated where very little information was available online and most was available at the laboratory’s library.  Now I have better knowledge management and retrieval tools available to me than I could ever dream of from any enterprise.  I capture knowledge from new alerts, friends, industry experts and use the wisdom of others selecting the best information for me to consume.  I wonder how my children will laugh at these primitive tools in another 20 years time!

 

I’ve had some time recently to catch up on a number of TED talks.  Rachel Bostman spoke in Sydney on 2010 on the subject of Collaborative Consumption.  The main themes of the talk were society moving to a point of utilising technology to highlight reputation, and trusting that reputation in transactions which are moving from ebay and swapsites through to lending money or sharing expensive resources such as land or cars.

One graphic that stood out during the talk was this visualization from Jason Tester proposing a reputation statement account, and he first created this back in 2004.

Image Rights Creative Commons (Jason Tester) (Source)

There are some interesting points of reflection in 2011 which make me believe we finally have the critical mass to start to see reputation based models moving into employment models.  Those are:

• We are increasingly trusting of reputations to allow us to make purchases, its only natural that this will progress to skills and services.
• LinkedIn is now over 100 million people strong, this means that we all find peers and opportunities from this community than we do from our much smaller social circle or enterprise communities.
• We increasingly are working as specialists in the long tail and the likelihood is that within the tail is where we will find peer support, opportunities and employment in the future.

The question is when?  Employment contracts today aren’t ready for the change, simple financial tools such as credit rating tools aren’t ready for the change.  It seems that we need to see the shift that society is making in trusting reputations to be repeated by institutions.

With that comes cautions too.  How easy would it be for our reputation to be damaged maliciously etc..  Its an exciting new world we are moving towards but its also just a little bit scary too.

 

Are we getting to the point that we can’t read anything now?  I have this problem at work and at home.  Like most knowledge workers the workplace can be a cacophony of distractions.  Reading means locking myself away somewhere quiet.  Home is a cacophony of distractions too.

To support us all in the quest to make reading articles from online sources easier, I’ve turned, about 12 months ago, to scanning then batching items together using  Instapaper.  So everything goes there from web pages I’ve landed on from searches to articles I want to read from my RSS feeds.  Instapaper is superb, especially the iPad app which makes the reading experience great (but it works on paper too and lets you group things together to print – great for when electronic items are still banned on the plane).

But I see it “do it later” more and more.  It seems its like the free credit we get on sofas “buy now pay in 400 years time” – even YouTube now has a watch later feature.  We seem to be drifting that way with consuming information.  I doubt I’m alone in saying I wish I had more time to consume information and add value to it, after all that’s what I’m paid to do – yet the hardest thing to find time to do is consume information and then even harder (if you can get harder than hardest) is make the thinking time to add value to it.  I think tomorrow might see a scythe being taken to some repeating meeting (be warned folks!)

 

Increasingly I find myself spending more and more time in PowerPoint.  To articulate ideas and gather input the first thing I turn to is PowerPoint.  PowerPoint is as important to me to articulate ideas in the workplace than any other office tool.  I’m a firm believer in the beyond bullet points ethos and work hard to make my slides visually compelling and my presentations flow and tell the story [although I must add that I never followed the beyond bullet points methodology to the letter as its too constraining for me].

What I found recently was a wonderful site called Speaking PowerPoint where Bruce Gabrielle tries to overcome the problem of poor slides and presentations, and shares some great tips and tricks to make presentations more visually compelling.  I’ve picked up enough tips to want to buy his book.  Here’s one, enjoy and hat tip to Bruce:

 

@grahamchastney today blogged:

I’ve spent a good deal of my time over the last few days ‘crafting slides’.

This particular activity hasn’t changed a great deal in the last 15 years.

All sorts of progress and development in the collaboration arena has taken place over that time.

So why no change?

Why do we still need to transact over a set of information in a meeting?

I’m going to answer how I see the world of crafting slides.  I think its more about what has changed to support us craft the story and how that has changed:

Excuse my clunky diagram but this is one way I actually tell the story with customers once crafted, I find slides just too constraining to complete the needs of most meetings.

Starting on the left the way we store knowledge has changed dramatically which then feeds our research.  Evernote and Instapaper are both important tools for me today to supplement what I can hold in my head, files and email have been there all the time, search is still a challenge but is better in these personal knowledge tools.  When I supplement my research with that from peers this is now increasingly feeding from tools such as linkedin or twitter – which in many cases link back to blogs from experts.

I also would argue that the crafting of slides has changed.  The thing I use is still called PowerPoint but my use of it is much more visually compelling than anything I created 15 years age.

What I don’t see enough of in meetings is switching between presentation tools and switching to an input rather than output mode.  I love to use whiteboards, or in my case the tablet PC, and mindmaps in meetings. 

To answer Graham’s exam question the purpose of a meeting for me is still to transact over some information and then come out with an agreed direction or next step.

 

In the UK we are getting older as a population, information overload is common, and we need to transfer knowledge.  Over the past few weeks I’ve read a few articles which discuss the shortfalls in both professional education and identify needs in workplace professional development.

Craig Roth discussed MBA courses and the use of simulations to help candidates understand the need to filter data with dashboards and KPI’s and extended the thought processes to take a view on information management:

I’m not just joking about how screwed up the average corporation is.  These difficulties exist in even the best of organizations, making attention management an essential discipline if one desires to be an effective information worker and good managerial decision maker.

I’d extend Craig’s concerns into schooling at secondary level and above.  My first point is we just don’t train our young people to filter and focus on priorities – I’m not saying its easy as I struggle with this every day.  However we aren’t even arming them with the mental skills to prioritise their schoolwork, study, research or plan effectively. 

When our young folk enter the enterprise and become knowledge workers we have excellent graduate schemes which offer training, but these may not be enough.  Dave Snowden recently blogged about the apprenticeship and the lack of a similar model for management:

Maybe its time we stopped treating management as something that can be taught and then practiced, and instead focus on creating a professional model of management education which is based on praxis. Of course that would mean HR giving up their cult like toys; competence models, assessment centers, psychometric tests and the like. It would mean KM people starting to create long term projects rather than information management with a candy coating of communities of practice. Physical presence can be augmented by virtual connectivity but it can never be fully replaced. Above all we should be authentic to humans as humans, and to the social ecology of their interaction. We are not cogs in machine, we cannot be engineered, but out evolution can be stifled by inauthentic attempts to make it so.

We can see that we have a problem over the horizon in many countries, including the UK.  We aren’t getting younger, we’re all getting older.  This will put increased pressure on organizations to transfer knowledge to fewer people.  Information overload will get worse, especially for the younger worker.  Prioritising will become more important.

The statistics from the UK Office of National Statistics show that as soon as 2018 we could see more people over 40 working than under 40, that assumes 300,000 people of pensionable age continue to work.  The column label is missing but that’s millions of people.

The beauty of demographics is they aren’t the same in all areas of the world, but the headlines for the UK are:

• population rising
• we are living longer
• there will be less workers under 40 compared to those over 40
• if people work beyond the pensionable age then everything changes (and they will, I probably will!)
• older knowledge workers are more likely to want to work part time – that then makes knowledge transfer and priority setting for those that remain more important

One thing I’ve not dealt with well here is whether globalization will solve the problem.  Will we truly get to the point that global teams drawing on skills from areas with younger populations will fill the demographic gap in the UK ….. that’s a bit heavy for an already long post so I’ll mull over that one with you over a virtual pint.

 

It’s been anything but a quiet year, except here on the blog which has been too quiet. I’ve had lots I’d like to write and the time factor and means twitter is still my easiest update tool. So twitter is in (@sdownes1972).

Evernote is most definitely still in. All my research and analyst reports are there. Ok not all tagged but easily searchable. Excellent tool. Premium account is worth it.

New is the iPad which has resulted in using Instapaper. Absolutely superb for reading later. I generally use it as a staging post and if articles make the grade they get promoted to Evernote. Again excellent and recommended.

Now the iPad. The work device? Erm not for me, some work on it but not its primary use. The family device absolutely yes. Quick checking things, buying things (excellent eBay app, Amazon Windowshop, Debenhams, etc.).  Its also great for grab and instant browse and games are superb (my 5 year old is a wizz).  We have found we spend more online now – just need some good supermarket apps to do my online regular shopping.  Now don’t get me wrong I do use it for work and I can get all my corporate emails and access to a virtual desktop – however its primarily an information consumption device not a production device and I’ve not really had any travel where I haven’t had need for my tablet PC.  Rather than a corporate device its really a personal professional device which I use to keep up to date with information, read PDFs in a friendly form factor, read RSS feeds, keep up to date with twitter etc.  I do use it to scan emails, check my calendar etc. but don’t really use it as a mobile device.  Having said that I do like to take it with me……

The reason I take it with me is as a second monitor using MaxiVista which really helps on those evenings working in hotels etc.  You’ll notice from the picture I also have a mobile keyboard/mouse and laptop stand to allow me so save the old neck.

2011 I have no major plans for new tech, I will be using a mifi (my Christmas tech) to allow me to always have access to a personal mobile wifi unit which connects to the internet using my mobile data sim…just need more 3G coverage please

2011 I expect to be productivity focused, my life is generally very hectic and without focus nothing gets done well.  I’m managing a to-do list less and a focus list more and forcing myself to try and avoid distractions…..well its a challenge especially as I actually want to spend quality time at home with the family and enjoying my hobbies as well as being successful professionally.

So here goes…..happy new year!