I really enjoyed having a beer with Andy Bounds last night. Andy is an inspirational communications coach and author of the best selling new business title "The Jelly Effect, How to make your communication stick". He says he became obsessed with good communication growing up wanting to describe things...

Remember that episode of the apprentice when they had to sell stuff on a shopping channel? Well it was my turn on Saturday night when I appeared on QVC 's Small Office Home Office show to sell Home and Student Edition at the very good price of £63.24. It was good experience and there are few things I...

Leonardo Da Vinci said "simplicity is the ultimate sophistication", a truth that has been a repeated theme for me in the last week. Here are some examples: At our recent marketing department offsite I was utterly appalled by the lack of clarity and simplicity in the way we communicate - and these are...

I find myself morbidly drawn to my own impending obsolescence. When I joined Microsoft at the age of 26, the average age was 26. Now that I'm 36, the average age is now 36. Perhaps that's because nobody ever leaves Microsoft, they just get old? And so being mr off the peg Microsoft, I am something of...

A rather good article posted on presentationzen this week talked about new research from the University of NSW on "Cognitive Load Theory" which more or less says it's hard to read and listen at the same time. Some slightly lazy journalism resulted in leaping from that to the sensationalist " PowerPoint...

I had the interesting opportunity to take part in the blogging4business conference today in London. I was part of a panel who took questions on corporate blogging from the audience of mainly PRs, marketing agencies and journalists. I also did an interview for the Radio 4 today programme which luckily...

For the launch of Exchange Server 2007, Windows Vista and the 2007 Microsoft Office system, I put together this demo and have been hawking it round pretty much every event since (well that's just good reuse right?). This demo required a fair amount of stuff installed on the virtual PC including Exchange...

If any of you were at the Nottingham Technet event last week, you were a witness to probably the worst crash and burn I have ever suffered during a live presentation. I had put quite a lot of work into the presentation, believe it or not, and I had planned some 50 minutes of demo during my 75 minute...

Following on from my recent Death by PowerPoint post which was all about making presentations better for the audience - here's one for the nerdy presenter. I'm loving my new toy, the Microsoft Presenter 3000 device. I can't find it anywhere online unfortunately (add a comment if you can) but it...

Take yourself back to that day in the mid eighties, in some smokey, Silicon Valley room where some developers were coming up with the ideas for a new application to help people do presentations. I don't think on the blackboard of brainstormed thoughts was "death by PowerPoint". We've forgotten why PowerPoint...