Last week in the middle of a presentation to of 500 people at the Massachusetts Conference for Women, my PowerPoint presentation became suddenly “unavailable.”  The screen went dark and a signal sign was flashing.  As luck would have it, even though we had “tested it twice,” the computer crashed while Meredith O’Connor, our Marketing Director, was loading  videos.  These videos were an important part of the program, an exercise called “You Be the Coach,” in which the audience critiques well known CEO speakers. 

To compound things, I had arrived there in the morning without a hard copy of the PowerPoint slides.  They were not printed for the audience.  So without PowerPoint slides it would have been tough to make sure the “show went on.”  Fortunately, I have had so many experiences like this, that I knew I would need a print out.  I asked a terrific conference aid if she would take the flash drive and run to Kinkos downstairs at the Boston Convention Center to have it printed for me.  This is an important reminder- you ALWAYS need to have  hard copy in front of you - little did I realize it would save me.  I was able to go on and even joke about how whatever can go wrong, will go wrong, and to point out how to rescue yourself when you encounter such an inconvenient technological glitch.

Here are five tips on how to resuscitate a presentation when the technology gremlins threaten to ruin you.

1.  Bring backup: Flash drive of the PowerPoint, hard copy of the same, and any other visual aids that do not depend upon technology.  Make sure whatever happens you can deliver a great program.

2.  Be flexible: While the technical gurus work on “fixing” a problem, go on with the program, ask questions, do an exercise, get people engaged in a discussion, so that you don’t continue to call attention to the technical issues and people feel the time is used productively.

3. Bring a side-kick:  It would have been extremely difficult to resolve this technical issue with only the technician that the conference center provided; in fact the guy was nowhere to be found at the moment it went down.  Meredith rebooted and kept working on it while I kept the program going, and that was what made the difference.  Whenever possible, bring along someone who can trouble shoot.

4. Stay cool:  What impresses audiences is not the PowerPoint, but how you handle yourself on the platform.  They feel bad for you but they don’t want to have to live your pain.  You will be judged by clients, prospects, bosses, your board of director and other audiences by how you manage under pressure and keep your focus.

5. Have a sense of humor:  When I turned to Meredith (semi seriously) after it looked like she had rebooted and we would be able to see the video.  I said, “Don’t make a liar out of me!”  and that got one of the biggest laughs at the conference.  Later people came up and said, “you model what you say.  That could have been a disaster and you handled it well.” 

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I’m wild about a brand new, beautiful, and absolutely brilliant book on how to create memorable visuals for presentations.  It’s called Presentation Zen, Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery, by Garr Reynolds (New Riders, 2008).

You only have to flip through the pages to immediately grasp Reynold’s provocative mix of inspiration and practical guidance.  As a presentation designer and internationally acclaimed communications expert, he shows how  thoughtfully designed, graceful, efficient visual imagery can make you look good as a presenter.  He has of the most popular Web sites on presentation design and delivery on the net — www.presentationzen.com.

The book is filled page after page of examples of how creativity, photos, large size font, and cool graphics can transform your PowerPoint from dull to dynamite.  Just one example - picture this - the slide on the left shows a full page photo of a runner slogging through the desert with a simple message - Less than 33% of U.S. adults are at a “healthy weight.”  Not bad.  But the slide on the right? It shows the midsection only of an overweight man grabbing his belly fat, with the caption in large print: 66% of Americans are obsese or overweight; below that a simple chart on the numbers of all adults, women and men.  It’s so much more memorable!

Garr Reynolds is a writer, designer and musician who currently holds the position of  Associate Professor of Management at Kansai Gaidai University in Japan. http://www.kansaigaidai.ac.jp/asp/

 Hence, his zen-way of seeing things.

His real message: Simplicity Rules.

How good is it?  Seth Godin  http://www.sethgodin.com/sg/ the marketing guru of gurus quips, “Please don’t buy this book! Once people start making better presentations, mine won’t look so good.”

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