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Developing a compelling presentation involves a series of decisions and exercises to align your head with the fact that you're delivering your content directly to people. No Internet. No weblog. Just you.
Your first decision: speech or presentation? Wondering about the difference? Take a quick look at two entirely different appearances by Steve Jobs. The first is his "Three Stories" speech at Stanford,[3] and the second is part of his MacWorld 2007 keynote.[4]
You need to watch only a few minutes of both to get a feel for the difference between a presentation and a speech. My guess is you only viewed the Stanford video, because everyone has seen Steve Jobs at MacWorld and the Stanford video is a shocker. Clearly, it's Steve Jobs. It's his voice, he's got his trademark bottle of water, but the delivery is completely anti-Jobs because he's reading his compelling stories from a piece of a paper.
It freaks me out.
In Steve Martin's autobiography, regarding his stand-up comedy years, he writes, "If you don't dim the lights...the audience won't laugh." This subtle, paradoxical observation is the core difference between speeches and presentations. In a presentation, half of the art is figuring out how to create an environment where your audience can actively participate without knowing they are participating. In a speech, the audience may laugh or cry, but they are not required nor encouraged to participate, because, during a speech, the spotlight never leaves the speechmaker.
For a presentation or a speech, you need your audience; otherwise, it's just you in an empty room talking to no one in particular, and we already have a word for that...it's called writing.
Learn more about this topic from Being Geek.
As a software engineer, you recognize at some point that there's much more to your career than dealing with code. Is it time to become a manager? Tell your boss he’s a jerk? Join that startup? Author Michael Lopp recalls his own make-or-break moments with Silicon Valley giants such as Apple, Netscape, and Symantec in Being Geek -- an insightful and entertaining book that will help you make better career decisions.
