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One year later, Xerox had taken over the software. Instead of entrepreneur John Meyer giving the opening keynote address, it was corporate journeyman-turned-president Larry Gerhardt. He began with a corporate backgrounder, offered his own resume, talked about how Xerox would be responsive to our needs, and spoke of being proactive and innovative. For the attendees at this conference, this wasn't a speech; it was a punishment.
It was bad enough that this address was everything that Ventura users didn't care about, and delivered with the energy and charisma of a potato. What made it worse were the slides--those dreadful slides. There were yards and yards of bullets, all black text on a white background, which mirrored what Gerhardt said, often verbatim. And this was back in 1990, when the big breakthrough in slide shows was the laser printer and transparencies (before then, slide shows were created on 35mm slides, a carousel projector, and hundreds of dollars in slide output charges). Instead of working the room, Gerhardt was working the projector, fiddling with transparencies and trying not to put his face in the light.
I recall these two memories because I want to share with you what I consider to be the highlight and the nadir of speech-making. The quintessential speaker can hold a room with his or her voice and words, while the less experienced or less talented speakers tend to retreat to various visual aids to help them through a presentation. But this leads to a question that has been nagging me for the last two years: Where have all the good presenters gone? Because I refuse to believe that there aren't any left, there must be something else going on, and I'll tell you what it is: |
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