Special Speeches: Technical Speeches

00:00 Here's the problem. You're told you have to give a technical presentation and people automatically put this hat on, and it says, Oh, I've got to be really boring and do a massive data dump.

00:10 No, you don't.

00:12 You can be interesting and memorable.

00:14 It doesn't matter if it's a technical presentation, a financial presentation, formal or informal.

00:20 The audience is still judging you the same way.

00:22 Is this interesting? Useful, helpful? I'll pay attention.

00:25 Boring, tedious.

00:26 Zone out. So you've got to realize that when you're giving a technical presentation.

00:33 People tell me all the time.

00:34 T.J., I love your ideas about narrowing the messages down, having examples, case studies, stories, but I can't do that because I'm giving a technical presentation at absolute garbage.

00:46 Yet, who else gave technical presentations? Steve Jobs. Now.

00:50 I don't want you to mimic him and try to be Steve Jobs, but when he spoke, he got people to focus on one thing at a time.

01:00 When he used visuals, it wasn't to store a whole bunch of words.

01:04 So I would urge you Google Steve Jobs speeches, go to YouTube, look at his speeches, and note how relatively few number of points and data points and numbers are in his speeches.

01:17 Look at how he uses images to drive home technical points. So when he wanted to communicate the technical point that one of his AirMac earlier laptop was incredibly thin, he didn't put up a slide, the keynote slide, which is the Apple version of PowerPoint.

01:39 He didn't put up a keynote slide that said bullet point thickness, one eighth of inch. That's not what he did.

01:46 He had someone walk out on stage, carry an envelope, give it to him.

01:50 And he said, How thin is this new computer? He pulled it out of the envelope, thin enough to fit in this envelope. It dramatically conveyed the idea of, wow, this computer is really thin.

02:07 Most people, when told they have to give a technical presentation, they wouldn't do that. They think, Oh, I got to go over all the specs and the gigahertz and the megabytes and the ram and the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

02:18 It's boring. It doesn't stick.

02:20 Now you've got to be able to answer people's questions on that.

02:23 You can certainly give them that information and the handout, the email, the press release.

02:29 But as far as you standing up and speaking, that's not the time to do the technical data dump.

02:35 You've got to get people to focus on what's most important in your technology and how it's going to help and change their lives.