Book Review: The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs
Monday, September 28, 2009 at 8:51AM 
I've sat through many corporate Powerpoint presentations in my day, and I think I speak for everyone when I say 98% of them are terrible. Make that 99%. Those of us who follow Apple, know one guy who really knows how to make a presentation shine, and that is, of course, Steve Jobs.
In the new book The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience, Businessweek.com columnist Carmine Gallo hopes to share of Jobs' techniques, and hopefully make the presentation world a better place.
The book is a mix of practical tips, and examples from Jobs' keynote appearances. Most of the book focuses on three presentations: the Original Macintosh announcement, the iPhone announcement, and the iPod launch. It's not surprising that the book would focus on three keynotes, since the "rule of three" is one of the major themes of the book. However, it does become monotonous, and redundant to hear about these three presentations. (the Intel conversion, 3G launch, and GarageBand launch are also mentioned.) One advantage to focusing on these three presentations though: they are readily available on YouTube, making it easy for you to watch them yourself. Additionally, Gallo has supplied 13 pages of notes, many of which are links to video clips.
I hope this book can make its way into the hands of those who need it most: the middle-managers, and CEOs who regularly give presentations. Gallo makes an interesting observation that most people create "sliduments": they take documents, and make slides out of them, with multiple bullet points, sub-headings, etc. As most Apple fans know, these elements rarely appear on Jobs' simplified slides.
It's a quick read, that although a bit redundant and maybe a little too pro-Apple to give to your favorite Dell or HP executive, The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs does a fine job of pointing out the brilliance of a Jobs keynote, and how anyone can improve their own presentations.
Hey, anything could help, right? The biggest "secret" revealed that most people probably don't want to hear, is that practice, practice, practice is perhaps the most important thing to creating a great presentation.
If you're an Apple fan, and you've tried to emulate Jobs in your business life, this is a great read, as it also serves as a trip down memory lane to great moments in Apple Keynote history.
Reader Comments (2)
It's really good to know about this book.
A video preview of the presentation secrets of steve jobs can also be found here: Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs