The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs

From AP/Paul Sakuma

You know my stand on this. I think Steve Jobs has to be one of the best pre­sen­ters in the world. His speeches are great not because he is a great speaker (which he is), but because he makes great use of the tech­nol­ogy that he has avail­able to his advan­tage. He is prob­a­bly the world’s best sales­man today.

This is an inter­view by CIO​.com of Carmine Gallo, a com­mu­ni­ca­tions coach who has coun­seled many exec­u­tives on how to give great presentations.

FRI, OCTOBER 02, 2009 — CIO — Per­haps today’s model of pre­sen­ta­tion per­fec­tion is high-tech’s uber-presenter and the sub­ject of Gallo’s book (now avail­able): Apple’s Steve Jobs.

In The Pre­sen­ta­tion Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audi­ence, Gallo exam­ines Jobs’ gifted public-speaking skills and offers a “ready-to-use frame­work to help you plan, deliver and refine the best pre­sen­ta­tion of your life,” Gallo notes on his web­site. “It’s as close as you’ll ever get to hav­ing the mas­ter pre­sen­ter him­self speak directly in your ear.”

CIO​.com Senior Edi­tor Thomas Wail­gum recently spoke with Gallo about what makes Jobs so spe­cial, how much Jobs actu­ally prac­tices his craft, and what CIO​.com read­ers can bor­row from Jobs’ pre­sen­ta­tion tal­ents. Also included in the inter­view are instruc­tive YouTube videos of the Apple pitch­man in action.

CIO​.com: You write in the book about the impor­tance that sim­plic­ity and min­i­mal­ism hold for Steve Jobs in design­ing Apple prod­ucts. How does that con­cept carry over into his pre­sen­ta­tions?

Carmine Gallo: Steve Jobs once said “sim­plic­ity is the ulti­mate sophis­ti­ca­tion.” You can see this approach in how he designs his slides. The slides are stun­ningly visual and min­i­mal­is­tic. He’s not afraid of empty space. Some­times, there’s only one word or a sim­ple pho­to­graph.
There are 40 words on the aver­age Pow­er­Point slide. It’s dif­fi­cult to find 10 words in seven slides in a Jobs pre­sen­ta­tion. This is called “Pic­ture Supe­ri­or­ity.” You see, neu­ro­sci­en­tists are find­ing that infor­ma­tion is more effec­tively recalled when the ideas are deliv­ered as text and pic­tures instead of text by itself. Jobs has ele­vated pre­sen­ta­tions to an art form.

CIO​.com: What’s one thing that Jobs does, which very few peo­ple notice, that is crit­i­cal to his pre­sen­ta­tion success?

Gallo: Jobs describes every prod­uct or new fea­ture with a one-line descrip­tion that can fit in a Twit­ter post. By doing so, he helps you men­tally cat­e­go­rize the prod­uct. He gives you the big pic­ture before fill­ing in the details. For exam­ple, when Jobs intro­duced Mac­Book Air in Jan­u­ary 2008, he could have said some­thing along these lines: “Today we’re excited to launch a new, thin, light ultra-portable note­book com­puter with a 13.3 inch wide-screen dis­play, a full key­board, a back­lit dis­play and five hours of bat­tery life.”

Instead he sim­ply said, “Mac­Book Air. The world’s thinnest note­book.” If [a per­son watch­ing] wanted to learn more, they could visit the Apple web­site after the pre­sen­ta­tion, but if they only remem­bered that one thing—world’s thinnest notebook—it would tell them a lot. Now, Google for “world’s thinnest note­book” and you will find more than 30,000 links to the phrase.

Audi­ences are look­ing for a “head­line,” a way to posi­tion the new prod­uct in their own minds. One of my favorite prod­uct descrip­tions from Jobs occurred in 2003, when he intro­duced Keynote pre­sen­ta­tion soft­ware for the Mac. He said “Keynote is a pre­sen­ta­tion app for when your pre­sen­ta­tion really counts. Oh, and Keynote was built for me!” The slide behind Jobs sim­ply read, “Built for me.” He then launched into the details of the soft­ware but you only needed the one takeway—a pre­sen­ta­tion appli­ca­tion built for Jobs.

CIO​.com: Pow­er­Point soft­ware always causes con­tentious debate about its mer­its. How does Jobs use it to his advantage?

Gallo: Well, let’s be clear. Steve Jobs uses Apple’s Keynote pre­sen­ta­tion soft­ware, a very ele­gant tool.

The vast major­ity of pre­sen­ta­tions, how­ever, are cre­ated on Microsoft Pow­er­Point. My book is software-agnostic, which sim­ply means it doesn’t mat­ter whether you’re a Mac or a PC, whether you use Keynote or Pow­er­Point. The point is that both of these tools can com­pli­ment your story.
Pow­er­Point is not evil as some have sug­gested. Guy Kawasaki once told me that Pow­er­Point is a tool. Those who think it’s evil don’t know how to use it. Now that we know that infor­ma­tion is more effec­tively deliv­ered with pic­tures instead of words, Pow­er­Point becomes a very effec­tive tool for deliv­er­ing new or abstract infor­ma­tion. For exam­ple, when Jobs intro­duced the iPod in 2001, he said it would allow you to carry 1,000 songs in your pocket—the “head­line.” And to show you just how small it was, he said “iPod is the size of a deck of cards.”

It’s been years since I saw that pre­sen­ta­tion but I remem­ber what he said. Why? Because the slide showed a deck of cards. Pic­tures trump words.