Last night
I finally got to meet one of my communication heroes – the legendary ad man
Dave Trott, who was speaking at the LSE on his favourite topic ‘Predatory
Thinking’.
As a keen
disciple of Trott’s books and blogs I was looking forward to hearing lots of
familiar stories – straight from the horse’s mouth. What intrigued me as a Presentation Skills
coach, however, was whether be could be as compelling in front of a live
audience as he is in print and through various advertising media. And what would he use in the way of
presentation aids?
The answer
to the first question is that Dave Trott educated, inspired and charmed every
one of the 500 or so people who had come to hear him and he stayed very late into
the evening signing books and engaging personally with every purchaser. As for his presentation aids, he announced: “We’re going old school” and proceeded to scrawl a series of little doodles on
an overhead projector! Admittedly it was
probably actually a ‘visualiser’, but it was about as far from PowerPoint as
you can get. And it worked perfectly in terms of amplifying the topics he was communicating.
Now, in my
book Presentation Magic I referred to a discussion with a friend many years ago
when we theorized about what would make the perfect presentation tool. After much debate we decided on the flipchart
because you could appear to be making up the content as you went, enabling you
to tailor your content directly to feedback you were receiving from your
audience, so making them feel they are truly a part of all that is being
discussed. Of course, nobody actually does this because flipcharts are old tech
and I have even see text books that say ‘flipcharts have no role in
presentation’. Here, however, Dave Trott was putting the principle into action, albeit with a tool that can reach an
audience in excess of 500.
You can
see some of Trott’s doodles here. What
would your marketing department make of those? Believe me, though, they were perfect as a tool for supporting the
speaker on this occasion. And that is
how we must perceive presentation aids of all types – as a tool to help you as
a speaker to get your point across. I
often show the people I am coaching videos of Steve Jobs and I point to the way
he never puts anything on the screen unless it is actively helping him at that moment. Dave Trott takes the principle
several stages further by bringing real personalisation to the process.
While we
are on the subject of Dave Trott, I urge you to read his book Predatory
Thinking. Essentially, it is Trott’s take on the concept of ‘Disruptive
Activity’ that has become the by-word for securing an advantage and getting
ahead. His favourite story of a ‘powerful strategy to out-think the competition’
goes like this:
Two explorers are walking through the jungle.
Suddenly they hear a tiger roar. One explorer sits down and takes a pair of
running shoes out of his backpack. ‘You’re crazy, you’ll never out-run a
tiger,’ says the other explorer. ‘I don’t have to out-run the tiger,’ he
replies. ‘I just have to out-run you.’
The pages
of Predatory Thinking are full of
stories like that, with Trott telling them straight from the heart is his own
distinctive style – very much as he speaks. I describe it as ‘street wisdom’
because it’s all about people and, woven in amongst classic examples such as
Churchill, Einstein and Jobs you find actors, guitarists, racing drivers,
football coaches and people as diverse as Vietcong soldiers and a plumber.
Predatory Thinking – and its predecessor Creative Mischief – give you the distilled
wisdom of a lifetime and it’s too good to be confined simply to the creative
community that usually follow Dave Trott. You will find yourself choosing your
favourite stories, telling them at your next meeting and wanting more. And the
brilliant thing is that you can feed the habit because these books are
essentially compilations of Dave Trott’s regular blogposts. Which means you can find more on a regular
basis at these sites:
Predatory
Thinking can be found in print and on Kindle by clicking on the book:
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