Carmine Gallo had a quick interview with our World’s Best Presentation Contest winner Dan Roam. Dan is amazingly insightful in his answers so we wanted to publish it for the SlideShare community. Enjoy!

Q: What was the purpose of explaining health care with stick figures and napkins?

A: Like many people, I became concerned about the direction the health care debate had taken in this country. The anger, anxiety, and frustration we saw at the town halls told me that we lacked a common understanding of the issues actually on the table; nobody had drawn the health care “big picture” to explain what anyone was talking about. The result is chaos. I decided to draw that picture, and to draw it as simply as possible in order to establish a clear baseline for deeper discussions. I learned long ago that when helping executives clarify their ideas, nothing is more powerful than a simple hand-drawn sketch. The less polished, the better; the more “human”, the better. When introducing a new idea, people react much better to a work-in-progress than a polished presentation.

Q: This is hugely different than the vast majority of business presentations and I’m sure you don’t recommend that everyone copy this template. However, what is the common principle that applies to anyone’s presentation?

A: On the contrary, I DO recommend that everyone copy this approach. If we really want our audience to engage and understand, we must create presentations that invite our audiences in. Simple, hand-drawn pictures draw people in. Preaching to our audience through bullet points or overwhelming them with mounds of undifferentiated data does not. The standard PowerPoint approach actually closes down discussion. If we really want to make our message stand out, we have to make it look human.
What is the key takeaway/learning from Back of the Napkin?

Three quarters of the neurons in our brain that process incoming sensory information are focused on vision. While most people in business think they can’t draw (they can) or that they’re “not visual” (they are), we can all get infinitely better at discovering, developing, and sharing new ideas by taking advantage of our innate “visual thinking” system: our eyes, our minds-eye, and our ability to draw simple shapes.

Q: Dan, your presentation looks like it’s created in PowerPoint. So, PowerPoint is not evil? Your thoughts?

A: For good or for bad, PowerPoint has become the standard tool for communication. Because of its ubiquity and the ease with which PowerPoint makes lazy thinking look “professional”, it’s easy to malign PowerPoint as evil. But PowerPoint is just a tool. It’s a hammer. We don’t blame the hammer if the building falls down; we blame the builder. The same applies here. As a simple framework for telling a linear story, PowerPoint is fine. We get in trouble when we let all the unnecessary polishing tools in the menus do the our thinking for us.

Q: Finally, all the winners are highly visual. Does this represent the new trend in PowerPoint design?

A: Using visuals isn’t just a trend in PowerPoint design; using pictures to think, work, and share is the dominant business communication trend of our time, period. Which makes sense: in a globalized business world where we likely don’t speak the same first language as our colleagues and where we face problems of such complexity that they defy words, pictures are the answer.

Parents on SlideShare have a new place to go to learn, and share household tools, tips and tricks. The Parent Toolbox Channel, sponsored by Microsoft Office brings you content and community related to home and family.

There are three groups within the Parent Toolbox Channel

• Fun & Games: exciting activities for the whole family to unwind
• Home Organization & Money: worksheets, presentations & forms for a more efficient household
• School & Writing: ways how to help your kids learn and grow

You have an opportunity to share your own content on these topics. You might even win a copy of Microsoft Office. Just upload as usual and add it to the relevant groups. Go here to learn more.

Blogger Asha Dornfest from Parent Hacks will be curating content. We’ve also invited other leading parenting bloggers contribute. Expect relevant presentations, documents and even blog posts. You can comment, favorite, subscribe to content or even upload your own.

We’re really excited about the Parent Toolbox Channel and we hope you’ll love it as much as we do. We can’t wait to see all your uploads.

We want to hear about your adventures on SlideShare. Do you have a SlideShare account for business or personal reasons? We know there’s a wide variety of users ranging from teachers uploading lesson plans to social media agencies promoting client content to speakers posting their slides. But we also know there’s probably a whole lot of users we don’t know about, and we’d like you to share your stories with us.

Give us the nitty gritty on who you are, and how you use SlideShare. Tell us about your work, your passion, your dog’s name and favorite treat. We want to know about the resume you just posted or the value added your clients see or the children your nonprofit helps.

Comment on this blog post or link to your own blog post. We’ll be featuring great stories in our upcoming newsletters.

Sorry folks, working on getting the site up again. Something in our magical black box seems to have stopped working.

One hour later: Its back to normal… no worries… just a temporary glitch.

The site is just fine

The Presentation Camp trilogy continues with the third set of tickets going on sale, Friday Feb 27th at 11:00am via http://presentationcampsf.eventbrite.com/ The last 25 tickets will go quickly, so set an alarm.

We will be confirming registration at the door via name and e-mail address the ticket order is under. If there is more than 1 ticket per order, please come together. You do not need to print out a receipt or anything, we are trying to minimize paper usage.

***The date  the tickets go out is Friday, Feb 27th. I had a typo with the date earlier, my apologies for being a bumbling fool

So Presentation Camp is generating more excitement than we anticipated. We didn’t expect to sell out 2 sets of tickets in a single day, but not to fear, the third set of tickets will soon be here. We  plan on releasing those tickets next week and will make an annoucement here, on our lovely blog before they go out so you know when to start refreshing our registration page.

We are also hoping for presentation experts to attend and share their knowledge. I mean, it could be a great way to build your reputation, show off your expertise, and perhaps find some new clients.

We’d also like to highlight all the other Presentation Camps popping up for those of you not in the SF Bay Area, or even in the United States. We’ll be supporting these Presentation Camps the best we can.

Subscribe to the Slide Tips series here or get it in your email.

I’ve just hosted a passionate debate on my blog about the importance of design in a PowerPoint presentation. Some bloggers were adamant that design was a luxury that businesses could not afford. Others couldn’t understand why businesses didn’t accord the same design budget to PowerPoint presentations as they did to their annual reports and brochures.

Here’s my take on it. There are slides that are ugly but work. There are slides that are visually stunning but have zero learning value. In this post I want to:

1. Distinguish between the two aspects of slide design which explain this: graphic design and instructional design

2. Explore how you can implement effective instructional design in your next SlideShare presentation.
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