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.

This is a quick reminder that the World’s Best Presentation Contest 2009 is in its home stretch. The entries were submitted till 8th Sep, and the voting will continue till 15th Sep. So you have four more days to get votes for your presentations. This includes the weekend - ideal to spend a few hours on your computer emailing your friends, posting on Twitter, Facebook etc to get votes.

This has been a great contest so far. Here are the stats as on Saturday morning (12th).

# Entries 2997
# Votes 10847
# Participants 2495

Also want to mention that like previous contest, we are keeping a close look on any voting malpractises. Once the voting is over, we shall do a exhaustive check on voting patterns, any hints of rigging etc. Fraudulent votes & entries will be disqualified straightaway before the final shortlist is sent to the judges. We want this to be a clean & even contest, and we’ll ensure that.

Just a quick reminder- this is the last week for submission of contest entries in WBPC2009. Entries can be submitted till the 8th of Sep, while the voting will continue till 15th. We already have about 3000 entries. Let’s see how many get added in the remaining period.

If you want to participate, don’t wait for the last moment. Upload your entry now. One disadvantage for last minute entries - you are likely to get a shorter voting cycle.

We’d also like to share something that will take you down our previous contests. This is the link for the screenshot below. We have created a page from where you can browse all previous slideshare contests (and we’ve had quite a few- WBPC 2007, WBPC 2008, Credit Crisis Contest, Fuze Meeting Tell a Story Contest). All previous contests are linked from this page.

The ongoing World’s Best Presentation Contest 2009 has category prizes as well. One of the categories is “About Me” and we noticed a bunch of interesting entries here. Some that tickled our editorial team are embedded below.

Something to note- each of these entries is interesting for a different reason…

1) This is a social media resume. If you are wondering, what that is supposed to mean, take a look..

2) This is a sequel to a presentation that won a nomination in the WBPC 2008 last year. The story continues here. If you want to see the first part to this, go here.

The World’s Best Presentation Contest 2009 is hotting up. Its been a couple of weeks since this went live and we have 1547 entries from 1021 participants and 3432 votes have been cast (as on 18th August 5:00 AM PST). Its great to see this kind of enthusiasm in the community.

Off course not all the entries are top notch (thats expected). But one entry that did catch our attention for its humorous overtone is embedded below. This is a take on what people should do to win the SlideShare contest. Thanks avalok for this cool slideshow. This had the slideshare team in splits as well…

Just a reminder- this year, besides the votes polled, we are also looking at the social media receptivity for each contest entry - no of tweets, shares etc. So you’ll need to keep the score ticking on that front as well.

The first contest we ever hosted, the first World’s Best Presentation Contest 2007 was an important landmark for SlideShare.  We discovered gems like Shift Happens and Meet Henry. The second year (2008), we built on that further and quadrupled the number of entries and votes. This year, for World’s Best Presentation Contest 2009, our focus is on presentations as social media objects that get shared online and passed around.

We have asked judges who are experts on presentations & social media to join us in finding the best presentation for 2009. Guy Kawasaki (gkawasaki on SlideShare) has written a lot about presentations and needs no introduction to this community. David Armano, author of Logic & Emotion blog (darmano on SlideShare) is one of the most popular people on SlideShare - his visual communication style is brilliant. Finally, Padmasree Warrior CTO of Cisco (padmasree on SlideShare) has taken communication by a company to a whole another level. Through her talks, tweets and presentations, she has helped us all think about collaboration.

So please enter your presentations into this year’s contest. Give us the best you can create. First prize is MacBook Pro, second is Amazon Kindle while third prize is iPhone 3G. Go here to learn more and full list of prizes.

As in previous years, everyone on SlideShare can vote. But we have something new this year. To choose the finalists, we will go beyond votes and look at tweets and shares on social networks. So, ask your friends / contacts on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to check out your entry and vote / tweet / share it. This will add a whole new dimension to this year’s contest. The hashtag for the contest is #bestpreso.

Another new this year - if you use the SlideShare app on our partners services - LinkedIN, Facebook & XING, you can get votes from your friends & colleagues on those networks. If your SlideShare.net account is synched with our LinkedIn, Facebook & XING apps, your SlideShare contest entries will show up there with a strong call for viewers on those networks to vote.

We want to thank our sponsors Adobe Acrobat for helping us bring this contest to you. They recently released Acrobat 9 which also helps you create rich presentations and portfolios. They are also sponsoring a special prize (HP TouchSmart laptop) for the best presentation / portfolio created with Acrobat 9. Judges for this category are social media experts: Julie Hansen, COO of Business Insider, Scott Belsky, founder & CEO of Behance, Harry McCracken editor of Technologizer. For the duration of the contest, you can upload A9 presentations directly to SlideShare. Go here to learn more about the A9 prize.

Best of luck with your entries. The entire SlideShare team is waiting to see your work.

The Fuze Tell a Story Contest has winners!

Grand Prize ($5000)
The Grand Prize goes to Drunkenomics - The Story of Bar Stool Economics from slides2407. Drunkenomics = Drunken + Economics and its a great story about tax & tax cuts. slides2407 also has a behind-the-scenes account of how Drunkenomics happened. Check out The Monday That Never Saw The Night - Story of making of Drunkenomics.

Congratulations slides2407! This is well deserved.

Four Category Prizes (iPhone + $100 iTunes card)

Best Design: This goes to Super Cool Dudes from amv8192

Best Story Telling Ability: This goes to The Story of H from LubomirP

Best Use of Multimedia: This goes to White Shaka - Graphic Novel from AlanBrody

Most Popular: This goes to Let’s Talk Poverty from dcaron

Big thanks to our awesome judges: Ann Handle, Don Tapscott, Om Malik, Pete Cashmore & Tony Hsieh.

Thanks to the contest sponsors, Fuze Meeting . We had a great time working with you. If you have not already, go give the Fuze meeting software a quick try.

For presentations lovers everywhere, we have one more contest for you! This time its about storytelling. We are partnering with Fuze Meeting (who have an awesome online meeting product) to bring you this contest.

A lot of you have already been posting stories to SlideShare. This is an opportunity to get that story inside you onto slides. Tell your story in words and pictures. Add audio or video if you want. Just keep it within 30 slides. Your story could be about anything you care about. Yes, we mean anything. Your travels, a story of a friendship. Or the story of your brand or your product. Make us care, make us think.

And what’s the prize for storytelling. The Grand Prize is $5000! Yes, that’s correct. Imagine what you could do with $5000. We have four other prizes for Best Design, Best StoryTelling Ability, Most Popular and Best Use Of Multimedia. Everyone gets to vote for their favorite entries. Judges will choose the winners from the top voted.

Like before we have assembled a star cast of judges: Tony Hseih, Om Malik, Don Tapscott, Pete Cashmore, and Ann Handley.

Rules are similar to previous contests. You have 3 weeks to enter your presentation to the contest (May 26th to June 15th). Voting will go on till June 22nd. And results will be declared on June 29th.

Thanks to Fuze Meeting who we worked with to dream up this contest and who kindly sponsored the prizes! It has been fun working with Brook and Patrick . Go check out Fuze Meeting.

As usual, we have a presentation about the contest (below). Please help us get the word out. Embed the presentation, share it with your friends. Help us reach every corner of the world where people create presentations.