Steve Jobs (3 page)

PROLOGUE

xv

Figure 1 Apple’s master showman turns presentations into

theatrical experiences.

Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

iTunes 6, with the news that ABC would make television shows

available for iTunes and the new video iPod. Jobs even intro-

duced jazz legend Wynton Marsalis as an encore.

In keeping with Jobs’s metaphor of a presentation as a classic

story,
The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs
is divided into three acts:


Act 1: Create the Story.
The seven chapters—or scenes—in

this section will give you practical tools to craft an exciting

story behind your brand. A strong story will give you the confi-

dence and ability to win over your audience.


Act 2: Deliver the Experience.
In these six scenes, you will learn practical tips to turn your presentations into visually

appealing and “must-have” experiences.


Act 3: Refine and Rehearse.
The remaining five scenes will

tackle topics such as body language, verbal delivery, and mak-

ing “scripted” presentations sound natural and conversational.

Even your choice of wardrobe will be addressed. You will learn

why mock turtlenecks, jeans, and running shoes are suitable

for Jobs but could mean the end of your career.

xvi

PROLOGUE

Short intermissions divide the acts. These intermissions con-

tain nuggets of great information culled from the latest findings

in cognitive research and presentation design. These findings

will help you take your presentations to an entirely new level.

What Are You Really Selling?

Jobs is “the master at taking something that might be consid-

ered boring—a hunk of electronic hardware—and enveloping

it in a story that made it compellingly dramatic,” writes Alan

Deutschman in
The Second Coming of Steve Jobs
.
8
Only a hand-ful of leaders whom I have had the pleasure of meeting have

this skill, the ability to turn seemingly boring items into excit-

ing brand stories. Cisco CEO John Chambers is one of them.

Chambers does not sell routers and switches that make up the

backbone of the Internet. What Chambers
does
sell is human

connections that change the way we live, work, play, and learn.

The most inspiring communicators share this quality—the

ability to create something meaningful out of esoteric or every-

day products. Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz does not sell coffee.

He sells a “third place” between work and home. Financial

guru Suze Orman does not sell trusts and mutual funds. She

sells the dream of financial freedom. In the same way, Jobs does

not sell computers. He sells tools to unleash human potential.

Throughout this book, ask yourself, “What am I really selling?”

Remember, your widget doesn’t inspire. Show me how your wid-

get improves my life, and you’ve won me over. Do it in a way

that entertains me, and you’ll have created a true evangelist.

Along the way, you’ll also discover that Steve Jobs is motivated

by a messianic zeal to change the world, to put a “dent in the uni-

verse.” In order for these techniques to work, you must cultivate a

profound sense of mission. If you are passionate about your topic,

you’re 80 percent closer to developing the magnetism that Jobs

has. From the age of twenty-one when Jobs cofounded Apple with

his friend Steve Wozniak, Jobs fell in love with the vision of how

personal computing would change society, education, and enter-

PROLOGUE

xvii

tainment. His passion was contagious, infecting everyone in his

presence. That passion comes across in every presentation.

We all have passions that drive us. The purpose of this book

is to help you capture that passion and turn it into a story so

mesmerizing that people will want to help you achieve your

vision. You see, it’s quite possible that your ideas or products

vastly improve the lives of your customers—from computers,

to automobiles, to financial services, to products that create a

cleaner environment—but the greatest product in the world will

be useless without a strong brand evangelist to promote it. If

you cannot get people to care, your product will never stand

a chance of success. Your audience will not care, they will not

understand, nor will they be interested. People do not pay atten-

tion to boring things. Do not let your ideas die because you

failed to present them in a way that sparked the imagination of

your listeners. Use Jobs’s techniques to reach the hearts and the

minds of everyone you hope to influence.

As Jobs often says to kick off a presentation, “Now let’s get

started.”

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ACT I

Create

the Story

Creating the story, the plot, is the first step to selling

your ideas with power, persuasion, and charisma.

Succeeding at this step separates mediocre commu-

nicators from extraordinary ones. Most people fail

to think through their story. Effective communicators plan

effectively, develop compelling messages and headlines, make

it easy for their listeners to follow the narrative, and introduce

a common enemy to build the drama. The seven chapters—or

scenes—in Act 1 will help set the foundation for presentation

success. Each scene will be followed by a short summary of spe-

cific and tangible lessons you can easily apply today. Let’s review

the scenes here:


SCENE 1: “Plan in Analog.”
In this chapter, you will learn how truly great presenters such as Steve Jobs visualize, plan, and

create ideas well before they open the presentation software.


SCENE 2: “Answer the One Question That Matters Most.”

Your listeners are asking themselves one question and one

question only: “Why should I care?” Disregard this question,

and your audience will dismiss you.


SCENE 3: “Develop a Messianic Sense of Purpose.”
Steve

Jobs was worth more than $100 million by the time he was

1

2
CREATE THE STORY

twenty-five, and it didn’t matter to him. Understanding this

one fact will help you unlock the secret behind Jobs’s extraor-

dinary charisma.


SCENE 4: “Create Twitter-Like Headlines.”
The social

networking site has changed the way we communicate.

Developing headlines that fit into 140-character sentences will

help you sell your ideas more persuasively.


SCENE 5: “Draw a Road Map.”
Steve Jobs makes his argument

easy to follow by adopting one of the most powerful principles

of persuasion: the rule of three.


SCENE 6: “Introduce the Antagonist.”
Every great Steve Jobs

presentation introduces a common villain that the audience

can turn against. Once he introduces an enemy, the stage is set

for the next scene.


SCENE 7: “Reveal the Conquering Hero.”
Every great Steve

Jobs presentation introduces a hero the audience can rally

around. The hero offers a better way of doing something,

breaks from the status quo, and inspires people to embrace

innovation.

SCE

SCENNEE 1

1

Plan in Analog

Marketing is really theater.

It‘s like staging a performance.

JOHN SCULLEY

Steve Jobs has built a reputation in the digital world of

bits and bytes, but he creates stories in the very old-

world tradition of pen and paper. His presentations are

theatrical events intended to generate maximum pub-

licity, buzz, and awe. They contain all of the elements of great

plays or movies: conflict, resolution, villains, and heroes. And,

in line with all great movie directors, Jobs storyboards the plot

before picking up a “camera” (i.e., opening the presentation

software). It‘s marketing theater unlike any other.

Jobs is closely involved in every detail of a presentation: writ-

ing descriptive taglines, creating slides, practicing demos, and

making sure the lighting is just right. Jobs takes nothing for granted. He does what most top presentation designers recommend: he starts on paper. “There‘s just something about paper

and pen and sketching out rough ideas in the ‘analog world’ in

the early stages that seems to lead to more clarity and better,

more creative results when we finally get down to representing

our ideas digitally,” writes Garr Reynolds in
Presentation Zen
.1

Design experts, including those who create presentations for

Apple, recommend that presenters spend the majority of their

time thinking, sketching, and scripting. Nancy Duarte is the

genius behind Al Gore’s
An Inconvenient Truth
. Duarte suggests

that a presenter spend up to ninety hours to create an hour-long

presentation that contains thirty slides. However, only one-

3

4
CREATE THE STORY

third of that time should be dedicated to
building
the slides, says Duarte
.2
The first twenty-seven hours are dedicated to researching the topic, collecting input from experts, organizing ideas,

collaborating with colleagues, and sketching the structure of

the story.

Bullets Kill

Think about what happens when you open PowerPoint. A blank-

format slide appears that contains space for words—a title and

subtitle. This presents a problem. There are very few words in a

Steve Jobs presentation. Now think about the first thing you see

in the drop-down menu under Format: Bullets & Numbering.

This leads to the second problem. There are no bullet points in

a Steve Jobs presentation. The software itself forces you to cre-

ate a template that represents the exact opposite of what you

need to speak like Steve! In fact, as you will learn in later scenes,

texts and bullets are the
least
effective way to deliver information intended to be recalled and acted upon. Save your bullet

points for grocery lists.

Visually engaging presentations will inspire your audience.

And yes, they require a bit of work, especially in the planning

phase. As a communications coach, I work with CEOs and

other top executives on their media, presentation, and public

speaking skills. One of my clients, a start-up entrepreneur, had

spent sixty straight days in Bentonville, Arkansas, to score an

appointment with Wal-Mart. His technology intrigued com-

pany executives, who agreed to a beta test, a trial run. Wal-Mart

asked him to present the information to a group of advertis-

ers and top executives. I met with my client over a period of

days at the offices of the Silicon Valley venture capital firm

that invested in his company. For the first day, we did noth-

ing but sketch the story. No computer and no PowerPoint—just

pen and paper (whiteboard, in this case). Eventually we turned

the sketches into slide ideas. We needed only five slides for a fifteen-minute presentation. Creating the slides did not take as

much time as developing the story. Once we wrote the narrative,