HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations (HBR Guide Series)

Plan content for 60% of your time slot: If you’re given a full hour, take no more than 40 minutes. That will leave time for Q&A, a panel, or some other form of discussion. It’s hard to keep people’s attention for much longer than 40 minutes unless you’ve built in interesting guest speakers, video clips, interactive exercises, and such. As Thoma

People will move away from pain and toward pleasure. Prod them (with words like “struggle” from the first example; “destroying” and “killing” from the second) so they feel uncomfortable staying in their current position. Lure them toward your idea with encouragement and rewards (the promise of meeting deadlines; protection of endangered species).

Trim your slide deck: If you created an hour-long presentation and want to deliver it in 40 minutes, cut your slides by a third. You can work in slide-sorter mode in PowerPoint, dragging slides to a “slide cemetery” at the very end of the file. Don’t delete them, because you might have to resurrect one or more at the last minute, when you’re answer

“Your audience wants you to be real. So avoid sounding like a corporate spokesperson—but don’t portray false humility, either. Playing small and meek when inside you know (and the audience knows) you’re a giant will not win you any fans. Authenticity means claiming who you are.”

If you tap into an object’s natural rate of vibration, or resonant frequency, it will move: It may vibrate, shudder, or even play a sympathetic musical note—think tuning forks. The same is true, metaphorically, when you present to an audience. If you tap into the group’s resonant frequency, you can move the people listening to you.

“forgive a stumble, an ‘um,’ or a section where you backtrack as long as they know that your heart is in the right place.”

Each slide should pass what I call the glance test: People should be able to comprehend it in three seconds. Think of your slides as billboards.

and yourself as the mentor who helps people see themselves in that role so they’ll want to get behind your idea and propel it forward.

Say you’re presenting a new product concept to the executive team, and you know you won’t get their buy-in unless Trent, the president of the enterprise division, gets excited about the idea, because they always defer to his instincts on new initiatives. Appeal first to Trent’s entrepreneurial nature by describing how exciting the new market is—whi