A presentation is a great chance to further your career. People will pick you for key projects because they can count on you to sell the work at presentation time. In this series, we look at the principles that enable you to prepare outstanding, career-boosting presentations. The Audience Your starting point, and the key to strong preparation, is a thorough understanding of your listeners, including their needs and limitations.
Great presentations are radical in their focus on the audience.
They address real people with real needs and ask them for a real response. Poor presentations, including many that seem quite polished, play out in thin air, removed from the audience, in an abstract space of ideas. Because they don't address real people, they rarely get a real response, either. Thinking about these three things will lead to a strong main message and possible key points that matter to the audience. In a presentation skills seminar, one engineer gave a well structured, informative presentation on a certain computerized system intended to replace error-prone manual control.