Steve Job’s Presentation Secrets

The book I read to research this post was The Presentation Secrets Of Steve Jobs by Carmine Gallo which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. Steve jobs was the CEO of Apple Computers until his untimely death and made it into a bigger company than Microsoft but he had been earlier forced out of the same position at the age of 30 despite at that time Apple being a company he had founded and had become a major player in the computer industry. Let’s focus on his presentation skills anyway. He never used bullet points in his presentations and normally substituted pictures. He would often have a kind of stage background and people would often say if you were at one of his presentations you didn’t forget it in a hurry. He would use headline that were short, simple and to the point, often like tweets on twitter. At one of his presentations he used an actor who had played him in a tv movie and from a distance looked just like him to introduce him. On another occasion he had the CEO of Intel come on stage in a protective suit like they use in the manufacture of processors. He was very much a showman and would typically pose a problem to the audience and them the gadget and explain how it solved it. When he introduced the Apple TV he told them it is a dvd player for the 21st century. His presentations would consist of 3 products and would be displayed in 3 acts and apparently the US Marine corp has done research in how we remember things and found 3 is more effective than 2 or 4 strange as it sounds and is a kind of magic number for anything like presentations. There are technology events where they typically invite a CEO from a technology to do something like a 6 minute talk on a new product launch and they often limit how long it can be because they say if you can’t explain its features in that time it’s isn’t worth explaining. At one technology launch they charge $3,000 per minute for somebody from a company to do a talk and you can imagine they are eager to make it quick. I did really enjoy this book which is hugely informative although only around 210 pages so only short. Finally Steve Jobs also used to take technical facts about his products and translate it into something we’d understand like the first iPod was 5 GB of storage so he explained that’s about 1,000 songs.