“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.”

“In the old days, I’d lug my book around and do a dog and pony show with my work meticulously mounted to 16″x20″ black boards. It’s how they taught me to do it in art school. What they didn’t teach me was how to whip up a proper proposal.”

“The Apple CEO is well known for his electrifying presentations. Here are five tips to make your next talk just as mesmerizing — or close.”

“Several people have asked me for a blog entry about executive summaries. My colleague at Garage, Bill Reichert, wrote this explanation, and it’s as good as it gets.”

“Sometimes the best presentation is… no presentation. Ditch the slides completely. Put the projector in the closet, roll the screen back up, and turn the damn lights back on! Especially if the slides are bullet points. Or worse… paragraphs… The second you dim the lights and go into ‘presentation mode’ is the moment you move from a two-way conversation to a one-way lecture/broadcast.”

In the Japanese language Nikkei newspaper yesterday I stumbled upon an interesting article featuring stories on people who have started small grassroots movements — however unintentional — by doing something in a unique way. One such person is Mr. Masayoshi Takahashi who has gotten a lot of people interested in his unique way of presenting, now labeled the ‘Takahashi Method.’ Takahashi uses only text in his slides. But not just any text — really big text. Huge text. Characters of impressive proportion which rarely number more than ten, usually fewer.

“As Jerry Seinfeld once noted, at a funeral, most people would rather be in the casket than giving the eulogy, since public speaking stresses people out more than death. But giving talks doesn’t have to be such a frightening affair.”

“Welcome to Thumbstacks.com, a new site for making and sharing presentations on the web… With Thumbstacks.com, you can make presentations — like slideshows, or outlines — right in your web browser. When you’re done, you can share your presentations with anyone, anywhere, just by sending them a link. Want to see an example? Here’s a presentation about us.”

“I’ve just come back from a grueling week of corporate meetings, a 5 day marathon of seemingly never ending PowerPoint presentations. As the person in charge of marketing and IT, part of my job is to be the contact point for all of the attendees, folks ranging from 1st year sales reps to divisional presidents, COO’s and CEO’s. Everyone is required to send me their presentations in advance, so that they can all be put on a single computer. If I get them in time, I usually go through them quickly and fix any of the obvious problems. Human nature being what it is though, most people actually gave me their presentation the morning they were presenting, usually on a memory stick with the words ‘I made some last-minute changes, just put this one in instead…’. Sometimes this doesn’t work quite as well as they would like…”

“This is totally off-topic but this is a must-watch for anyone doing presentations in front of an audience. The content is pretty interesting in itself (the concept of electronic identity) but the form of the presentation is what will blow you away. This is absolutely brilliant.” (”Watch Dick [Hardt, Founder & CEO, Sxip Identity] deliver a compelling and dynamic introduction on Identity 2.0 and how the concept of digital identity is evolving.”)

“So, if PowerPoint is evil; the fightback begins here. Think of this as a wholesome, good karma form of industrial sabotage. All that is required is a careful (furtive) insertion of this image into various PowerPoint presentation decks … No money back guarantee and I’m not liable if you lose your job, the respect of your peers … etc. etc.”