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Amazing Business Presentations

http://www.iaipirc.org/irc/download-files
http://www.iaipirc.org/irc/download-files/NMIMS%20India%20-%20CFA%20Research%20Challenge%20Presentation%20-%20HDFC%20Bank.pptx?attredirects=0&d=1

Learnings from a presentation @ Atlas Copco Customer Meet

I had attended a presentation by Atlas Copco recently.

Here are a few of the things which went wrong with their presentation, from my eyes, that night:

• Their presentation was immensely long – a good 3 hr presentation comprising of several sub-presentations.
• Each sub-presentation was handled by a separate individual, but no emphasis was paid to keeping the presentation any shorter than they were.
• The speakers were desperate to tell everything to the audience. Even if someone gave them a cue to move faster, they chose to ignore it.
• The presentations were too much in depth, not suitable to the kind of audience they were entertaining. Barely anyone was interested in the in-depth technicalities.
• While presenting, the speakers were looking at only a certain section of audience, that was sitting towards the front-left.
• The products discussed were beyond the interest of the audience present.

But obviously, not everything went wrong. I learn a couple of good things as well.

• The audience was less, they knew exactly who to focus their energy on.
• Every topic was handled by an ‘expert’.
• They made customers comfortable by also telling them about alternate ways of getting their equipments fixed in case of breakdown or service issue should the company officials are unavailable for some reason.

Are you experiencing a very unique problem?

During one the sessions by PM, one his exampls made me think-
Almost every country is facing problems similar to some other country in the world. After all there are 196 of them!
But, we are so adamant, so egoistic, so sure, that we are unique and nobody else has faced that problem, that we fail to look around to see if the other person/country faced that same problem.
Yes, our problem may be unique when looked at closely, but we can definitely learn from others. Isn’t education just that? Sharing ideas/solutions which were discovered by someone else?
Why then as a government, or a company, or as an institution, or as an individual we refuse to educate ourselves and learn from others?

Learnings from a presentation after it went rogue

While preparing and delivering a presentation recently, i made some critical mistakes. Most of them being in our preparation. (The important units of a presentation- http://wp.me/p1emvy-4l)

We were allotted a particular micro-economics topic, and we were asked to present a caselet in which a company had made use of that particular economic theory to achieve their goals.

[Mistake#1]
The data we had collected, or read through, related vaguely to the topic that we were allotted. Maybe we were too lazy to look for another company or case study, or we felt that the topic was appropriate. By the time we realized that it wasn’t a perfect fit, it was too late, so went on with it anyway.
i.e. Our content was weak.

[Mistake#2]
I consider myself decently good at representing information on a powerpoint, and so i did. Whatever we had at hand, I represented with the help of flowcharts, images, diagrams, text-free. But the content still looked disconnected, coz their was lack of appropriate data and linkages.

[Mistake#3]
Our group comprised of 6 individuals, and each of us was required to present a section of the PPT. When we started presenting, we lacked group coordination. Even though we were being marked as a group, each individual wanted to speak for a good 3-5 min, in a presentation which was supposed to last only 10 mins.
Plus, every person wanted to say as much as they knew about the topic.

The Result?
The lousy group coordination during the PPT made the audience immensely confused about the content and direction of the PPT. The only saving grace was that some individuals in the audience complimented me for the way i had represented data onto my slides. Apart from that, our PPT was a total failure.

The Important Blocks of a Presentation

A presentation can be divided into some of these very important parts:

A. Why Presentation?
1. Fine, you’re giving a presentation. But Why?
2. What does your audience want? or your assumptions of their expectations.
3. What are you attempting to deliver? and how does it align with their ‘wants’?

B. The PPT, The Drama, The Speech
1. The content which forms the foundation of your presentation
2. How you represent your ‘data’ into your presentation
3. How you present to the audience you topic, your idea, your findings, your words.

C. Feedback
1. Their immediate questions/responses/comments
2. The ‘action’ created as a result of your presentation

The business plan of your life

From Evernote:

The business plan of your life

How about creating a business plan for yourself.
A tool which will remind you of what you decided for yourself.
A tool which you can edit as you go along, yet allows you to stay on track.
This plan can help you solve all the problems you have in your life,
help you become the person you have always wanted to be,
developing your skill sets,
and maximizing the utilization of the potential within you.
What say?

Presentation Tips: Carefully assume what your audience knows or not knows

From Evernote:

Presentation Tips: Carefully assume what your audience knows or not knows

Everyone in my class of 80 students uses LAN to access Internet.
At one of the presentations that i was asked to give, I spoke on how people could access internet without each one of them using LAN. I suggested using Connectify instead.
Why?
It was a mess to have LAN wires everywhere!
Why Connectify?
coz i believed it could help people access internet without using LAN and they will like it.
My Assumption-
Once people know what connectify can do, they will install it, and use it to share internet with others and they might also use it for lowering their phone bills.
But after i took the poll during my presentation I realised almost half the class knew about connectify yet continued to use LAN.
It was probably coz they had already got used to carrying messy LAN cables with them everyday
or
nobody wanted to share internet with others.
or
Something i cant think of at this moment.
But where I primarily went wrong was in deriving the wrong cause-effect relationship.
Assuming,
cause= unavailability of wireless lan
effect= everyone uses LAN
I took it as,
if i negated the cause, i.e. provided wireless lan,
the effect will be negated, i.e. people will stop using LAN.
but there is another unknown (to me) cause which is making people use LAN.
Any ideas?

Day 1 @ B-School

The first day at the college was kept pretty light – Basic Registration, Books distribution, a quick quiz (on the pre foundation course), and an ice-breaking session with the senior batch.

Few things which caught our attention:
1. The seniors made sure we understood, that by the same time next year we will be too loaded with studies as well as the ‘autumns’ (the internship period)
2. Value based learning was actually imbibed into the system
3. The importance of punctuality
4. The increase of batch strength meant we need to put in much more effort to bag a good placement.
5. Almost everyone will be part of some club or the another.
6. Suggested to carry phones with email notifications.
7. The need/importance to create the right image in front of corporates to ensure that the companies give a chance of internships and job offers to the students.
8. Pre-Foundation course was told to be taken seriously by every senior which made it possible that we took it seriously as well, (at least towards the end)
9. It didn’t take long for people to group according to their native place.
10. The schedule has been released for the next one month only.

Also, Thanks to the incessant rains, it’s not too long till the Pond/Lake/Sewage overflows and forces us to walk through it to the classes.

Crime against Women

Is India’s judiciary an obstacle to justice in cases of sexual assault?

One retired Supreme Court justice said it can be appropriate for women to marry their alleged rapists, and a law professor’s research shows courts have given shorter sentences to rapists of women judged not to be virgins

Read more-http://on.wsj.com/13x9ph7