A tale of two presentations

Triumph and disaster

Director Michael Bay is known for a long resume of blockbuster summer movies featuring his trademark emphasis on grand spectacle, including the liberal use of pyrotechnics.1 While critics have not been kind to his work, the studios that entrust him with their marquee franchises have happily raked in the profits, as his productions have collectively grossed billions of dollars.

In 2014 electronics giant Samsung sought an appropriate spokesperson for a new television it was about to launch. Given his reputation for visual effects Bay seemed the perfect fit. He was asked to participate in the premiere industry forum where the company’s latest technological achievements would be showcased.2 Sharing the stage with a company executive, Bay intended to talk up the potential of these new screens, leveraging his own experience as a prominent director.

The session began with the usual anodyne comments. Unfortunately for all involved, that was the only part that went as planned.

A missed cue and a momentary hiccup in the prompter from which Bay read his lines threw him off kilter, and he found himself unable to regain his place in the text, quickly bringing the session to a halt.3 His co-presenter attempted to steer him to a more general discussion—which should have been simple given his extensive background in the medium. Even that failed to rescue the floundering Bay.

Visibly flustered, he finally turned on his heel and simply walked out without explanation, leaving his dumbfounded counterpart to feebly attempt to regain the audience’s attention.4

Contrast Bay’s reaction with another speaker who faced a similarly unexpected technical failure. Steve Jobs was in front of hundreds of Apple fans and journalists in 2010 to introduce the new iPhone 4 when the device failed to connect to the internet.5 Jobs was known for his iron-fisted control over the smallest details, and now momentum was lost as a balky network connection stopped the demo in its tracks.

Despite the tension, Jobs maintained his poise as his team worked frantically to isolate the problem.6 It was finally identified as a bandwidth issue linked to the audience’s own use of the internet. After some bantering with the crowd, Jobs was back in business and the rest of his demonstration continued as expected. The incident became just a minor speed bump and created an opportunity to engage listeners while openly acknowledging the shortcoming.

Shift the focus

What accounted for the dramatically different outcomes? Sure, Bay could have rehearsed more to be less dependent on the script. Jobs also had the advantage of his mythical reputation, putting the audience firmly on his side before he even said a word.

But perhaps the biggest factor was that Jobs had something he cared about deeply and wanted to share, and the keynote was the means for introducing its transformative capabilities to a wider audience. One of these was a new video calling feature called FaceTime, which had been anticipated in fiction for decades and was now real. Bay was primarily a hired gun, brought in to bring some star power to an event needing some dazzle factor.

Communication is most powerful when the speaker is fully subsumed in the idea being shared, as Jobs clearly was. Bay’s failed outing showed what happens when the presenter and idea being conveyed are disconnected.

How a presenter is perceived, the rigor of her rehearsals, deploying the right rhetorical flourishes—all are important, but these are not the focus. The most effective communicators captivate others with the power of their ideas, and they do so even when the subject seems prosaic. A quarterly financial update or analytics review can be inspirational, if the one delivering the message identifies and shares the intriguing or significant idea it carries.

You wouldn’t need to rehearse much if asked right now to talk about something you were passionate about, or a profound experience you wanted others to join in. The emphasis would naturally flow from the power of the idea to ensuring that your listener engaged with it. You would be excited by the prospect of spreading what is personally meaningful to others. In this model the idea is central, and the speaker merely a means of ensuring it sinks in deeply.

The big idea

The high stakes presentation from the convention center stage is uncommon, but the principles of a good one apply equally to the team update in the small conference room. Consider three principles for the next session you are tasked with leading:

• You must have something important to say. No tips, tricks, or speaking hacks will matter if you don’t. Bay was a mercenary hired for his reputation. He lacked obvious passion for the product he was charged with demonstrating, except to the extent that Samsung paid him otherwise.7 For all his flaws Jobs was a passionate evangelist for the technology his company produced, and no one at Apple cared more about creating exceptional products and then sharing this excellence with the world. If you don’t care, why should your audience? Conversely, passion is infectious.8
• You are not the message. If given the chance to share with a group, take that as a precious opportunity to deliver something of importance, not a means of self-aggrandizement. Even in politics, where success seems linked to the ability to draw attention to one’s self, effective leaders stand in for an idea in their supporters’ minds. This is why some of the more memorable campaigns around the world have developed specific expressions of universal ideas (change, hope, freedom, etc.) and foregrounded these as worthy of support. Jobs was iconic for the “reality distortion field” he could propagate from the stage, but the reason for this wasn’t the elegant visuals or the black turtlenecks. He succeeded because he shared a vision, manifested in technology, for which he was the messenger. The best speakers are means of conveying ideas that go beyond what a single individual can represent.
• Impact relates directly to the stakes of the idea. In the case of Bay and Jobs, the stakes were frankly not earth-shattering (although Jobs might beg to differ). If the rollout of a curved television or a new videoconferencing feature was glitchy these products would find their way to the market anyway. Other messages are more critical, and communicating precisely and convincingly really matters. Trivial or obvious ideas don’t capture minds, so be sure that what you share is meaningful—and that this meaning gets through to the listener. The inability of engineers to convey the life-and-death consequences of their findings to those in authority led on two separate occasions to the loss of a Space Shuttle, each time costing the lives of seven astronauts. For your message to be powerful, the implications should be as well.

The next time you have the opportunity to present, what significant idea do you want to share?

References

Unfortunately for Michael Bay his abortive Samsung presentation lives forever on the internet. This Guardian article includes a clip.

Blow-by-blow of Steve Jobs’ iPhone 4 introduction and the problems he encountered available on Wired.

Chris Anderson, the founder of TED, described the concept of sharing an idea as central to the conference’s eponymous talks.