Speak Up

Really enjoying this book Working The Room by Nick Morgan about how to get some energy and passion into any speech or presentation you give. Morgan is no fan of Powerpoint -- so he and I are brothers/sisters in the movement to make Powerpoint go away. It seems to just about guarantee that the SNORE factor in your conference room will jump exponentially in relation to the number of slides you've made and number of bullet points on each slide -- pretend the bullet points are bullets heading for each person in your audience and pretty quickly, you have NO audience.

We've all seen Lincoln's Gettysburg Address on Powerpoint, but here it is again, and in Morgan's book he writes a very detailed exegesis of the actual Lincoln speech showing why it's just so damned good.

If you've ever made a speech, if you're going to make a speech, if you had made 150,000 speeches, this is still really worth buying. His section on the "story" of a good presentation, including "The Quest" or "Stranger in A Strange Land" or "Rags To Riches" or "Revenge" and last but not least, and a big favorite "Boy Meets Girl" is really interesting. Buy it. read it. do it.