Millions of words have been written about COVID an d its effect on our lives, so there's not much I can add.

But it was and continues to be illuminating to see huge parts of the business world shift to virtual meeting mode. I've been working remote since 2004 -- but it was a game changer to have EVERYONE on a call also be in their own space.  

I know it's common to express fatigue and disdain for Zoom and other video platforms.  We're all sick of them, sure.  But what a true gift they have been the last few years.  I did audio-only for more than a decade...trust me, video is much better.  And that's a little bit about the faces - the virtual human contact - but it's MOSTLY about the shared screens.  If you only knew how many times I was the on a remote audio call while others were in the same room, writing on a white board and using ambiguous terms like "this" and "that" for the options on the board!  "But if we do THAT, then this will never work."  And it's incredibly hard to break into a room full of people having a lively conversation around the white board to ask "Could someone throw me a noun?!?"

One definite silver lining of all the Zoom meetings is, I think, people will be more cognizant of the challenges of remote team members in the future.  And of the benefit of any kind of shared visual aid when you're collaborating.

I hope so anyway.  

If you reach a certain age, you know you are going to start losing friends and colleagues.
It doesn't make it any easier, but maybe less surprising.  

I lost a friend and mentor on 3/23/18. Tim Searcy was someone with whom I had argued, analyzes, laughed and schemed. Someone who had lifted me up and also frustrated me to the breaking point at times.  He battled cancer for about a year, demonstrating grace in amazing ways along the way. His funeral was packed with people who had known and worked and worshiped with him who came together in a mix of sadness and celebration for a life well-lived. I doubt my own funeral will be as well attended, but Tim was always much better at networking than I. I hope, however large or small the group, that those who attend my funeral will tell stories and smile the way those who remembered Tim did.  

If we're not the one leaving this earth, we are going to have to say a lot of goodbyes.
It's doesn't make it any easier, but maybe less surprising.

New friends pour through the revolving door.
Maybe there's one that more. If you find one, that'll do.
But us, old friend, what's to discuss, old friend?
Here's to us. Who's like us? Damned few.
- Sondheim, "Old Friends" from Merrily We Roll Along

In every career, in every life, there is a stream of people coming into and out of our story. And most of the time when someone leaves, you get the sense they're just moving on. It's the right time and the right thing for them.  You know you will miss them, but you wish them well.

And sometimes, the leaving feels like an ending, a withdrawal, a surrender or perhaps even an attack or sabbotage. 

What makes the difference? I think it's whether the person is moving toward something new or only away from something old.  

Those who are moving toward are focused on what's next, and it's easy to get behind their goals.
Those who are moving away from are usually angry or frustrated and focused on the negative and, it seems, they want their leaving to hurt those who stay.

As we move ourselves into and out of situations, it's worth asking: am I moving to something or away from something? Do I have hope and vision or merely a burning need to NOT be in the current environment?

​Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting anyone stay in a toxic situation!  But rather, the desire to get OUT is not enough  - find the new goal so that you leap toward not just away.  

​Find a way to say "I'm starting" rather than "I'm quitting."

One day I was in an internal meeting reviewing the draft of an upcoming client deliverable with a team of 7 or 8 people. At one point the highest ranking person in the room, whom I'll call the Admiral, shut down an argument by saying, "The client wants it like this." And we moved on.

A few minutes later the Admiral argued (and won) a battle by saying, "Sometime we [our company] can get get fired for doing exactly what the client asks."

Now both of these ideas have merit. Yes, we must give the client what they ask for. The customer is always right, right? But sometimes we have to see past what they WANT to what they NEED. The customer lacks vision; that's why they hire us, right?

Yup I accept that these contradictory ideas can exist at the same time. Though I can't say I have ever heard them uttered about the SAME client project in the SAME meeting and by the SAME mouth.

Now if I did not know the Admiral as well as I do, I would assume this was just a case of a high ranking exec justifying inconsistent ideas and shutting down any challenges with pithy phrases.

OK. That might have been a teeny bit of this situation.

But in general the Admiral is a brilliant, if tangential, thinker with an innate sense of business strategy. In other words, I couldn't dismiss the contradiction solely as executive ego on parade.

In this case the client had asked for a survey of competitors with recommendations for improvement. A valuable exercise to be sure. Emulating others and making incremental improvements can close gaps, but it will never lead to innovation. You can't become a market leader by "following better".

The client wants to understand and beat their competitors. But simply closing any gaps is not enough.

How to reconcile what they want with what they really need? In my opinion the key is to find a way to answer both the want and the need in sequence. Personally I feel like the answers are stronger separated into two deliverables, but at minimum they should be presented in discrete bites.

You can't ignore the ask, even if you "know" better. If you agreed to a gap analysis, you need to provide one. Package the answer in the cleanest and clearest way you can. Provide a realistic diagnostic of the gaps to competitors and the improvement needed to reach parity.

Only then, after the ask is complete, can you expand to larger ideas, ideas that challenge the status quo and may not even be possible today. This type of "no rules" thinking is the way innovation happens.

Here is the kicker... Even if you KNOW you need to go there, presenting the second step without the first is a big mistake, IMHO. It not only disregards the clients request, but it also "cheats" by ignoring the constraints of the client's reality. Any of us can design a flying car, if we start the the assumption that gravity does not exist!

Ambiguity is not my favorite thing. But the more I thought about the apparent contradiction of "do what the client wants" and "sometimes we fail if we do exactly what the client wants," the more I realized they can live in harmony by answering both in sequence.

I attended a conference recently where the speaker had good content but presented it almost exclusively in a monologue.  Plus, she had handouts that didn't align to her slides and slides that didn't include some of the strongest points she made (off of paper notes).  This lack of congruent material made me, I confess...itch.

Others who attended were thrilled with the material (and there was some good stuff!), but I was completely distracted by the approach.  Sitting and listening for 30 minutes is one thing, but this was an all day workshop.  I kept thinking it would have been just as effective to simply read the material -- in fact, more effective because I could have gone off on tangents and allowed other ideas to blossom from the main points as I read.

And after a few hours, I found myself wondering, "Do I ever do this?  Do participants in my workshops feel this stifling weight of just watching and listening as the clock ticks by?  Do I lose the value of a concept because it's out of sync with the materials (handouts, slides, flip-charts) that are supposed to support the content?"  

I truly hope not, but I imagine the answer is probably "Yes, sometimes you do." 

Personally I believe the universe gives us a gift in annoying people and situations.  That is, if someone or something is annoying you, it's also likely demonstrating something you need to understand. To me, the lessons the universe was trying to show me in this workshop fall into two broad categories:

How many pages should there be in a book?  Of course that's a silly question, because books come in all shapes and sizes.  There are common sense rules that it should be too heavy to hold or have so many pages that the bind breaks. But even these can be broken, as those of us with dog-eared, rubber-band-bound copies of Michener's Hawaii can attest.  If you're writing a book, you don't worry about how many pages it will be; you worry about telling the story.

The same is true for creating sales artifacts: we must FIRST worry about telling the story. But we must tell the story within the appropriate parameters. We have to consider the right amount of content for our delivery, how much of it should be reinforced on our slides or handouts, and what pacing and level of interaction is appropriate for our audience. 

And yet, so many presenters think they can bend time and space.  They KNOW how long the audience is available, and they know how long their deck is, yet they seem surprised when things go amiss. They cram 80 slides into a 20 minute meeting.  They present slide after slide with block paragraphs of 8-point text.  They drop 14-column Excel spreadsheets into slides that are ugly to look at and impossible to read.

Have you falled into any of these artifact traps?  Here are two tips to get back on track:

Assess Your Presentation Rhythm
Some people can tell a compelling story in an hour using only 3 slides; others are equally effective with 100 slides in a hour. The number is not important; the outcome is.  If you regularly present from slides, jot down the number of slides and approximate presentation time of your next dozen presentation.   Until you assess your actual times, a good rule of thumb is 30-90 seconds per slide.  So a 20-minute presentation will usually be in the range of 13-40 slides.  When gauging your presentation, you might want to omit any section break slides from your count and give extra weight to slides that you know take longer. The point is not the exact formula you use but that you are aware that your content has to fit into the time allowed.

Nix the Eye Chart
Important corollary to the rule of thumb above: The way to get your presentation from 50 to 20 slides is NOT to simply reduce the font size!  Be honest: Has your audience every seemed startled by the amount of text you put on a slide?  Do they suddenly reach for glasses or squint at the screen at a certain place in your presentation? As a presenter, you never want to make your audience uncomfortable, distracted or annoyed.  Guess what?  Teeny-tiny fonts do all three!  

Remember that the reason we still call them "slides" is because they were originally designed to be projected.  Yes, PowerPoint (Keynote, etc) can be used to create other types of documents, but their primary purpose to support YOU in a group presentation setting.  Consider how you change your speaking volume when you are addressing a group of 20 versus talking to one or two people.  
Font size is the volume of your slide, so turn it up.  
The bigger the room, the larger the font.  Even in a more intimate boardroom setting, 16-points should be your absolute minimum font size.  If your content doesn't fit on the slide at that size, you are using too many words or trying to convey too many ideas on one slide.  

In my experience, most people do not like to outline.  It's right up there with Brussels sprouts or flossing: things we know we SHOULD do, yet rarely do.  

That's probably because outlining, when it is taught at all, is taught in a very specific and didactic way.  There is little room for personality when you're following the teacher's rules for outlines.  Like little Stepford Students, we learned that a passing grade came when we described the prescribed Intro, Three points (with at least three supporting points each!), and Conclusion.  Yippee.

So, I'm guessing the minute you didn't HAVE to outline, you didn't.

But now, three years or three decades after you suffered through your last outline in English class you may wonder if there is something missing.  Something in your approach to writing that's a bit willy-nilly.  You might even sketch out an outline from time to time, but I'm guessing it doesn't get you where you want to go. An intro, three points, and a conclusion might get a B+ in high school, but it probably won't lead to a compelling sales piece or presentation.

So is there another answer? Something between the chaos (and occasional genius) of unplanned seat-of-the-pants writing and the rigid barriers of the perfect outline?  Yup.  Storyboarding.

You might wonder, isn't a storyboard an awful lot like an outline? Sure; the storyboard is the unruly cousin of an outline.

Where an outline tends to be very linear, a storyboard is organic. An outline has a standard path  (Well, if you're feeling frisky you can reorient your outline so that the AAABBBCCC structure becomes ABC ABC ABC, ooh, fancy). A storyboard has no required flow. An outline, in its perfect form, is extremely uniform and parallel.  If you have four supporting points for one idea, it looks naked to have only one sub-point on the next.

A storyboard is tactic, a process. You a play with your ideas, move them around, and see what works. Go digital and create the big blocks of your message in traditional tools like PowerPoint or newer apps such Trello, Scrivener, or Paper. Go low-tech by jotting your ideas on sticky-notes, and then use a whiteboard or empty table to see everything at once.  Combine text, graphics, photos and your best caveman drawings to express your ideas.  Invite others to contribute and play.  Whatever your preferred method, as you group, sequence, and re-group, you find the heart of the story you need to tell.  You become aware of the flow of the story, not just the logic-tree of individual topics of an outline.

An outline tends to suck the creativity out of the process of creation; a storyboard lets you bring fresh eyes and a fresh spirit to your business writing.   A storyboard focuses on the story, not the structure.  Where the outline invites convention, the storyboard invites invention. 

I enjoy online shopping. I like the variety, the lack of crowds and lines, and the fun of receiving a package a few days or weeks later.

I also have had the opportunity to collaborate with other marketers at agencies and client accounts to understand the elements of a great digital experience.

So I was surprised and annoyed to be shop-blocked when I attempted to browse on dillards.com.  I clicked to get detail on a pair of pants and BAM! the landing page above appeared. 

"DON'T lose your place in line! 
DON'T close your browser. 
DON'T refresh. 
Stay on this page and you can start shopping as
 soon as other customers ahead of you check out.
Thank you for your patience."

OK.  First of all - on what planet is a three line headline of DON'T statements considered a good idea?  I don't know about you, by my response to being scolded by my browser is: you are NOT the boss of me!

Second - am I to understand that the site was FULL?  That Dillard's needed to install a red velvet rope and a bouncer outside their website because so many many shoppers are clamoring to get in?

Third - and this is a big one - I was not trying to checkout, I was trying to BROWSE.  I can *maybe* (big maybe) see the need to slow the queue to actual checkout, but just to view a page?  The mind boggles.

I closed the browser after waiting 3 minutes -- yes, even with 3 big DON'T commands I was able to find the strength to  close it.  Curious, I went back 4-5 hours later - same landing page.

Now I think it's pretty clear this approach is about as far from a best practice as one can get.  Yet, I also think it's an example of a kind of "solution" many of us have inadvertently attempted -- a failed solution that happens when you solve the wrong problem.

I'm guessing that Dillard's had an issue with site response time or felt abandoned carts were caused by delays... and they decided to "fix" it by reducing the number of shoppers at any given moment.   This might look good on paper.  By keeping me and others wanting to shop "outside" their site, response metrics probably improved.  But that is the equivalent of disconnecting callers to reduce hold time in a call center.  

They are solving the wrong problem.

So Dillard's lost my transaction this time.  But I think there is a broader lesson:  make sure we are solving the right problem.  Encourage our teams to challenge the basic premise of a solution before we run too far down the wrong path and DON'T look back.

PowerPoint gets a bad rap.  Most slide presentations are only fair (and that's being generous) and many are truly poor.  Now I would argue that this fact is NOT the fault of PowerPoint.  As the saying goes: it's a poor workman who blames his tools.

Nevertheless, there's a growing number of presenters who have decided to "solve" the PowerPoint curse by not using PowerPoint (or other slide applications) at all.

The lack of slides does remove some of the symptoms of a bad presentation:

• Too much text on a crowded slide
• The hypnotic compulsion to read slides to the audience
• Seemingly random content or disjointed flow
  
  

But of course, addressing symptoms provides some relief, but doesn't cure the underlying disease.  In this case that disease is a lack of story.  If you don't know the story you want to tell, if you haven't thought though how to bring your audience along with you, if you haven't planned the flow of content, you will not be effective, slides or no slides.

Presenting "naked" required more preparation, not less.  You, or more precisely your thought process, is alone and exposed.  This is not the time to wing it!   

One way to be very effective without slides is to actually start with SLIDES -- because often you are convey information that DOES need some visual support.  But every utterance does NOT need a corresponding bullet point.  Start with a full presentation, then delete any that are not completely vital to effective communication.  Left with only a handful of slides, you can decide if you want to insert slides into your talk only at key points or use handout, flip chart, or other method to aid audience understanding.  

This hybrid approach will allow YOU to hold center stage for most of your presentation.  Try it before your let all your slides slide. 

I wrote a book.
I wrote a book!
I. Wrote. A. Book.

Ahem. Sorry.

The path from idea to manuscript to book can be a winding one. I first had the idea that became Centered Presentation on an airplane several year ago.  The idea would roll around in my mind then move to the front, like a wayward cough drop, and I'd savor it for a minute then stick back between my teeth and cheek for a while. 

About a year ago, I thought it might make a good ebook and actually sat down and wrote a short 40 page PDF.  I thought it could be good marketing for the consulting work I do.  

I shared it with a friend and trusted adviser, Tom Searcy, who suggested it deserved a longer treatment. I wrote in my journal "could be a "real" book - we'll see."

Funny how the physical book is still much more real to me.  Maybe the Millennials don't feel this way.  I do have a Kindle, and I enjoy reading eBooks - but still.... the feel and smell of an actual book.  Nothing like it. This project became much more REAL when I held the physical proof in my hand. 

I used Amazon's CreateSpace to publish the book. This is an amazing site.  It would have been called a "vanity press" 20 years ago.  But the rules of publishing are changing so fast, I think the choice of self-publishing has a completely different flavor in 2013.  

I don't expect this book to make me rich or a household name.  
But I am richer for having written it. 
(I wrote a book.)