154 Consulting

After a new client emails or calls us, we kick off our project work by reviewing our process overview document. We use this document both to give a sense of how we work and to set deadlines for each of the project's deliverables. While it's specific to how we work, others building presentations may find some use from it, which is why we've posted it here.

Unclutterer has a recent post on organizing meetings - it's not solely about presetations, but it provides an occasion to note that good meetings and good presentations both focus on getting a decision made.

Several recent correspondents have wondered where 154 Consulting is located. While the question is of course a reasonable one, I've been resisting putting our location on the website, as we're eager to work with clients in almost any location. One of our team has often travelled to meet with clients onsite, and we will happily continue to do so.

Our headquarters, however, is in New York. If you contract with us, most of the work will be carried out either at your location or in New York, though some of our team is not local (and, for what it's worth, I often work from South Dakota).

The logs show that many of you are clicking on "login" or "register" but neither logging in or registering. Though 154Consulting.com is a corporate site, we encourage comments and participation, and invite you to register. If you're trying to register but something isn't working, please email us at info@154consulting.com. Thank you for visiting.

Andrew Abela, a presentation consultant, has been blogging about academic and scientific research on presentations (see his most recent post The Science of Effective Presentation ). Dr. Abela and I were at the Corporate Executive Board at the same time, but never worked together. His approach is somewhat different from the 154 Consulting approach, but I'll look forward to the book he's writing with interest.

To get a sense of the type of presentation 154 Consulting offers, view our Sample Presentation.

There are several extra text slides in this web version of the presentation that wouldn't be in the presentation if it were being presented live, giving it a feel similar to Lawrence Lessig's excellent presentations. For more on Lessig, view our Presentation Resources & Diagnostics.

154 Consulting has been getting a fair number of requests from potential clients about presentation training. The training we offer takes the form of an onsite presentation to your team. We request that the audience have roughly the same seniority, and that each audience have no more than thirty attendees. Sessions vary in length and in the amount of interaction that happens during the session. While each session is customized to the needs of the particular client, a basic outline might look something like:

Part 1: Overview and basic principles
•The importance of presentations

I sat in on a client's meeting yesterday at the Georgia Tech Global Learning Center. It's a nice facility with both "ballroom" style setups auditorium-like classrooms. But it's the facility's motto, not the facility itself, that really caught my attention.

Plastered across the front of the podium during the session, and on many many other surfaces in the facility, was the motto: "When meeting outcomes matter."

The TED conference just wrapped up, and while 154 has already highlighted video of some TED talks as a presentation resource , the commentary available from several attendees of the conference is worth highlighting:

-TED Blog is the conference's official blog

Presenting effectively often requires making ideas into visuals, and that's hard - its difficulty is one of the reasons that too many presentation slides are covered in text, and too many "presentations" are simply one person reading bullet points aloud to their audience. Over at http://indexed.blogspot.com/, Jessica Hagy provides some evidence that even the toughest ideas can be expressed visually, engage the audience, and draw a laugh at the same time.