Meetings / Presentations

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For those poor unfortunates of you who are still forced to number yourselves amongst the gainfully employed (Gloat, gloat, gloat!) and are required to attend/conduct/participate in that most horrendous of business practices - The MEETING - (I feel your pain!) I offer the following...

Guidelines For Giving A Horrible Presentation

Presenting data at a conference? Preparing a seminar or a lecture? Then you need these “Guidelines For Giving A Horrible Presentation.” Strict adherence to the following time-tested directions will ensure that both you and your subject matter will remain obscure, and will guarantee an audience of minimum size at your next presentation.

SLIDES AND OVERHEADS

1. Use lots of slides and overhead projections. A rule of thumb is one for each ten seconds of time allotted for your talk. If you don’t have enough, borrow some from the previous speaker, or cycle back and forth between slides and overheads.

2. Put as much information on each slide and overhead projection as possible. Graphs with a dozen or so crossed lines - all in the same colour, tables with at least one hundred entries, and maps with at least twenty or thirty geographical divisions are especially effective; but equations, particularly if they contain at least fifteen terms and twenty variables, are almost as impressive. A high density concentration of excessively detailed and marginally relevant data usually preempts penetrating and potentially awkward questions from the audience.

3. Use the smallest available type size. Anyone who has not had the foresight to either sit in the front row, or bring a set of binoculars, is probably not bright enough to understand your talk anyway.

4. Use figures and tables directly from publications. They will assist you in accomplishing goal 2 and 3 above and minimize the amount of preparation required for the presentation. If you haven’t published the work, use illustrations from an old publication. It’s likely that only a few people in the audience will notice anyway.

5. Make sure that at least one slide or overhead is upside down or sideways. This will help in relieving tension in the room.

PRESENTATION

1. Don’t organize your speech in advance. It is generally best not to even think about it until your name had been announced by the session’s chair. Above all, don’t write the presentation down, for it may fall into enemy hands.

2. Never, ever, rehearse, even briefly. Speeches are best when they are given spontaneously with content organized in a totally random manner. Leave it as a challenging exercise for the listener to assemble your thoughts properly and make some sense out of what you say.

3. Discuss each slide and overhead in complete and prolonged detail, especially those parts irrelevant to the main points of your subject matter. If you suspect that there is anyone in the audience who is not asleep, return to a previous slide and discuss it at even greater length.

4. Face the projection screen, mumble, and talk as quickly as possible, especially when making important points. An alternate strategy is to speak very slowly, leave every other sentence unfinished, and punctuate each thought with, “ahhh,” “unhh,” or something equally informative.

5. Wave the light pointer around the room, or at least move the beam rapidly about on the slide image in small circles. If this is done properly, it will make 50% of the people in the front three rows (and those who had the foresight to bring binoculars) ill.

6. Use up all of your allotted time and at least half, if not all, of the next speaker’s allocation. This avoids foolish and annoying questions and forces the chair to cut short the subsequent speaker’s presentations. Remember, the rest of the lecturers don’t have anything important to say anyway. If they did, they would have been placed higher on the program than you.

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HOW TO ATTEND A MEETING

To really succeed in a business enterprise or an organization, it is sometimes helpful to know what your job is, and whether it involves any duties. Ask around amongst your co-workers. “Hi, “ you should say. “I’m new here. What is the name of my job?” If they answer “long-range planner” or “Lieutenant Governor,” you’re pretty much free to lounge around and do crossword puzzles until retirement. Most jobs, however, will require at least some work.

There are two major kinds of work in modern organizations:

1. Taking phone messages for people who are in meetings, and
2. Going to meetings.

Your ultimate career strategy should be to attain a position involving primarily activity #2, going to meetings, because that’s where the real prestige is. It’s all very well and good to be able to take phone messages, but you’re never going to be able to get to a position of power, a position where you can cost thousands of people their jobs with a single bonehead decision, unless you learn how to attend meetings.

The first meeting ever was held way back in the Mezzanine Era. In those days, Man’s job was to slay his chosen prey and bring it home to Woman, who had to figure out how to cook it. The problem was that Man was slow and basically naked, whereas the prey had warm fur and could run like an antelope. (In fact, it was an antelope, but nobody knew that yet)

At last, someone said, “maybe if we just sat down and did some brainstorming, we could come up with abetter way to hunt our prey!” It went extremely well, for an initial effort, considering the position of facilitator had not been invented yet, plus it was much warmer sitting in a circle, so they agreed to meet again the next day, and the next.

But the women pointed out that, prey-wise, the men had not produced anything, and the human race was pretty much starving. The men agreed that this was indeed a serious situation and they would put it right near the top of their meeting’s agenda. At this point, the women, who were primitive but not stupid, started eating plants, and thus modern agriculture was born. It never would have happened without meetings.

The modern business meeting, however, might better be compared with a funeral, in the sense that you have a gathering of people who are wearing uncomfortable clothing and would all rather be somewhere else. The major difference is that most funerals have a definite purpose. Also, nothing is ever really buried in a meeting. An idea may look dead, but it will always reappear at another meeting later on. If you have ever seen the movie, “Night of the Living Dead,” you have a rough idea of how modern meetings operate, with projects and proposals that everyone thought had been mercifully killed rising up constantly from their graves to stagger back into meetings and eat the brains of the living.

There are two major kinds of meetings:

1. Meetings that are held for basically the same reason Arbor Day is observed - namely, tradition. For example, a lot of managerial people like to meet on Monday, because it’s Monday. You’ll get used to it. You’d better, because this kind of meeting accounts for 83% of all meetings (based on a study in which I wrote down numbers until one of them looked about right) This type of meeting operates about the way “Show and Tell” does in nursery school, with everybody getting to say something, the difference being in nursery school, the kids actually have something to say.

When it’s your turn to speak, you should indicate you’re still working on whatever it is you’re supposed to be working on. This might seem pretty dumb, since obviously you’d be working on whatever it is you’re working on, and even if you weren’t, you’d claim you were, but that’s the traditional thing for everyone to say. It would be a lot faster if the person running the meeting would just say,”Everybody who is still working on whatever he or she is supposed to be working on, please raise your hand.” You’d be out of there in five minutes, even allowing for the jokes. But this is not how we do it in America. My guess is, it’s how they do it in Japan.

2. Meetings where there is some alleged purpose. These are more of a challenge, because what you do is determined by what the purpose supposedly is. Sometimes the purpose is harmless, like someone wanting to show slides of pie charts, and give everyone a big fat report. All you have to do in this kind of meeting is sit there and have elaborate fantasies to occupy your mind, then take the report back to your office and throw it away, unless, of course, you’re a vice-president, in which case you write down the name of some subordinate in the upper right hand corner, followed by a question mark, like this: “Norm?” Then you send it to Norm and forget all about it. (although it will plague Norm for the rest of his career)

3. But sometimes you go to meeting where the purpose is to get your “input” on something. This can be a very serious situation because what it means is, they want to make sure that in case whatever it is turns out to be stupid or fatal, you’ll get some of the blame, so you have to escape from the meeting before they get around to asking you anything. One way is to set fire to your tie.

Another is to have an accomplice interrupt the meeting and announce that you have a phone call from someone very important, such as the President of the company, or the Pope. It should be one or the other. It would sound fishy if the accomplice said, “You have a call from the President of the company, or the Pope.”

You should know how to take notes at a meeting. Use a yellow legal pad. At the top, write the date and underline it twice. Now wait until an important person, such as your boss, starts talking. When he does, look at him with an expression of enraptured interest, as though he is revealing the secrets of life itself. Then draw a bunch of interlocking doodles on the pad. If it is an especially lengthy meeting, you can try some more complicated doodles and perhaps a caricature of the boss.

If someone falls asleep in a meeting, have everyone else leave the room. Then collect a group of total strangers, right off the street, and have them sit around the sleeping person until he wakes up. Then have one of them say to him, “Bob, your proposal is very, very risky. However, the arguments you’ve put forward give us little choice but to give it a try. I only hope, for your sake, that you know what you’re getting yourself into.” Then they should file quietly out of the room.

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TOP TEN TRICKS TO LIVEN UP A MEETING


1. Stand up and act indignant. Demand that the boss tell you the “real” reason this meeting has been called.

2. Spill coffee on the conference table. Produce a tiny paper boat and sail it down the table.

3. During a meeting, each time the boss makes an important point, (or at least one he/she seems to consider important), make a noise like you are building towards an orgasm.

4. Stay behind as everybody else, including the boss, leaves. Thank them all for coming.

5. Give a broad wink towards someone else at the table. Over time, wink at everybody. Sometimes shake your head just a little, as if to indicate the speaker is slightly unstable and everyone knows it.

6. Arrange to have a poorly-dressed young woman with an infant quietly enter the meeting, stare directly at the (male) speaker for a while, burst into tears, then run from the room.

7. Bring a hand puppet, preferably a cartoon character or fuzzy animal. Ask it to clarify difficult points during the discussion.

8. When there is a call for questions, lean back in your chair, prop your feet up on the table, smile contentedly, and say, “Well, here’s the way I see it, J.B....” (or any other impressive-sounding initials that are actually not your boss’s.)

9. Complain loudly that your neighbour won’t stop touching you. Demand that the boss make him/her stop doing it.

10. Bring a sizeable mountain of computer printouts to the meeting. If possible, include some old-fashioned fanfold paper for dramatic effect. Every time the speaker makes a point, let on as if you are checking it in one of the printouts. Pretend to find substantiating evidence there. Nod vigorously, and say, “Uh-huh, uh-huh!”