We just got back on Monday from Fort and a major review cycle with the US Army Combined Arms Center. For the last week, we have been editing the various pieces of the Military Presentation Method, wrapping up the Microsoft Fiscal year, and taking care of some administrivia so please excuse the tardiness...

Good Morning Modern Presenters, Yesterday I wrote that I would fill you in on the Microsoft/Us Army project so here goes. What is the US Army/Microsoft Presentation Project? The project that we are doing with the US Army is a practical application of the Modern Presentation Method. What we...

Good morning Modern Presenters, With the recent Wired article I have been getting a ton of questions about what the Modern Presentation Method is and how people can learn more about it, so I thought I'd pen a quick post to bring everyone up to speed. What is The Modern Presentation Method? The...

Just back from almost four straight weeks of traveling! I am exhausted. Big thanks to the folks in Fort Leavenworth Kansas; Quantico Va; NJ; NY; Pennsylvania; and everyone else who sat in training or one of my speeches. It was a great success and high scores on the speeches and training are rolling in...

In an earlier post this week , I talked about the need for organizations to have a single Graphics Library that contains amongst other things, Shapes. The primitives are circles, squares, rectangles, bullets, triangles, etc… Today, I am including 52 different PNG files that have a range...

So what are the principles that underlie the Modern Presentation Method? What key tenets do I think should guide a presentation method? Less Is More - A presentation should be of limited length and duration. The goal is to present the right amount of information in the minimum time. Standardize...

It's been a couple of weeks since my last blog post as I've been on the road to see the Doctrine and Training experts for the US Army and the US Marine Corps. Had lots of productive meetings and I think we are making progress on how both branches can use the Modern Presentation Method (MPM) as a model...

Whirlwind trip with a ton of meetings. CAC, CAC-T, BCTP, CGSC, MC COE and even ABC. Looking forward to how Microsoft can help the Army save time and money using MPM. More Posts soon. DK

Big day for the ModernPresenter. Got up at 5:40am to leave for Fort Leavenworth to pitch the Army on testing and adopting the Modern Presentation Method. Step #1 - Take a picture of my parking spot so I remember where I parked. Stay tuned. DK

All right, it's Template Thursday. Today's Super_Green_Template is great for Pitching or Teaching and has a nice green color scheme. Steal this and use it for your next presentation. Let me introduce you to one of the slide layouts in this template. It's called the TrendWall. Trend Wall A TrendWall...

Hello everyone. I've been off the grid working on a military map symbols set for the US Army Graphics Library. If everything goes as planned we will have a test version of the library available in the next two weeks. Also, tomorrow is template Thursday so I will have a new Super Template, this time...

Wow! Just finished meeting with Stephen Kosslyn PHD, former Dean of Social Sciences at Harvard , currently the Director for the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford . Dean Kosslyn is a pioneer in the world of cognitive neuroscience. For 35 years, he has been a groundbreaking...

It has been a crazy week! I spent most of it at the Microsoft - US Army Symposium talking about how the Modern Presentation Method can help the Army save time and drive better presentation outcomes. They loved it! More to come on that in future weeks. For today, I wanted to offer up another...

At the US Army - Microsoft 2011 technology symposium for the next 3 days so I don't know how much time I will have to post. Have a ton of side meetings to talk about how the Army can use the Modern Presentation Method to help them improve their internal presentations.

Sorry about the break. I got a nasty cold and had to take a couple of days off. Today I will give an overview of S tep 3 of the Modern Presentation Method: Build & Refine. In this step, we will take a slide drawn up on your storyboard, refine it and add content, and bring it to life. Here's quick...

The second major step in the Modern Presentation Method (MPM) is Storyboarding. In this step, we are going to take our work from Visualization and craft a great story. Storyboarding is a very quick process and should not take you much time at all. The purpose of storyboarding is to lay out a complete...

Whew, I know that was a lot of content. But, Visualization does not have to take much time. To help you walk through it, here is a simple checklist that I fill out anytime I have a presentation to do. It is simple and walks you through each of the Visualization steps. It also includes a sample...

Today, we'll cover the second part of Visualization which is how the presenter decides what type of presentation they are giving. Have you ever sat through a presentation and wondered, what's the point? Felt as though the basic premise of the presentation is flawed and poorly thought out? One of the...

Let's dive into the Modern Presentation Method (MPM) and cover how to Visualize a great presentation. I'm going to do it in three posts. This one, the first, introduces Visualization and covers the first three steps. The second post will be about something I like to call the Presentation Spectrum, which...

If you are like me, one of the top things you worry about whenever you start a project, is how much time should I spend on each item in my work back schedule? This is a difficult question when it comes to presentations, but here are some basic Modern Presentation Method (MPM) rules to follow in...

So first off, what software should you have? Well for all presenters, Microsoft Office 2010 of course. I have found that for the majority of presentations, whether on screen or on paper, I will use PowerPoint, Word, and/or Excel at some point in the process. PowerPoint, in addition to being...

Saturday afternoon and I'm going to take a few minutes away from the first bowl games of the year. As a result, this post will be pretty quick. Today I want to riff on slide backgrounds. People ask me all the time, should I use a light one or a dark one? Well, the answer is really simple...

Six years ago, when I first started doing executive level presentations I was stunned to find out that there was no easy to use process for building a great presentation! For the first year or so I muddled my way through as best as I could. Luckily, I had access to two resources that most presenters...