 | Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com A unique approach to organizing and constructing business presentations that draws on the insights of cognitive psychology and provides an infrastructure to build presentations that resonate with your audience like a good story. Average Customer Rating:  
Telling a Story versus "Making a Pitch"
| Customer Rating: | "The Seven Slide Solution" is more than just a book on how to build a PowerPoint presentation in seven slides (or less). Paul Kelly offers a different way of thinking about...and approaching...a presentation in this book.
More specifically, this book covers the core elements of storytelling and maps these elements into PowerPoint presentation language. More about storytelling than PowerPoint, I recommend this book to anyone who presents material to others. Focusing on a story as opposed to bullet points on a slide stands to benefit many presenters and audience members. |
Excellent resource
| Customer Rating: | | I keep this as a companion for when I am creating or editing presentations on Powerpoint. It reminds the key approaches to how much content per slide and how to best depict a concept or idea... |
Great for speakers
| Customer Rating: | For my senior year of college we had a new university president. He liked to take a lot of the chapel time to talk about all the ways they were planning to spend our money on improvements to the school that we would never get to see. He also liked to use PowerPoint - a lot! After a few chapels, we were sick of PowerPoint.
Over the years I have been presented to with PowerPoint in a lot of different settings. Most of the time it was the same story of "blah blah blah." Too many people lean on the tool to enhance their presentation when all it does is illuminate the boredom. PowerPoint doesn't make presentations. People make presentations.
That's why I liked the premise of Paul Kelly's book The Seven Slide SolutionTM. I really found the first two sections interesting and helpful when it comes to developing a presentation using PowerPoint. Based on the way people's brains work, Kelly suggests that a presentation doesn't need to be any longer than seven slides. Anything beyond that is wasting your time and the audiences - they won't remember it. He walks you through the process of developing a story, from creating a premise to establishing conflict, adding tension, and ultimately providing a resolution to your presentation. The final section seemed to me a more hands on or reference to have handy when you are actually putting together the presentation.
Again, it wasn't exactly exciting or motivating, but I learned some good things. If you use PowerPoint very often, it might be a good book to take a look at. It's also a good refresher for putting together the basic elements of a story. |
Helpful Book
| Customer Rating: | This book does for presentations what flow charts do for good programming.
The author begins by depicting the all-too-familiar scene played out daily in most corporate presentations. He moves to an analysis of a better way to present material and provides an easy to replicate template to use when building presentations.
This template is very useful in helping the reader organize his/her thoughts and, in turn, make a better presentation in less time. I used this for the first time a couple of weeks ago to much success in presenting information to the managment of a joint venture. To my surprise, several people on both sides complimented my presentation and thanked me for making the information so clear, etc.
This book will help keep your presentation focused, clear, and clean. You still have to know what you are presenting and do your "due diligence" on facts. But it is definitely a good source to have at your fingertips. |
The generic becomes TM
| Customer Rating: | What makes a presentation compelling? According to the author here, it's the ability to tell a solid story and that, asserts the author, can be done in just seven slides.
I liked this book and yet, for me, I felt that the information had been presented before and done better in a couple of other titles: Beyond Bullet Points and Presenting to Win. Both of these provided clearer presentations of their own material (that is remarkably similar in some ways) than this particular book. One reason for that might have been nothing more than the text-heavy nature of this publication: it feels more weighty than the other publications and detracts from its simple message. While the publisher might have wished to estbalish this as a more serious handling of the topic, it lacks 'white space' in its own presentation.
The material here is fine: the 'story' is a natural format for presentations since we all, at heart, love conflict & resolution. If you've not read material like this before then this book will provide a good introduction. But there are other options that convey the same detail in a less textually heavy manner. |
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