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With presentations a fact of corporate and military life, “Preparing More Powerful Presentations” offers tips that can help presenters improve, and links to additional resources. One way to ensure better presentations is to use shorter presentations, with advance hand-out or held back Appendices that offer key details and information.

In order to really make shorter presentations work, however, one must think about them in a different way. Silicon Valley has its own semi-standard 12-slide pitch format for entrepreneurs, but it doesn’t always translate directly into corporate presentations. Enter Bill Jensen, whose best-selling book “Simplicity” speaks to the internally-generated, productivity-sapping “fog of business,” and discusses ways to think and act differently in order to create more clarity. Jensen’s site, SimplerWork.com, also includes a number of resources – one of which is “The Ultimate 10 Page Presentation” [PDF, 350k]. Tips include:

“People will tolerate your logic for no more than a couple minutes. (Usually less!) After that, they start forming their own conclusions – whether or not you’ve gotten to your point…”