TNF #108: New size = new product

Welcome Professionals…

…I was writing an article for a newspaper recently. The editor advised me that the article had to have exactly the size of 3,500 characters (including spaces). I had a document that was about 13,000 characters and I thought I would just cross out some paragraphs, condense some lines and it would be finished. Wrong!presentation

I ended up writing the whole text all over again. I was able to use the material I had as a collection of content and I was able to use the main conclusion. Everything else had to be redone for this new edition. I needed a new story line, some new examples and it turned out to be much quicker to rewrite the article than altering every single sentence. It seems so obvious when you think about it. If you take some paragraphs out of a text, the text will not make sense anymore.

The same applies to presentations. A convincing presentation is always geared towards objective, audience and timing. When we face significant changes in one or more of these three dimensions, we have to rewrite the whole thing! I have seen so many case teams shuffling old slides into new presentations. It usually does not work.

It gets especially frustrating when case teams start producing slides while the person who knows the audience and will have to hold the presentation is not even in the room, yet. This leads to rather unpopular night shifts.

Wise presenters plan upfront and have their material crafted on individual requirements!

Hope you can skip the night shift this time,

Malte

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One thought on “TNF #108: New size = new product

  1. Yeside Adesida

    It is always better to restart than to try and condense, when you condense you lose the flavour entirely.

    Reply

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