I know, it seems obvious, but preparation is definitely crucial to the success of your presentation/demo.
The other day I watched a presentation by Jesse Desjardins called "You Suck at Powerpoint – 5 Shocking Design Mistakes You Need to Avoid".
Along with many useful design mistakes, he made an interesting observation that
Most experts say: An outstanding 1-hour presentation takes 30 hours or more of prep time.
— Slide 39
When I lived in Melbourne and worked in some of the inner suburbs I often saw some amazing graffiti. Some of it I’d classify as Art. Now I differentiate this type of graffiti from the simplistic "tagging" where the person sprays a basic signature multiple times in an area, sometimes over the top of much better work.
Tagged Graffiti Art
I was catching up on some blogs recently when I came across the article "Now that’s what I call service!" by Mike Taylor. Mike received some outstanding service from his local pub when he mistakenly left change behind. As an exponent of the Fish! Philosophy I can related to the idea that a business would want to "delight its customers" in this way.
His story reminded me of the differences in service I experienced earlier this year during the migration of our two phone lines when we moved offices.
Not far from our offices in West End is a heavy transport recovery company. You know, the sort with really big tow trucks. As such, I was pretty surprised to see this sign near the entrance to their business. I’m guessing they’ve had problems with people parking across the driveway.
It just goes to show that even if it's obvious, you sometimes still have to spell it out.
Back in 2007 I published a post about "Capability versus Competence" in which I espoused the virtue of Capability over Competence in IT and the difficulty in measuring it during recruitment but the value it can provide.
I recently had a comment on my original post. In it the author indicated that "Competence" in their opinion was far better.
Tagged Leadership
