Here’s the scenario. A bio-tech company will fly to Paris to convince influential French physicians to use their compound-in-development in clinical trials. The company has invited the French doctors to a nice meeting room in a nice hotel and plans to tell the doctors all about the compound.

When asked, “What is the purpose of the presentation?” they say, “To tell them about the drug.” I say I see it differently. I say it’s to help the French doctors come to the conclusion that the bio-tech company would be a great company to partner with, and that the drug is a versatile powerhouse that will almost certainly make it to market and get their names in the best peer-reviewed journals in the world.

When I lay out this plan, they say it is not scientific enough. I am sensitive to that. I like and respect the traditions of science. But I say, “This is not a scientific presentation. This is a business presentation. Science plays a part, but the goal is a business goal. You need these people to believe in your company and your compound. Our job is to induce belief in them, and raise that belief to the level of action.”

We take the scientific and corporate information they already have and restructure it to make a strong argument for partnership. There is some resistance holding out in the recesses of their scientific hearts.

I persist. This is a “decisional” presentation, I say. The French doctors will say, “Yes, No or Maybe.” There are risks for them. They could miss out on a good thing if they say no. They could miss out on better opportunities if they say yes. There are rational calculations to make, including the fact that they have practices to run, assistants to pay, and time to manage.

There are also non-rational issues. They would love to get their names on an important study. They would hate to work for years on a trial of a compound that never gets to market. Should they say no? Should they say yes?

In reality, I would guess their decision will hinge on what the most influential physician in the group decides.

This was a lesson in knowing the audience–in targeting their rational and non-rational needs. The bio-tech firm was relying on the science to do the job. It seemed to me the calculation was broader than that. For the doctors, the decision would be psychological as well as scientific.

Stay tuned.

People make fun of engineers–ribbing them for their introversion and poor communication skills.  I don’t feel that way.  Whenever I work with them on their speaking skills, I find them to be eager and open to new ideas.  When I give them a process to follow, they try to make it work, and generally they succeed.

I recently worked with a chief engineer on an elaborate and complex presentation of a global HR initiative that would have significant impact on the careers of all the engineers in his company.

When we met, the presentation was long, and all about the features of the program.  The slides were also crawling with bullet points.  When we finished, it was about one-third as long and not a bullet point in sight.

How did we do this?  We changed the structure of his talk from all about the new HR initiative to all about what the HR initiative could do for the engineers.

Within that structure, we described the features of the program, but only after we had built an emotional reason for taking an interest in it.

The emotional reasons were that the old one was vague, overly-comlex, rigid, and unfair–while the new one put them in the drivers seat, gave them the keys to their career, and a road map to the position of their choice.

So not only did we emotionalize content that could have been very dry, but we made the benefits concrete by using the metaphor of being in the driver’s seat.  Plus, we had a great picture of a young woman sitting in a brand-new car being handed the keys and smiling from ear to ear.

Words and pictures.  Much better than words alone.

Last week I went to the third and last day of a meeting for engineers.  After lunch, one of their senior leaders stood up and summarized every presentation they had experienced during the past three days.  As he began to speak about each presentation, he put up a new slide, and each slide was a beautiful photograph of a bridge.

London Bridge, Pont Neuf in Paris, that famous bridge in Venice I can’t remember the name of–and the George Washington Bridge, lit up with a thousand lights strung along its spans in the dark.

I liked the images, but I spent time staring at them and wondering what they meant.  Were they meant to say that he was “bridging” back to previous content in the meeting?  Or was he bridging from “Engineering” content to the upcoming presenter who was about to speak on the subject of Emotional Intelligence?

Then he added another layer of complexity to the experience by linking the lyrics of songs to each of the bridges.  Apparently he could recall the lyrics of popular songs with ease, and he would recite, say, a few lines of “Bridge over troubled waters” as the picture of the George Washington bridge appeared with the now destroyed World Trade Center in the background.

At last he announced the subject to be addressed by the next speaker, and he showed a picture of his young blond son in his shiny blue soccer uniform running at full tilt after a ball.  He spoke about his experience as a father attending his son’s games–how many other parents witnessed the entire event from behind a “chunk of plastic and wires.”  And with that, he put his hand up to his face as though he were holding a small video camera.

I felt a sensation in my body begin to move into my chest.  Because he then said that those who watched the game from behind a camera could not easily jump up with joy when their child scored their first goal, or run out onto the field to join the team as they embraced their hero, or participate head, heart and hands in the support of the team.

Nor can a camera man quickly respond when his son is injured, he said, or be the first one at his side, or engage with the other parents, or enjoy the animal spirit of competition.

“That’s my view on emotional intelligence,” he said.  Then he introduced the speaker.

He spoke with such earnestness and authenticity that I was truly moved–literally moved–because something moved through me.  Perhaps because of his previous dullness I was jolted by his sudden authenticity, but something happened in that room full of 250 engineers.  The man changed the atmosphere by speaking with real emotion.  It was palpable.  He bent the air.

Here’s the thing.  I don’t remember a thing he said about the umpteen presentations he recalled for us.  I only remember the images, the stories, and how I felt.

Makes me wonder about the 50,000 or more intelligent PowerPoint presentations delivered every day in the meeting rooms of America.  How long did it take to create them?  How much did it cost?  And just what is the ROI–The Return on Intelligence–when there is little imagery, and no emotion?

I recently bought a book called The Craft of Scientific Presentations by Michael Alley, which begins with a quote from Isaac Asimov.

On March 21, 1949, I attended a lecture given by Linus Pauling… That talk was the best talk by anyone on any subject that I had ever heard…  The talk was more than a talk to me.  It filled me with a desire of my own to become a speaker.

The book belongs on your bookshelf if you deliver scientific presentations, or presentations that report research of any kind.  It provides scores of examples from contemporary and historical scientific presentations to show clearly what makes an oral presentation effective.

What is most intriguing to me is his study proving that the proper use of PowerPoint slides can in fact boost audience comprehension.  Alley calls the most effective use of PowerPoint the “Assertion-Evidence” method. This means that the headline of a slide should be an assertion–a complete sentence–that is proven by the visual or graphical evidence below it.

I know several of my client companies in the consulting business do this, including McKinsey and Health Strategies Group, although the practice is not universally adopted in either firm.  But they are on the right track, according to Alley.  His study demonstrated an 11% boost in audience comprehension with the “Assertion – Evidence” model vs. the standard use of a phrase as the headline–such as “Market Share” or “Toxicity.”

It is time that those of us responsible for communicating ideas and information of strategic importance use PowerPoint in a manner that is based on research, and not on ease of use or corporate culture.

The book is called The Craft of Scientific Presentations.  The author is Michael Alley.  It’s worth owning, if you care about excellence in presenting ideas.

When Medical Liaisons in big pharma are launching a drug with a major study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, you’d think their job would be easy.  But it’s not.

One way it’s difficult is in the variety of audiences they have to educate.

They have to speak to senior executives in their own company, who have limited expertise in the particular therapeutic area, and little room in their busy brains for more technical information.

Sales managers want to know what their representatives will have to learn and how other products in the same area compare.  They may even want a say in how the product is presented to prescribers.  And they are concerned about the quality of their sales meetings–they don’t want their troops bored and confused.

Sales reps want to hear the good news.  How easy will it be to convince physicians that the new product is an improvement over existing therapies?  What objections will they encounter?  What data can they use to make their case?

And finally, medical professionals will want a detailed clinical story, and will be likely to cling to older therapies until it feels safe to prescribe the new one.  Better safe than sorry, they say to themselves.

To do justice to the requirements of each of these audiences demands that a standard deck of slides be tweaked over and over again.  It is not enough to take the approved slides and present the facts.  Audiences will complain, as they did recently in a client company.

The sales force will complain loudly if the Medical Liaison takes them down a rabbit hole of research, and they should!  What’s the point of talking if your audience doesn’t have the background or the patience to go with you?

Sales management knows the market and will complain if the clinical story doesn’t fly.  Their incentive pay depends on the reps ability to get the message across in less than 30 seconds.

Senior executives in the company don’t necessarily want all the science.  They want reassurance that the product is valuable enough to prescribers, patients, and payers so that they can accurately predict performance.  Science is a part of it, but positioning and messaging will play a bigger part.

So Medical Liaisons have their work cut out for them.  Who goes into such a career, anticipating the need for such persuasive skill, or the need to translate his expertise into so many different languages?

I went to a slew of parties over the holidays.  When people asked me what I do,  I found myself saying, “Consultant,” or “Speech consultant,” or if I’m feeling really insecure, “Itinerant rhetorician.”  I am essentially dodging the phrase “presentation skills” because I’m paranoid that people will think of me as the guy who tells you to look people in the eye, stand still, and wave your hands around.

In fact, I spoke to a lady the other day who differentiated between “speaker training” and “presentation skills.”  To her, “speaker training” is getting doctors to master new data; presentation skills is delivery.

I am currently working with a pre-clinical group in the pharmaceutical industry, helping them prepare presentations to an internal committee in order to win approval for promising new compounds to be tested in humans.  When I did some interviews, I found that many in the department had underlying attitudes about presenting.

Here they are in no particular order:

- Scientists must be dispassionate and objective, therefore passion in a scientific presenter is unprofessional.

- Management should leave me alone and let me do what I’m good at.

- Most good scientists are not good presenters, therefore, if you’re a good presenter, you’re probably not a good scientist.

- I should not have to care about my “image.”

- I have no interest in improving my presentation skills.

- Content is king. Presenting is a necessary evil – Presenting is a burden, not an opportunity- Publishing my data for peer review is good; presenting my data to my peers is a pain.- My data slides ARE my presentation.- Reading slides is what my mentors did.  If it was good enough for them, it’s good enough for me.- Rehearsing is for actors, not for a scientist like me.

My impulse was to quote Cicero in response, a snooty approach I successfully avoided.  But I wanted to tell them what he said: “If truth were self-evident, eloquence would not be necessary.”  To my mind, eloquence is, at bottom, speech that creates clarity and feeling in listeners–enough to cause them to take action.

In this case, the scientists have a tough job–to recommend that the company spend millions on a research project that, if history is any indicator, has only a tiny chance of succeeding.  They’ve got to get the audience to salivate over efficacy, safety, and marketability, despite the presence of vast uncertainty on all fronts.  If the speaker doesn’t demonstrate conviction and clarity, and strive to create the same in her audience, what are her chances of success?

Uh…slim to none, and slim is leaving town!