Have you ever been to a presentation and thought this is awesome content but the speaker is so boring or monotone I can’t pay attention. So you end up looking up the subject of the presentation on your phone, tablet or laptop and researching it, then ask the SME questions when they finish their spiel?

As bad as I feel about it I will admit it happens to me more often than it should. Partly because I have a very small attention span, and partly because I prefer things to move fast (East Coast kid). Recently I sat through a very cool presentation, at least the subject was cool but it got me thinking what makes a good presentation? So let’s tackle a super subjective subject.

Yeah this is really my dad and I

When I did my first presentation a long time ago, I was counseled that presentations are all about the presenter, their style and the audience to which they are presenting. I thought sure that makes sense, my dad was a Chief in the Navy and he told me the Chief philosophy of presenting which goes like this:

Step 1 tell them what you are going to tell them

Step 2 tell them

Step 3 tell them what you told them

While this process works it’s more of a framework than a delivery style. You still need to bring your own flavor to make the presentation a success. I have been through a couple of speaker trainings as well and each say the same thing:

Be concise

Speak Clearly

Use body language to your advantage

Don’t read the slides talk to them

Tell a story

It’s the last point that is really the most important, when you present you need to build a story, your presentation needs to have a beginning, middle and for your audiences sake an end. That end most likely needs a “call to action”, which is marketing speak for telling your audience what they should do next based on the information you just provided them.

The infamous Fred Nix tells all EMC new hires to “transfer their enthusiasm into other”. Which means you have to be enthusiastic about the subject that you are presenting. How do you do that if you really don’t care about what you are about to present? The answer is, think of a story from your life that relates to the subject and then built that story into your presentation.

Once you are comfortable with telling the story, and wrapping that around the subject you are presenting on you can really start to have fun with it. Come up with themes, maybe it’s your favorite movie or a random meme, and build the deck around that and then connect with the subject through creative ways. This will increase your connection even further and will draw the audience in even more.

Lastly let’s address knowing your audience; I have spoken in front of some very serious individuals. In my less experienced years I would curtail my style to be more business like and eliminate my sarcastic and joking nature. The result was uncomfortable presentations with awkward pauses as I regrouped to answer questions. Now I have realized a universal truth, which is everyone likes to laugh, and I deal with stress through jokes. I would say making jokes or self-deprecating humor are key strengths for me while presenting. That may not be everyone’s forte, so figure out what works for you through trial and error. If you do choose to go the joke route, be sure that you don’t go too far. Remember office humor can be funny but don’t be the one who gets escorted out of the Christmas party funny, and make fun of yourself but not to the point where you lose credibility.

Presenting is just talking and it it can be a lot of fun. I hope this helps someone who has been struggling find their voice and style. Good luck and I would love to hear how you present and what your style is?

After running around like crazy lately and traveling a lot, I decided it was time to put some effort into getting this blog rolling again. As anyone who blogs knows it is really tough to keep writing. But I hope with this reboot will come a drive to keep it up and keep writing.

While writing my last big post on AppVolumes I realized that install configure posts are not my thing. Way too many screenshots and I lost the desire to continue writing the post. I started to wonder why that was and remembered something that was told to me by a friend in IT about the concept of Warriors or Monks.

Warriors are the engineers who dive into the battle and can learn every nook and cranny of technology and can get anything working. They spend countless hours, doing what I call bulldogging, just stubbornly pursuing the root cause of problems, or figuring out what makes things tick.

The monk, meanwhile are those that learn a technology and can then go and explain that technology to others. They strive to figure out what the best way is to teach and to help other monks as well as warriors see the bigger picture and how it all fits togethers.

For most of my career I was a warrior, during the last few years I have had to act as more of a hybrid warrior monk (think David Carradine in Kung-Fu see the pic). I think now I am probably closer to Mr. Carradine in Kung Fu the legend continues than the original series. I can still kick butt but am better at helping folks see the bigger picture. I can read white papers and understand how something works and explain it. Then put hands on it and make it work. But my job is more to explain how it works to others and help them decide where their journey should take them. There are things that I miss about being in a datacenter and working operations, I don’t have the same level of comradery  that I did working in a datacenter, any new tech I want to play with I have to find a lab to deploy into. The biggest thing I miss is some of the tempo, while things on the vendor side move fast it’s not always with the same urgency I saw when our primary power was arced by the guy changing the air filter on the generator and caused an outage. But there is a lot less stress than having to be up all night working  an outage or working through the ITIL process for a change request.

So why does any of this matter and what’s the point of this self reflection, well I will tell you friends that to blog you have to be passionate about what you write and while I do love technology I don’t like technical writing. I am way better at consuming a technology and then explaining how it fits into the bigger picture and how organizations can leverage it to meet their objectives. So that is where I am going to go with this blog moving forward. There may be the occasional product review or usability description but I will not do any more build\install write-ups I will let the folks who are good at it do that. A special thank you to my friend John Brescia of VirtixIT for the new logo, expect to see some swag very soon from it.

Hope you keep reading and I will keep writing since this is a bit of therapy for me to help me learn and work out my messaging. Thanks as always and I would love your feedback.

Still trying to get some of this together but I have been asked before for a history of EMC acquisitions. Figured I would try to put that into a timeline format. I will update this moving forward as best I can working on scripting some of it. But for now take a look and tell me what you think.