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Home » How to Avoid Death By PowerPoint: David JP Phillips at TEDxStockholmSalon (Transcript)

How to Avoid Death By PowerPoint: David JP Phillips at TEDxStockholmSalon (Transcript)

David JP Phillips

Here is the full transcript and summary of presentation expert David JP Phillips’ TEDx Talk on  How to Avoid Death By PowerPoint at TEDxStockholmSalon conference.

TRANSCRIPT: 

Okay, ladies and gentlemen, welcome. There is a question which has puzzled me for quite a while, and that is, why do our PowerPoints look the way they look? Or rather, how on earth, can we accept that they look the way they look? How can you do that?

And do you know what’s even more intellectually challenging for me to understand, is how can a person sit over here in this meeting room with ten others, observing this dismally bad PowerPoint filled with charts, graphical elements, page numbers, fading away five, seven minutes thinking of other things. You know the feeling, the boredom, the waste of time!? This person, after 40 minutes, he/she will stand up, a bit dazed, trotting off to his own office, coming to his own computer, flipping it up, going like: oh my god, I’ve got a presentation tomorrow, and I do have a PowerPoint to build.

Now what is the chance that this person will build an equally bad PowerPoint as the one that he/she was by herself tortured by in the other conference room? Is that a big chance? Yeah.

Now, what is that, why do that, is that vengeance? Is that where you go, you did that to me, I’m going to do it to you, you got it coming, bro. Is that the case? I don’t think so. I don’t think that that’s got to do with vengeance; has got to do with intelligence. I think it’s got to do with something else.

Now my passion in life is the brain, and an even bigger passion than that is presentation skills.