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Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos talked, so people listened.
Customers don’t care about “speeds and feeds,” Jobs would remind his teams at Apple. “People don’t just want to buy computers. They want to know what they can do with them.”
Jobs instinctively understood the key to effective presentations: Put the audience at the center of the story. Your listener will care about your ideas if you talk about what they care about.
In my communication classes at Harvard Executive Education, I introduce “audience-centric” communication as a system where the speaker puts the listener first. If you’re watching a boring PowerPoint, there’s a good chance the speaker is too focused on the information they want to get across rather than the content you’re most interested in.
Don’t be the boring speaker. Follow these four principles of audience-centric communication.
1. Start with the audience and work backward.
“Our fundamental approach is to start with customers and work backwards,” Jeff Bezos wrote in his 2009 Amazon shareholder letter. The principle of working backwards has stuck at Amazon ever since.
When I was researching my book, The Bezos Blueprint, I learned that nearly every major product or feature Amazon released—from Kindle to Prime—started life as a press release. The press release exercise will change the flow and the content of your presentations. When most people prepare presentations, they create slides, add data, and decide what they want to say. Does this sound familiar?
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Carmine Gallo
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