Apply John Bohannon’s proposal to your organization

Recently, John Bohannon presented a TED talk in Brussels that proposed replacing PowerPoint with dancers. The video has had over 330,000 views in less than two months and the idea has once again started people talking about how to improve presentations. In his presentation, John quotes a calculation from an article I published a few years ago to illustrate how much poor PowerPoint presentations are costing organizations. He compares the enormous amount wasted by poor presentations with the cost of funding arts programs in the US, and suggests that cutting arts programs would not help the national economy nearly as much as capturing the productivity that is wasted creating and sitting through poor presentations. I suggest you consider applying his thought to your own organization, no matter how small or large it is. If you could plan and create presentations more efficiently, and the presentations were so good that they allowed quick decisions and increased profits, your organization would reap clear benefits. If your organization took some of those gains and used them to support local causes in the arts or other areas, our overall economy would benefit. Where do you start improving your presentations? I suggest you start with better planning of what you want to communicate in the presentation. Most poor presentations fail to communicate the important message because the presentation has no clear purpose or structure. Recently I delivered a one hour webinar on how to plan a successful presentation. You can order the webinar recording here and get started this week. If you are skeptical that your organization could really be wasting that much due to poor presentations, you may want to use the formula in this article and be prepared to be surprised at the number you end up with. There is a lot of discussion going on about how to improve the global economy. All of us can do our own part by improving the presentations we create, which will increase productivity and improve results.