Team huddle shakes up boring meetings


How are your team meetings?

  • Do they drag on endlessly while your staff watch the clock, aware that work isn’t getting done?
  • Does the staff leave the meetings no closer to producing results than when they came into the meeting?
  • Does the staff leave the meeting unsure of team priorities and “TOP 3” targets for the day or for the week?
  • Does the meeting leave the team’s morale downward at the meeting?

If your team meetings need a kick in the seat of the pants, try something radical, like a structured team huddle. Watch the video of a team huddle and find the six key parts of the huddle.

PowerPoint Comedy of Errors


UPDATE 2010: Don McMillan updated his comedy bit for 2010! (first posted in 2007…)

How many errors can you find in this PowerPoint show? Making the rounds on video sites is Don McMillan’s clever presentation, Life after Death by Powerpoint.
Did you spot the

Continue reading

The art of the focal point


“Every good design needs a focal point.” Garr Reynolds begins in this meaty blog post.

Explaining “Tokonoma,” Garr moves from the Japanese architectural and cultural explanation, into the realm of practical application in—of all things—presentations. He takes the real-life, explains the concepts, and turns them back into the real life.

Brilliantly depicting before and after examples of presentation images, Garr shows examples that my most-practical and literal-minded followers can swallow.

I encourge you to apply the principles if you do any of the following:

  • create presentations and training visuals
  • design living spaces or workspaces
  • create visual communications (even the most-basic e-mail!)
  • Read his post on presentationzen.com.

Rethinking the Presentation


Business Week’s article “Rethinking the Presentation”supports the presentation principles that I’ve covered in past sermons blog entries. In summary, the article reinforces the mantra: avoid bullet points, cut the noise, picture superiority, and other facets of the new design methodology.

As a team member on a redesign of our new employee orientation presentations, we featured many of these techniques, starting with Continue reading

digital photos, PowerPoint (boo), and online web albums (yay!)


“Geewhiz, send these photos out for the staff to see.” OK. I’ll just take a few hundred hi-res digital photos, paste them into a PowerPoint file, store that file on a local server, attach that file to email and send it to 200+ employees spread across the country. Aaaaaahh! You can see we have a recipe for a file storage disaster!

That process typified the old-school method of sharing photos, once used by our division. What’s wrong with that picture and what are we doing differently today?

Our first mistake was adding them to a PowerPoint file Continue reading

Good PowerPoint design


Instead of just “rebranding” our new employee orientation slides, a team is giving them an extreme makeover. I’m excited to report that the team is saying “no more boring bullet point slides!”
I’m jazzed that we’re considering overall presentation flow, identifying key takeaway messages, reminding ourselves of the mental perspective of a new employee, and connecting that audience regardless of their division or department.
For starters, check out Presentation Zen’s summary of (continued)