How to position a logo

Many logos come with tag lines and/or (R) or (TM) attachments. When positioning a logo on a page, ignore these and focus only on the main text or graphic to align the image on a slide (even better: violate the logo style rules and crop them out). For horizontal alignment of a number of…

Light or dark background?

For big audiences, you need to get the entire look of the stage right, not just your slides. Below you see that a dark background works better. A light background on a huge screen overpowers the presenter. For small conference rooms, a light background will do fine, and for reading…

Presenting to your CEO

You are the country manager of one of a company’s 100 territories, and the CEO is coming to visit. You probably have a deck somewhere that you can use to Frankenstein the all encompassing presentation about your country organisation.



But maybe it might be better to start from scratch…

Story procrastination

Life is tough in the corporate world today. Endless (often useless) meetings, short-term requests that frustrate your attention to get the big job done, a relentless stream of emails. With all these distractions, it is hard to find the time to simply sit down and design/write/dream the…

A deck for a 5 hr meeting?

After my presentation in Barcelona last night, one of the audience members came up to me and asked whether for 5-hour presentations, you should take a different approach from the one that I had been advocating for the 20 minute investor pitch. Two answers:

The tiny legend

Many consulting charts feature a tiny legend in the top-right corner that explains what the shading in the bar chart means (for example “Have no access to clean drinking water”). Often that is the whole point of the chart and that legend deserve to be made a bit more visible.

Handling an unfriendly audience

Audience members are not always friendly. Unfriendliness comes in 2 types:

1. the civilised audience who is reluctant to agree with your proposal (I faced many of those as a management consultant) and
2. the heckler who is out…