“Steve Jobs’ blockbuster keynote at last week’s Macworld was brilliantly and powerfully delivered — one of his best ever. It was also a colossal mistake.”

“I’m on a mission this year. A mission to expunge PowerPoint slides from all my clients’ presentations. For a while, I thought it was getting better. People seemed to be using fewer slides, though they were as poorly designed as ever. But, alas, there seems to have been a relapse.”

“People pay attention to graphics. They respond to graphics. They learn from graphics. If you want your readers/learners/audience to ‘get’ something as quickly and clearly as possible, use visuals. And you don’t have to be a graphic artist, designer, or information architect to put pictures in your presentation, post, or book. This post is my first attempt to categorize the kinds of graphics I do here, and offer tips for creating visuals that tell the story better and faster than words.”

“In Beautiful Evidence, Edward Tufte says, ‘If you’re running a business, figure out how to pack a huge amount of information onto a single 11×17″ sheet of paper and print it out on a laserprinter, then give it to decision makers. With that one sheet of paper, they will have as much information as 15 computer screenfuls or 300 PowerPoint slides.’ So why don’t more web sites do this?”

“Keyboard shortcuts can save time and the effort of switching from the keyboard to the mouse to execute simple commands. Print this list of Power Point keyboard shortcuts and keep it by your computer for a quick reference.”

“It’s basically a half suit that you can put on over virtually anything, to give you that professional appearance during video conferences or web chats. Each Businessbib has a slit back Velcro-sealed design and can be slipped over your T-shirt and shorts to give you to that sophisticated look in a jiffy.” Ha!

XPLANE founder and CEO Dave Gray will be giving a visual thinking workshop in Toronto on September 8: “The title of the workshop will be ‘The Power of Pictonics: Using Visualizations to Tell Your Technology Story.’ I am really looking forward to this. There will be plenty of hands-on exercises to help you hone your visual thinking and storytelling skills. You’ll also learn some of the ’secret sauce’ that goes into making visual explanations. This will be a pretty special event, to be held in the beautiful and hi-tech MaRS convergence and innovation center in the downtown Discovery District. It also happens to coincide with the Toronto film festival, one of the best film festivals in North America in my opinion. So if you’ve been meaning to visit Toronto you couldn’t pick a better time.”

“On Angel Day each startup will only get ten minutes, so we encourage them to focus on just two goals: (a) explain what you’re doing, and (b) explain why users will want it. That might sound easy, but it’s not when the speakers have no experience presenting, and they’re explaining technical matters to an audience that’s mostly non-technical.”

“Hey there. One of my largest pet peeves as an audience member, I have to admit, is a platform speaker who does not have his or her ‘ums’ or ‘ahs’ under control. Sure, these involuntary ‘placeholder,’ ‘filler,’ or ‘bridge’ noises are understandable in their way. However, in my opinion, one of the hallmarks of a professional teacher, trainer, or public speaker is that his or her speech just f-l-o-w-s as naturally as possible, and is relatively or completely free from extraneous filler words. In this blog post I will share a technique that has helped me to solve this problem.”

“I’m doing a lot of speaking all of a sudden, related to my pre-launch plans around a new media company. I’m finding that there are certain skills in communicating the information and building understanding that are important and useful. I thought I’d pass on some thoughts along those lines.”

“A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a pictogram is worth so much more… A good BoND [Back of the Napkin Diagram] can also assist with employee recruitment, team alignment, sales and technology build outs. The vocal [Rick] Segal comments, that ‘As the prospective client, employee, or VC engages, both parties can use the drawing as a central reference point. It’s a very useful tool that is often overlooked in favour of mountains of text laden painful power point slides.’ In fact, BoNDs can be used throughout the business, according to the Grandfather of business visualizations, Dave Gray, Founder and CEO of XPLANE (the business visualization company behind the powerful BoNDs you see in Business 2.0 magazine).”

“Speakers can be their own worst enemies. Here are our expert’s tips on how to make a presentation sing.”

“Here are ten tips I’ve found extremely useful. Poker players would call them ‘tells,’ psychologists would term them manifestations of our subconscious minds trying to communicate what we believe to be the truth. Behaviorists would say they are learned actions which have given us desired results in the past. The truth is probably a Venn diagram blending the three.”

“Giving presentations can be a complete and utter thrill. Too bad attending them can be a complete and utter bore. If you are on the giving side, I want to offer you up a collection of my best presentation tricks to date.”

“There are many things I’ve been delighted and impressed by during the nearly five months I’ve now spent at Microsoft. However, there have also been a few things that i’ve found extraordinarily disheartening. One of the latter has been the organizatational dependence on ‘the deck’ (that is, Powerpoint files) as the standard mechanism for conveying nearly all information.”