Presentations as Performance: A Professional’s Guide to Better Speaking

A huge library of advice has been published on the subject of professional communication, yet a critical gap remains. Whereas authors promise to deliver short, easy-to-read advice on the subject, they routinely write overly complex books that make the most relevant material difficult to discern. In the process, they over-think, over-theorize, and over-teach the soft skills that are actually easy to learn and apply in professional and public life. Other pocket guides regularly exceed two-hundred pages in length. One famous pocket guide is nearly four hundred pages long! The guide proposed here begins with the premise that busy professionals and stressed out students neither need nor want to spend their time trying to remember and apply many hundreds of pages of studies and byzantine lessons. This 100-page booklet draws on timeless, simple communication theory and the real-life situations of current professional and public leaders (CEOs, project managers, department chairs, program directors, religious leaders, and entrepreneurs) to produce the perfect blend of general principles and concrete applications in real-life situations.In addition to actually delivering on the promise of being a short, simple, and effective system of professional communication, this booklet is unique in one other way. It focuses almost entirely on speech delivery. Other books attempt to cover everything - from writing an email or a memo to avoiding inappropriate workplace touching to preparing a PowerPoint to making a phone call. This book teaches the reader, simply and effectively, how to speak impactfully in any professional or public context.