Like many people last Christmas I received a present of the Steve Jobs book written by Water Isaacson. My first thought was, look at the thickness of the book and do I want to spend my Christmas reading this? In early February I picked the book up again and started to read it. I don’t know about you but I like to read books with a highlighter this allows me to review the book quickly and remember important messages and ideas that may be valuable in the future.
On reviewing the book over the Easter weekend I realised that a lot of my highlighted ideas were to do with how Steve Jobs and Apple like to pitch and present their ideas/products.
Here are a few pointers which you may find helpful to you:
Simplicity is the ultimate Sophistication
Apples design mantra
This also applies to the presentation of that idea. I spend a lot of my time encouraging presenters to reduce and simplify the content of their presentations.
Steve Jobs on PowerPoint
I want them to engage, to hash things out at the table, rather than show a bunch of slides. “People who know what they’re talking about don’t need Power Point”
I recently helped a Chief Executive reduce the number of slides for a €1m pitch from 120 slides to less that 20 and they won the business.
Mike Markkula an early mentor taught jobs to understand that people do judge a book by its cover- and therefore to make sure that all the trappings and packaging of apple signaled that there was a beautiful gem inside.
How is your pitch/presentation packages, is it as innovative as your product or more likely a series of bullet points on a slide?
Alex Haley once said that the best way to begin a speech is “let me tell you a story” nobody is eager for a lecture, but everybody loves a story. That was the approach that Jobs chose. “Today I want to tell you three stories from my life”, he began. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories
