Sunday, February 26, 2012

Guest Post - Nikhaar Shah

Nikhaar is one of Chris' Spring 2012 Professional Speaking students at Carnegie Mellon. Here he writes about virtual communication.


Daiki To, a Japanese businessman, tries to hurry through the last meeting of the day in Los Angeles at 5 in the afternoon. Noticing his anxiety, a co-worker inquires to which Daiki exclaims “It’s almost 9 AM in Tokyo! My daughter will be waking up anytime, it’s her birthday!” After he completes the meeting on time, he grabs his coat and races to his hotel. As soon as he makes it to his suite, he opens his notebook and gleams with happiness as he virtually watches his daughter smile while she cut the birthday cake in front of him.

This is not a lone occurrence; 32 million [1] such stories happen each and every day to form a total of 300 billion [2] annual minutes from the free video call provider Skype. In comparison, for the same year, the total telecom minutes for the 2011 in USA were 2250 billion [3]. With everybody from governments, corporations, institutions, universities and personal users shifting to virtual communication to save cost, resources and time, the question perturbing everybody is – Is virtual communication an effective and sustainable replacement for physical communication?

As software engineers from India video-chat with their European counterparts to discuss daily progress in projects, governments set up video meeting times to address issues of their subjects and legal decisions based on video conferences with a witness from a secret location – there is no denying that virtual communication is facilitating immense savings in time, resources and cost. It is only due to virtual communication that these software engineers don’t need to travel to Europe every month, these governments don’t have to establish infrastructure in rural areas and these witnesses can be assured of better protection.

But a study from Cornell [4] shows that virtual communication is not as effective as faceto- face methods. The survey also states that a majority of executives prefer face-to-face communication to its technical counterpart, citing reasons like differentiation in bonding, multitasking, quality relationships and body language analysis. Another study [5] in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication discovers that virtual communication leads to a lot of trust issues between teams, and the trust developed is fragile and temporal.

So, to summarize – given the present state of the economy, virtual communication will increasingly keep on replacing physical communication but physical communication should be given preference during meetings where trust and bonding is of pivotal importance.

[1] http://skypenumerology.blogspot.com/2012/02/32-million.html
[2] http://www.techradar.com/news/computing/-metro-drives-magic-across-all-ourexperiences--
1053265
[3] http://www.ctia.org/advocacy/research/index.cfm/aid/10323
[4] http://cornellsun.com/node/44228
[5] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1083-6101.1998.tb00080.x/full

Guest Post - Swetha Patil

Swetha is one of Chris' Spring 2012 Professional Speaking students at Carnegie Mellon. Here she writes about virtual communication.


Communication has been derived from the Latin word "communis", meaning to share. Man is a social animal and communication is part & parcel of life.  We don’t realize but we are so dependent on technology and used to virtual communication that life seems impossible without laptop, smart phones, internet, cellular network & cell phones. But what is virtual communication? Virtual communication is interacting with others in virtual reality. There are various forms of virtual communications like video conferencing, telephone calls, emails and text messages. Technology has advanced to such an extent that geographical distances do not act as hindrance for communication.

Be it any culture, to have an effective communication certain things are essential like communication is not all about talking but also listening. When we interact we should be relaxed, which is the key to effective communication. In virtual communication we virtually connect but there has to be a bonding and respect for each other while communicating. One should be prepared, polite, enthusiastic, passionate, confident, direct and simple while communicating. Virtual communication is being extensively used in education, healthcare and entertainment to name a few. There can be two type of virtual communication i.e. synchronous and asynchronous. Synchronous virtual communication is like a phone call or video conferencing where person from each side communicates like real time conversation. Each side waits for the reply from the other side. On the other hand emails, text messages are asynchronous type of communication where people email or text and continue with their work and do not keep waiting for the reply. There is delay in asynchronous communication and does not have the non verbal element. This is why we have emoticons in instant messaging and email. These emoticons convey more than words.

I use virtual communication almost on a daily basis. I am so addicted to my iPhone that I can’t imagine any time of my day without my smart phone. I use it to make local and international calls, text my friends, surf web. With Wi-Fi and 3G, I even use it to “Skype” with my parents and friends back in India. Phone calls and Skype make me feel close to home even though I am in a different continent. Skype has become so popular that it is almost used as a verb. Virtual communication has made earth a closely bound planet. I am in Pittsburgh and my parents are in Bangalore, India but distance does not seem to be a problem because I am virtually connected. I bought a pair of boots last week and was so excited that started showing it to my parents on Skype. Virtual communication gives me confidence and a sense of attachment as I am not far from my loved ones anymore. I stay in touch with my school and college friends through googletalk, Yahoo messenger, Facebook, Skype and the list goes on. Another advantage of virtual communication is that one cannot feel lonely at any point of time. No matter where you are, if you have internet or phone, then you are connected.

For me the value of virtual communication is not just limited to personal life. I worked at Oracle for three years as an IT consultant. I worked with clients across the globe and had to interact with them at regular basis. In IT consulting communication plays a key role. Working form off shore wasn’t a big challenge as I was virtually connected with my clients and peers. We had Voice over IP phones and whenever wanted to reach someone from our desk, just had to dial a number and got connected to people in any part of the globe. Our team used to have calls, web conferences with clients which made our work simpler and faster.  Business at global level gives you the opportunity to interact with people of different cultures and learn new things about them and their culture. I worked with Asian, European and North American clients and learnt a lot of things about their business, work culture even though I did not travel to all these continents. I really find this technology amazing of connecting to someone who is miles away, in seconds.

In business the current belief is that virtual communication is replacing face- to- face interactions. Virtual communication is efficient, inexpensive and easy to use. But a study by the Cornell Center for Hospitality Research found that under certain business conditions, face to face interactions are more effective than virtual communication1.  To some extent it is true that virtual communication cannot be equivalent to face to face communication as it lacks the personal connection that you have when interacting with someone face-to-face.

With life moving at a fast pace we cannot connect to people every time by having face to face interactions. We keep moving, our loved ones keep moving but with virtual communication we no more feel isolated. We are all connected and bonded by this great innovation of mankind i.e. virtual communication

Guest Post - Tan Li


Tan is one of Chris' Spring 2012 Professional Speaking students at Carnegie Mellon. Here he writes about virtual communication.

With the development of technology, communicating with other becomes much easier than before. Virtual communication has been seen in business frequently nowadays, such as emails, video conferences and etc. Most big companies rely more on the Internet and global technologies. As a result, how to make effective virtual communication plays a vital role in business.

Definition
Virtual communication is defined by Umea University as, “the information, communication, and action, mediated by new information technologies, where contents, intentions, or actors may be nonexistent, distorted, replaced, or created – intentionally or unintentionally.”[1] Virtual communication also means that people work in a team without actually seeing others. In 21st century, it is a common way for completing projects in large companies with departments spread all over the world.

Purpose
The intention of virtual communication is to send the ideas and thoughts clearly without meeting one another. It is only considered to be successful that people send the message and the recipients receive the message correctly and timely.

Types
Virtual communication has different types. The internet is the most common medium in virtual communication. It could be used for emails, video conferences, social networking, online chatting room and instant messenger. On the other hand, mobile phone is another powerful tool for virtual communication. Text messages are considered effective in business, even though they are used more for interpersonal relationships. It is very important to know the appropriate type of virtual communication to use. For instance, if there is something important to announce, I will prefer to use emails or telephone calls rather than text messages.

Worries
Even though there are so many benefits brought by effective virtual communication, we still need to consider some issues that could lead to bad communication.
The first thing we should think about is the time zone. If the company has branches all over the word, the time zone will be a major consideration. For example, in United States, people in the east should make the contact after 12pm because it is just 9am in the west. If someone in United States wants to communicate with others in China, they had better choose to write an email rather than make a phone call.  

Another worry about virtual communication is the dependence on technology. For a company that relies greatly on technology, once the network fails or the database breaks down or even a slight outage for several hours, people will have nothing to do but wait for the engineer to fix it and the company may lose millions of dollars. So these companies should keep monitoring their network status and back up their databases frequently.

The last thing people should worry about is miscommunication in virtual communication. Email is frequently used these days and it has been proved to be efficient. However, something emotional like tone is lost when we type the words in the email. Communicating in a virtual world, people are not able to read your minds as easily as talking face to face. Some useful signs like facial expressions and body languages will not be seen. As a result, it will increase the potential for miscommunications. All in all, in order to make effective virtual communication, we should consider the difference in time zone, the dependency on technology and the potential for miscommunication.


[1] Papa, Nicole. "Effective Virtual Communication" eHow | How to Videos, Articles & More - Discover the expert in you. | eHow.com. Web. 19 Feb. 2012. <http://www.ehow.com/about_6756180_effective-virtual-communication.html>.

Sunday, February 19, 2012

Guest Post - Venkata Anirudh Gorthi

Anirudh is one of Chris' Spring 2012 Professional Speaking students at Carnegie Mellon. Here he writes about presentations.


It was the annual technical festival at our college and there were lots of events happening all around the campus. Having finished organizing the informals for the day, I decided I would relax and was scanning through the posters and the header just stuck to my eye, a talk on “Talent Vs Attitude: What do you need to succeed “. Though tired and in a mood to relax, I found this topic so intriguing, it made me curious and drew me towards attending the talk. The speaker, Harsha Bhogle, was from my home town, was one of the country’s most sort after cricket commentators. He had made a phenomenal rise in the broadcasting industry after doing his MBA from one of India’s best B-Schools. Very popular among the youth of the country, he started off his presentation by initiating a discussion on what the audience thought about the talent and attitude. Some of us were pumped up listening to others talking about things we did not agree with. Then Harsha had his take on this topic and came up with a story about his childhood and how he combined attitude and talent on his way to climb the ladder of success. One of his slides had a picture which weighed success against talent and attitude and this picture in a way summarized the importance of each of these characteristics for success. I was able to connect with Harsha and it was we were having a one on one conversation. After the lecture, all of us came out of the room feeling relaxed, enlightened and in a way lucky to have attended such a lecture.

Few days later, as the technical festival ended, we were back to our routines and I was strolling towards one of our lecture theatres. I went through the blackboard and we had this lecture on “2D and 3D normalizations” in Database systems. At first look I thought we are talking about various dimensions and was wondering how this was related to databases. The stroll from the hostel to the lecture hall in a confused state made me late to class. Disinterested, confused and fearing that I might find it tough to follow, I tried to concentrate on the lecture. My professor generally had his slides which were very verbose and rarely had any pictures or illustrations of what he was teaching. Also, his style of teaching made us assume that he thought that students sitting in the first two benches were ones who would be listening to him. He never bothered to address us or make any eye contact with us. This created an impression that we at back didn’t belong to the class. In order to draw attention of the professor, one of my friends asked the professor a question about the 2nd normal form. When asked, the professor gave a puzzled look and tried to shy away from the question and continued his lecture. These turn of events and the approach of the professor made me feel even more disinterested and I walked out of the lecture. Later in the day, me along with few of my friends sat down to discuss about what happened in the class. One of my friends, who was familiar with all these topics, started explaining us using a combination of illustrations and lecture slides we used in the class. He used an abstract example of all of us being team managers of our favorite football teams and related it to how we could use the concepts of the class to manage these teams. This made the topic even more interesting. We cracked a few jokes about how incompetent the professor was in his class, and post our session we thought we achieved what the professor could not – Understanding the topics of the class in a better way.

After I finished my graduation, I started to work and four months into my job, I had to present the second phase of our project. We had worked so hard on it for the past few weeks. My manager thought that I could present the progress of project competently as I had a good and sound understanding of the project. With no experience of doing presentations in my short cooperate life, I was a bit skeptical about
how I could manage the responsibility given by my manager. That night after I was assigned the role of presenter, there was some uneasiness within me about the presentation. As I laid back on my bed after a stressful day, I started to think about how I should handle the presentation, pondering over this, I started to think about the various presentations. The first things that came to my mind were Harsha’s amazing presentation on attitude Vs talent and my Databases professor’s dull lecture during my third year. Both of them though contrastingly different in their styles, helped me analyze the pros and cons of the two styles of presenting. Having thought over the various aspects of their presentations I felt a bit relieved and was more confident about being a good presenter. My change in attitude towards the presentation was best summarized by Mr Richard Saul Wurman, The inventor of famous TeD talks quote which said:
“What to communicate is to understand what it is like not to understand “.

Having being in a position where I was confused as to how to interpret two extremely different styles of presentations, I understood the things I need to take care of when I am presenting. The analysis helped me realize what I should present and how I should ,so as to convey my the story to my target audience. Looking back I am grateful for the experiences I had, they helped me become a more confident and composed speaker and presenter.

Guest Post - Cheng Song

Cheng is one of Chris' Spring 2012 Professional Speaking students at Carnegie Mellon. Here he writes about virual communication.


Virtual communication can represent any form of communication that is not face to face. For example, Video Conferences and Skype calls can both be considered virtual communication.
Here I want to share with you about some DOs and DONTs during Video Conferences.

DOs:
1. Do have a clear purpose of the meeting.
Compared to off-line meeting, on-line meeting is more demanding on clear purpose. Every meeting participant has to know the objective, things to be discussed and even the agenda of the meeting before video conferences. If people don’t know what is going on, they might get lost during the meeting because 1) they could not make preparation before the meeting; 2) once the meeting began, it is difficult to have a consensus about the objective and process of the meeting while everyone is sitting perhaps hundreds of miles away from each other.

2. Do have people participated in the meeting.
It is very dangerous to have a one-man show during a Video Conference. Unlike off-line meeting, in video conferences you cannot observe the eyes and faces of people accurately so in most cases, you could not know if people are bored about the topic or distracted by some other things.
So the only to guarantee that people are focusing on meetings is to get them involved. The meeting leader should assign major roles to different people, so people could share their ideas, have arguments and have a good feeling of participation.

3. Do have point in the meeting.
It is difficult to keep the meeting on the right way if people have too many ideas to share and too many arguments to settle. A good way to solve this is to have clear point of the meeting; statements like “The focus of the project is…” or “The most important thing is” are good examples of having points during a conference meeting.

4. Do set rules for the meeting.
To get people focused, the meeting should have some rules. Rules like “Everyone should get him/herself well prepared before the meeting”, “People should make notes about the meeting while others are concluding or valuable ideas are proposed.” Rules will make the meeting run more formally, because in most cases, people will not consider video conferences as serious as off-line conferences.

DONTs:
1. Don’t be distracted by other things during the meeting
When you are sitting in front of computer, there are always interesting things that might distract you from the meeting especially when the meeting didn’t reach you expectation and seemed boring. The right thing to do is to try getting focused, because unlike off-line meeting, there is no strict supervisor during a video conference.

2. Don’t refuse listening to others
“You create a wall before listening by evaluating what other people say.” In virtual communication, it is also true. You need to appreciate other ideas and voices during the video conference. If everyone refuses to do so, the meeting can have two alternative results: one, people are debating with each other which makes the meeting messy; two, people are talking, but others don’t consider it seriously.

Guest Post - Jinguang Zhou

Jinguang is one of Chris' Spring 2012 Professional Speaking students at Carnegie Mellon. Here he writes about presentations.


Definition of Presentation:
Presentation is the practice of showing and explaining the content of a topic to an audience or learner. Presentations come in nearly as many forms as there are life situations. In the business world, there are sales presentations, informational and motivational presentations, first encounters, interviews, briefings, status reports, image-building, and of course, the inevitable training sessions.1  From the definition of presentation, we know that there are two main parts in a presentation, person who makes this presentation and audience. The purpose of presentation is to let audience understand what you talk about and persuade them to agree with your opinion. In order to make a perfect presentation, well preparation is the most important thing.

How to prepare for presentation?
Just as I said before, a good presentation must consider audience so we should do research about the content we will represent and people who will listen to our presentation.

1.       Content.
The first thing is to confirm the goal of our presentation. Only when we understand the purpose of presentation, can we collect related information to support our opinion. In real world, the purpose of each presentation is different so we should customize our content. For example, if we make a presentation for business purpose, we should make our content professional. Graphs, figures ans statistics present strong persuasion for business people because they care about how the project can increase profits for the company, what’s the break even, what’s the revenue and what’s the opportunity cost of this project. For these concerns, numbers are much more direct and efficiency for them rather than verbal words. However, if we make the same presentation for customers or people not in this field, the content is totally different. For those people, we cannot use professional terminologies and statistics because they don’t have related background. For these cases, we should make complex content easier and make some stories for audience. If audience are attracted by our stories, they will focus on what we say.

2.       Style
As we know, audience cannot absorb everything from the presentation so our presentation style should be diverse and novel to attract attention of audience. For example, if we want to introduce the background of the presentation, we can use a related video. Professor Labash once used videos to show some mistakes in a job interview. It’s so impressive so all classmates focus on that video and get a lot of information about how to take a job interview. Besides, interaction also plays an important role in our presentation. We can organize some small games to attract attention of audience.

3.       Appearance
It also depends on who are audience. For some professional audience, we must wear professional. For audience who are teenagers, we can dress causal to reduce the gap.

4.       Other Preparation.
Before the formal presentation, we should come to the presentation place to check all facilities we will use work. Does the projector work? Is there enough room for audience? Is there white board to make notes? If facilities don’t match our requirements, we should change another place or ask staff to make some changes.

Conclusion
Preparation is the priority of any presentation. Good preparation will increase our confidence and attract audience’s attention. In addition, give the mock presentation to your friends before the normal presentation. Let your friends give you some suggestions which can help you find which part is not good enough.


Guest Post - Daniel Lozano

Daniel is one of Chris' Spring 2012 Professional Speaking students at Carnegie Mellon. Here he writes about presentations.


At some point in time, every individual is tortured with having to create or be a part of a presentation. These presentations can range from persuasion, building good will, or just general information.[1] Whether or not a certain individual learns from a presentation doesn’t necessarily depend on the structure, but the combined relation of the participant and the structure of the presentation itself.

                Usually we determine a presentation to be informative if we were really engaged or if a concept discussed, sparks a new interest. However, experience tells us that outside sources also really influence our motivation to be a part of the presentation.  Haven’t you ever found yourself starting to drift off during a presentation and suddenly you’re completely lost? This is can be a result of a lack of sleep, hunger, personality type, and even an unstructured presentation. Most seminars/presentation creators don’t realize that creating the right setting is actually pretty vital. Having the initial attention of the participant and holding it is actually the greatest accomplishment of a presentation. Obviously, people that register for a presentation usually don’t have this problem but a greater number of presentations are more geared towards requirements such as job opportunities, school activities, training exercises etc. So when these types of participants are forced into a situation where a presentation just has to happen they already go in with the wrong mindset. Some would believe that they would learn more and of course others would see it as a waste of time. Honestly, when done correctly every presentation can grab the audience while actually getting them to learn something.

                I like to call this idea “grabbing the audience,” pretty similar to Billy Mays’ idea but implemented in the presentation world. A good example would be defensive driving. Nobody would ever do defensive driving if it took place in a classroom. So usually they conduct it in a restaurant with a pretty informal setting. This allows the participants to feel more comfortable and put aside those distractions such as hunger and no focus. My interpretation would be pretty similar but rely on different tactics. Calling out participants randomly, maybe introducing a joke or two and altering your tone of voice. This would really create uncertainties in the audience and would actually require everyone to start paying attention because of fear of being called on or missing a good joke.

                At the same time presenter qualifications are just as crucial. It is very easy to dismiss a lecture if the person speaking doesn’t have the right credentials. That’s why a thorough examination of speakers must be done prior to a serious presentation. Certain traits such as charisma, physical appearance, and publications are also just as crucial. Even certain situations would require these characteristics to change. If your audience is very technical savvy, then having the speaker introduce technical lingo would not be a bad idea because it would be expected that the audience would have no problem understanding.

                Once presenter and audience attention have been attained the last and final piece is to mesh your structured presentation. This part isn’t necessarily the most important, as discussed, but here you can easily lose your audience if you aren’t careful. Always maintaining audience attention is very difficult in this new technology era. For instance, when browsing Google, how many times have you honestly gone to the second search result page? Some people would say sometimes and most people would say never. This is because we want information as fast as possible, as accurate as possible, and when totally unrelated, we immediately shut it out. So as a presenter your goal is even more difficult. As your audience is digesting the projected information, it’s essential that you maintain your focus and relate most of the lecture to the bigger picture.

                As for the presentation structure, the presenter must begin with introducing himself. This brief interaction with the audience will give the presenter a personality instead of just being the voice of the lecture. This can also be used as an attention grabber because he can introduce some of his publications and why he feels that he is worthy of giving a presentation on a specific topic. Once the introduction is over, the proceeding of the presentation should be continuous and not too robust around any particular area. All specific details must be documented and cited according to educational and legitimate standards.
                Real-World Presentations take place throughout any professional’s career and whether or not your audience learns from it is dependent on presentation quality, audience engagement, and eliminating those humanistic distractions.


[1] Presentation (2012) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentation Retrieved 11 February 2012

Guest Post - Rupa Krothapalli

Rupa is one of Chris' Spring 2012 Professional Speaking students at Carnegie Mellon. Here she writes about presentations.


There are two perspectives of any issue. The way you look at it and the way the rest of the world looks at it. They might not always be the same. When you are presenting something important, it is imperative that you understand what it feels like being the audience to the presentation. Be prepared for the following questions from them: Why am I here? How do you think that would really matter? So what do I have to do next?

Why? The first few minutes of your presentation should tell your audience how you intend to treat them for the next precious hour of their life. Explain the flow of the presentation so that they have a basic idea of why they are there listening to you. You get only one shot at creating a good first impression. Give your best!

How? This is when you educate, entertain or explain depending upon the subject you are dealing with. Most often, it becomes necessary that you do all three with emphasis on one of them. Be specific and focused on what points you wish to cover. While you go about giving them your point of view, make sure you engage them in the best possible way.

Some tips for better engagement are: Maintain proper eye contact. This would give the listener an impression that you are talking to him/her alone and grabs their attention. Tell them stories! We are a social species and we connect to stories. Leave room for questions and conversations. This is when you tend to develop a rapport with the audience.

State facts and back them up with real time examples. Giving examples from your personal experience also helps to connect to the audience as it improves your credibility of presenting the issue. Tell them what their key takeaway from the presentation is and focus on the value to the audience.

So What? The outcome is as important as the issue. Be very clear and specific about what steps need to be taken next and close with a point that the audience can take along for further action. Nail your final point!

If all this is what you need be prepared to cater to the audience’s point of view, here is what you need to concentrate on your side of the story: When putting forward an idea, be excited and enthusiastic about it. It helps induce interest. When you yourself do not show interest in the presentation, you cannot expect the audience to show interest in it. Time management also plays a great role. From arriving at the venue early to pacing the presentation well, each step requires proper time management. You can make your presentation better by including humor. Creating a common ground with the audience also helps.

The look and feel of your presentation creates a great impact on your audience. A guest lecture by Professor Dan Boyarski, School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University, gave me insights on improving one’s presentation skills. One of the key takeaways was to ‘show them what you want to tell them’. Pictures always create a greater impact than just textual information. Making the presentation interactive by using audio could help improve it a great deal. Apple, Adobe and many others now offer tools that help combine textual, audio and visual effects.

While I wish you good luck with your presentations, here are some words of caution:

-     Be tactful in putting forward negatives.
-   
      Remember that people have short attention spans. Grab their attention at every possible opportunity!
-      
      Don’t be lost in your world of presentation. It is important that you be alert.
-    
     Do not include too many issues that you wish to address in a presentation. Three would be a good number.

Lastly, make sure that you enjoy the presentation and so does your audience!

Guest Post - Weber Schulz


Weber is one of Chris' Spring 2012 Professional Speaking students at Carnegie Mellon. Here he writes about presentations.

Not So Much Power… Point

If I were to ask you to give a presentation on a topic of your choice, what would be your default method of presenting? Would you use props? A Whiteboard? PowerPoint? Just from simple observation, when there is a presentation, there is usually PowerPoint. The PowerPoint presentation has become a staple in most classrooms, meetings, and information sessions. From observing this, one might conclude that this is because a PowerPoint slide deck is the most effective means of communicating ideas and information.  Being a student, I am exposed to between 5 and 10 PowerPoint presentations a week, and not only are they most interesting part of my day, but they inspire me to be an overall better person.

Let me pause to wipe the sarcasm dripping from my brow. Most PowerPoint presentations I see are information heavy, aesthetically unappealing and do a poor job of enhancing the presentation. That is what PowerPoint is supposed to do, right? Enhance? However, instead of enhancing a presentation, more often I see it taking over the presentation. It steps out of the role as a visual aid, and becomes the backbone of the presentation. As a presenter, it is all too easy to dump all of your information into the slides and reiterate the content back to the audience. At this point, the presenter assumes the role of an assistant to the slides while they present the information. This approach takes most of the pressure off the presenter, and requires little creativity or audience interaction. It also leaves the audience bored, uninterested and disconnected. 

A survey was conducted by Dave Paradi (www.thinkoutsidetheslide.com) asking people the top three things they found most annoying about PowerPoint presentations. When asked, 73.8% said “the speaker read the slides to us,” 51.6% said that there was “full sentences instead of bullet points,” and 48.1% said “text was so small I couldn’t read it.” These three complaints scream one thing loud and clear: the slides are doing the presenting, and the presenter is just the aid. 

This begs for the question: how can we reclaim what PowerPoint has so tactfully taken? How do we become the presenter again, and effectively use PowerPoint as a visual aid? Here are a few suggestions to make your PowerPoint less, well, powerful. There are many answers to this, but I think the first step is to continually remind yourself of whom is presenting. YOU ARE. Make sure that you and your PowerPoint line up, but that your slides compliment what YOU are saying. They shouldn’t say it for you. If they do, then why are you saying it? Slides should be visually stimulating, and should make the audience want to hear what YOU have to say. Lastly, keep it simple. The amount of text, the variety of colors, and assortment of fonts should be tasteful, yet not distracting.

Remember. It’s your presentation. It’s your PowerPoint.

Guest Post - Yi Xu

Yi is one of Chris' Spring 2012 Professional Speaking students at Carnegie Mellon. Here she writes about presentations.


Nervous in Real World Presentations

I made my first presentation when I was in the third grade of preliminary school. It was to run for the class representative. I couldn’t recall what I said during my presentation, but what I am sure is that I was very nervous before, during, and after my speech. I exercised again and again, but I was still afraid of acting as a fool on stage. Luckily, I didn’t forget word or sentence, and completed my first trial.

From then on, I have made presentations for hundreds of times. Most of them are class presentations, such as reporting project result. Others might be presentations in student activities, in case challenging competition, etc. I still feel a little nervous, but it has been much better than years ago. As there will be more presentations, especially business presentations that are more formal, I should try to better control my anxiety in such public speech.

Following are some points to overcome nervous, according to my previous experience and some relevant studies.
I made my first presentation when I was in the third grade of preliminary school. It was to run for the class representative. I couldn’t recall what I said during my presentation, but what I am sure is that I was very nervous before, during, and after my speech. I exercised again and again, but I was still afraid of acting as a fool on stage. Luckily, I didn’t forget word or sentence, and completed my first trial.

From then on, I have made presentations for hundreds of times. Most of them are class presentations, such as reporting project result. Others might be presentations in student activities, in case challenging competition, etc. I still feel a little nervous, but it has been much better than years ago. As there will be more presentations, especially business presentations that are more formal, I should try to better control my anxiety in such public speech.

Following are some points to overcome nervous, according to my previous experience and some relevant studies.
1.      Try best to prepare what I am going to speak.
I find that if I didn’t rehearse my speech in advance, but only thought about the outline and directly went to talk, I would always fail that presentation. The more important the presentation is, the more times I have to practice. Be familiar with the notes would never be a bad thing.

2.      Know the room in advance.
I feel more relax in places where I went before. Just like actors, I would perform more naturally in a familiar room. So if it’s a new circumstance, it would be good to arrive early and look around. Sometimes I also have to catch chances to stand at the speaking area and imagine the presentation.

3.      Prepare for the worst case.
For a well preparation, I would ask myself what might happen and how to deal with each situation. If I forgot some words and didn’t know what the next sentence was, I should check my note cards and recall as soon as possible, or just skip to the next point and act as nothing wrong.

4.      Gain experience.
It’s obvious that I am becoming less and less nervous when making public presentations. Successful experiences help me build my confidence, while failures make me pay attention to my drawbacks. The beginning of a trail is hard, while continuous practice is also valuable.

Monday, February 13, 2012

Guest Post - Dan Li

Dan is one of Chris' Spring 2012 Professional Speaking students at Carnegie Mellon. Here she writes about meetings.


Meeting is an important part of people’s lives. We take all kinds of meetings every day, and it seems endless. As an international student in CMU, I’ve taken meetings with American, Chinese,  Indian, Japanese, Europeans and so on. People from different countries behave really different, and  I have to say meeting a reflection of culture.

As a Chinese, I was used to keep quite in a meeting. I’d like to listen to other people’s opinions and think carefully about their words. It seems like meeting is a place for me to learn.  The first time I took a meeting with American guys is in C-squad. They really like talking. In other words, they keep talking, which seems never stop. We quickly find a big problem about out meeting. It seems like an outsider of the meeting and I never got a chance to express my idea.  Thus they encourage me to talk and participate in them. I tried very hard to be more active in meetings since It makes meeting more efficient and I believe this is the first step for me to accept their culture.

I also got shock the first time I took a meeting with Indian guys. That’s a meeting we arranged to talk about out finance homework. We set the meeting time to be 10 am at Heinz. I arrived very early since it’s polite to be early for  the first meeting in my country. However, my partner didn’t show up until 10:30. It’s unbelievable in my culture, but now I accept it since it’s their culture. Even though Indian guys may not be on time, but they are very serious and active in meetings. They would express their opinions very clearly and keep exchanging ideas with you until they get a satisfactory result. I think that’s what I need to learn.

I’ve also taken meetings with Japanese. Their meeting culture is much similar with mine. They also polite and quite in meetings and listen to other people’s opinion carefully. There is one thing that impresses me a lot. Most of them are precisian. They would make a detailed schedule of each meeting and keep taking notes of other people’s opinion.

Above are what I’ve experienced in different meetings. They are totally different, but I think good meetings have some common features, such as good schedule, thorough exchange of views, and a clear purpose, which is the most important thing. 

Sunday, February 12, 2012

Guest Post - Vidhi Shah

Vidhi is one of Chris' Spring 2012 Professional Speaking students at Carnegie Mellon. Here she writes about communication.



Once a blind man was sitting in a corner of a busy New York street and was begging for money. There was an empty cup in front of her and “I’m Blind – Please help” was written on it. Every minute atleast 30-35 people looked at the cup, read the line and passed by without giving a single penny. A sane man was observing this situation for an hour.Then he went near the cup, changed the tag on the cup and put the cup on its previous position. Suddenly, within a few hours people started feeling the cup with money and the cup was overflowing. The blind man asked the stranger what is written on the paper on cup and the stranger said “Today is beautiful. You can see it, but I can not!”
My mother told me this story when I was 13. The story was touching, but in true sense it demonstrated the power of effective communication and persuasion. The change of words persuaded the people to donate the money. However it is not this easy to persuade people today. One of the major factors to aid persuasion is Oral Communication. The victory speech in 2008 by President Obama comes to my mind when I think of persuasive speeches. I was in India but after listening to his words, I was convinced that he would get the United States out of recession. This is the power of oral communication. Being precise, logical and articulate can do wonders while communicating, especially at work place.
According to the study by Albert Mehrabian1, there are 3 main elements of face-to-face communication. Only 7% of the communication happens by words while 38% by tone of the words and 55% by body language. The figures consolidate my stand on the importance of oral communications. When you have such a small proportion of communication through words, the challenge of conveying your thoughts effectively becomes even more daunting. The trick is that ‘it is more about what the audience wants to hear than about what you want to tell them’.
Today’s world requires that we be even more effective while communicating. Each of us would have suffered at least once due to ineffective communication. So how do we excel in an activity that is so important to be successful in life? The key is in making the first impression. We need to put ourselves in the listener’s shoes and treating each person individually. There is no blanket approach to communication. However once a good first impression is made, most of the words spoken would go into the 7% category stated earlier.
To conclude, effective oral communication can vary from being the most appropriate way to convince and persuade people to being the most difficult way to do the same. 


Saturday, February 11, 2012

Guest Post - Steven Suchora

Steven is one of Chris' Spring 2012 Professional Speaking students at Carnegie Mellon. Here he writes about meetings.


Why Do We Still Have Meetings?

“I love going to meetings! Don’t you?”

Wow, that’s not something you hear often, is it?  We spend, on average, 5.7 years of our life attending meetings.  Many of those meetings are unnecessary, so it’s no surprise that many of us would rather not have our workday disrupted by having a meeting.

Why, then, do we have still meetings?  With the advent of modern communication technology, such as two way video conferencing, meeting in one designated physical location seems unnecessary.  There are three key advantages to having a face-to-face meeting. 

First, a meeting allows all members to quickly share new information.  Every time we get together as a group is another opportunity to add to and change the collective sum of group knowledge.  Gathering in the same physical space to share our insight and perspective with others at a personal level can trigger the dynamic generation of new ideas.

Second, a meeting helps to define the team.  Each person at the meeting is taking precious time to be there and therefore has a vested interest in making sure that the meeting is a worthy use of time.  Thus, each person feels a sense of being part of a team via this shared commitment to the meeting.

Third, a meeting can help elicit greater commitment from participants to fulfill goals and accomplish tasks.  If someone announces to everyone at the meeting that he or she will commit to a specific task or goal, that individual is more likely to fulfill his or her obligations.  This is due to an internally felt sense of psychological commitment to our peers. 

Thus, even though we may not like to attend meetings, an in-person meeting can help accomplish goals and move your organization forward in ways that digital communication tools could not.


Sources:

Labash, Chris.  "Better Meetings."  Heinz College, CMU, Pittsburgh, PA.  6 Feb. 2012.  Lecture.

The Scotsman.  "Meetings Waste 5.7 Years of Your Life."  Scotsman.com. EasyBib: Free Bibliography Maker - MLA, APA, Chicago Citation Styles, 21 Aug. 2008.  Web.  08 Feb. 2012. <http://www.scotsman.com/news/meetings_waste_5_7_years_of_your_life_1_1087079>.

Guest Post - Sowmya Saragadam

Sowmya is one of Chris' Spring 2012 Professional Speaking students at Carnegie Mellon. Here she writes about meetings.

Someone said “Many heads are better than one!”.  When people meet and come up with solutions to a problem on hand, you see the wide variety of directions the discussion goes into. This in turn helps people to come out with better solutions as well. It doesn’t mean that one should have meetings for every trivial issue that could otherwise be solved through less time-taking means, say through a phone call or an email.
Now if we have to start talking about meetings, the first and foremost thing I would like to tell is “never be late to a meeting”.  One should realize that going late to a meeting is as bad as going late to an examination. Rather worse! In an examination, it’s just you who is responsible for your own self, whereas if you go late to a meeting you might waste someone else’s time in updating you about what has happened so far. Punctuality reflects your sincerity and commitment towards your job.
Make sure everyone introduces himself or herself, especially if they are all meeting for the first time. It is always nicer having some optimistic and energetic people in a meeting who can help brighten the spirits of others while contributing to the discussion, instead of having someone who would create an unpleasant atmosphere. It is ideal to have less than ten members in a meeting in order to make sure time is spent effectively communicating with each other about the topic at hand than in managing themselves. Before one comes to a meeting, he/she should have an idea about what the meeting is about. That shall give a heads up to the person to get well versed with the related issues before hand in order to be able to contribute better. That would also make the person feel more involved and responsible for the meeting.
The meeting place should be easily accessible to everyone. I would say one should carry some cash, for parking, if one is going to a meeting in a new area. The best time for a meeting would differ depending on who all are involved in the meeting. Say, if you were an employee of a 9am-5pm firm, you would not be very enthusiastic about attending a meeting at 4:30pm! Also, towards the end of the week, say a Friday evening would be a time to hit a bar and not go to a serious meeting.
The agenda for the meeting should highlight critical issues as well as the critical success factors. Keep the issue in front of you and ask yourself, or others, “why” five times, and that would help you understand the critical issues easily. Don’t scare away people with a 10 page agenda, instead try to keep it small, say limit it to a page. If you have too many issues to be discussed, you can sort the issues into different buckets and have more than one meeting, in order to solve them. It would also be helpful and more organized if you can be precise; i.e. decide on what is going to be discussed by whom and in how much time. You should always make sure that there are conversations and suggestions flowing in the meeting room and not arguments and demands. You should come out of the meeting room with an agreement in hand. If not an agreement, at least have all the opinions of the members jotted down, in order to come up with a solution considering all the positives and negatives of the feedbacks. Also, before wrapping up a meeting, you should make it clear to everyone about what has been concluded on, as well as decide on a timing and a place for the next meeting, if necessary.

Guest Post - Mayank Mantani

Mayank is one of Chris' Spring 2012 Professional Speaking students at Carnegie Mellon. Here he writes about job interviews.


Getting a job is no longer an “apply-appear-approved” deal. In the era of globalization, exposure, cutting edge competition and focused specialization; it has become the need of the hour to align an individual with the organization, as well as the job title, the job description, and its respective entailments.

We have known our parents and their parents, and them theirs, to work decades in a specific job as a duty and nothing more. Passion has been lacking in the majority of people we know of the bygone generations, and job satisfaction has been somewhat of a whimsical paradox. What changed? Here, one can point out that the change has been an oxymoron, a bad good if you must. It took the world time aplenty to figure out what lacked. Passion is the answer to it, the answer to happiness in that 9 to 5, the satisfaction of contributing something to the world and not just scrounging food for the family. To quote Annie Gottlier- “It’s so hard when I have to, and so easy when I want to.”

This is the reason why we must choose something that we love, and not what we think the world will love about us. Mind you, no work is any less respectable, only when it comes to loving what you do, can you achieve a true corporate nirvana. 

Finding what you want to do in life is not just a single brainstorm process with your parents or the school counselor; it’s having a talk with yourself. What ticks you, what excites you and what you see yourself doing, and doing happily at that, ten years down the line.

Chances are, what you want to do will be a lot different than what you will attain if you lack that razor sharp focus. To this, one needs to follow a certain protocol. From the basic steps to knowing the field you will choose, to shortlisting the loosely based fields in the same genre for you to experiment; it is a huge intellectual and challenging experience. Once you’ve got that covered, one must brainstorm with veterans of the same field to get insight that no search engine, no book, no colleague can give. This insight comes from experience. To bend your head down in humility, and learn the art from the masters will give you a much-required jumpstart in the industry.

Simultaneously with this, networking is extremely important. The idea is to let you out there. Seek challenges; be always up for tasks that will let you go that extra mile. After all, finding a job is not just getting home a paycheck, it is writing your identity in a life manual called resume. What best than pick something that’s a heart’s desire backed by sheer grey intellect.

Lately, social networking has provided a boost to the professionals by connecting them at a single click. Websites such as Linkedin connect professionals from over the world in their desired respective industries. Increasingly it has become a platform to find jobs, recruit professionals and connect companies engaging in sought after business deals.

For every working professional once in their life comes a point, where they come across a job which requires the perfect use of their skill set and provides opportunities to feed their hunger to grow.
To focus on ‘that’ ideal company, it’s pertinent to strengthen your foothold in the networking industry. This can be done through various mediums such as career fairs, online opportunities, recruiting agencies, industry specific seminars etc.
Web is proving to be quite an effective medium where fast growing companies are adept at updating their needs and requirements to the world of applicants. Continuous networking with the company personnel will put you in the front row of the candidacy.

The quest for the ideal job will only be converted to reality when one does not indiscriminately hand out resumes; rather a need specific applying behavior is adopted. Applying wherever one can lay hands on will only dilute your vision from what should be your focus. Know the job; know the company, the product, the industry, and the working environment. Once it fits the bill, make sure you know the company profile in and out, like you are on the payroll already. Hard core knowledge about the company profile is the first step to landing that perfect job.

If there is one advice to be given to find a perfect job, frankly there will be none. Although a continuous pursuit with enthusiasm to learn and the ability to connect will surely put you on the right path till you can find that job that we call a dream come true. Finally, one must never forget the ethics of a job. In the end, a job is not a mere stepping-stone to success for you. Always be up to contributing to the organization you work for, and never shy away from additional responsibility.