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For more than vãn 30 years, the TED conference series has presented enlightening talks that people enjoy watching. In this article, Anderson, TED’s curator, shares five keys to tát great presentations:
- Frame your story (figure out where to tát start and where to tát end).
- Plan your delivery (decide whether to tát memorize your speech word for word or develop bullet points and then rehearse it—over and over).
- Work on stage presence (but remember that your story matters more than vãn how you stand or whether you’re visibly nervous).
- Plan the multimedia (whatever you bởi, don’t read from PowerPoint slides).
- Put it together (play to tát your strengths and be authentic).
According to tát Anderson, presentations rise or fall on the quality of the idea, the narrative, and the passion of the speaker. It’s about substance—not style. In fact, it’s fairly easy to tát “coach out” the problems in a talk, but there’s no way to tát “coach in” the basic story—the presenter has to tát have the raw material. So if your thinking is not there yet, he advises, decline that invitation to tát speak. Instead, keep working until you have an idea that’s worth sharing.
A little more than vãn a year ago, on a trip to tát Nairobi, Kenya, some colleagues and I met a 12-year-old Masai boy named Richard Turere, who told us a fascinating story. His family raises livestock on the edge of a vast national park, and one of the biggest challenges is protecting the animals from lions—especially at night. Richard had noticed that placing lamps in a field didn’t deter lion attacks, but when he walked the field with a torch, the lions stayed away. From a young age, he’d been interested in electronics, teaching himself by, for example, taking apart his parents’ radio. He used that experience to tát devise a system of lights that would turn on and off in sequence—using solar panels, a siêu xe battery, and a motorcycle indicator box—and thereby create a sense of movement that he hoped would scare off the lions. He installed the lights, and the lions stopped attacking. Soon villages elsewhere in Kenya began installing Richard’s “lion lights.”
A version of this article appeared in the June 2013 issue of Harvard Business Review.