Author: Simon Morton
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Reviewer: Jennifer Watkiss, head of marketing communications, Adestra
This isn’t so much a book about presentations, as one about telling stories. Which makes sense, since the best presentations also follow a traditional story arc: setting the scene, introducing conflict, struggle, solution and redemption.
What makes this book useful is that it gives more detail about how to tell a story in the most compelling way possible for a presentation format. To do this, Morton has broken presentation-crafting into three main sections: understanding your audience, crafting the right content, and delivering it in a variety of scenarios.
The Presentation Lab is useful, filled with B2B examples of how the author’s company has helped clients update and optimise presentations for a variety of scenarios: sales pitches, investor meetings, conferences, etc. All of which focus on the goal of any business presentation: engaging the audience enough to persuade them to take action.
My only complaint is one that I find common among books written as thought leadership pieces by someone highlighting or representing their company: it’s pretty thin on the ‘secret sauce.’ I found that every time I got to a really interesting point where I was about to gain some key piece of insight – especially in the sections on profiling your audience – the book was heavy on what to do, and why to do it, but conveniently left out the how.
It’s understandable, since that’s how they make their money – but frustrating as a reader to be left thinking I need to hire them to get much benefit out of styling my presentations after their model.
That said, the book was a very easy read, its image-heavy design gave it the feel of a graphic novel, rather than a stodgy business book, and it did cover some salient points. I applied a few to a presentation of my own and had a good result.
However, it’s most useful for advice on how to tune-up presentations for a seasoned presenter or presentation writer, rather than a practical plan for someone starting from scratch.
Star rating:
