Steve Jobs: The Great Presenter

Many refer to Steve Jobs and the Great Inventor, but to me, he will always be the Great Presenter.

It's easy to admire the product innovator who made a product before you know you need it, the visionary who successfully established company strategy through counter-intuitive, disruptive moves. So, if Ronald Reagan is The Great Communicator and Richard Feynman is The Great Explainer, might Mr. Jobs be The Great Presenter?

His communication brilliance didn't just happen automatically, it was all be carefully planned, crafted, and rehearsed. Jobs consistently did four things:

1. Passionate about what his company makes: You can tell that Mr. Jobs loves what he did and he pushed the product quality to a level of excellence unmatched in the world. When he presented, he modeled for us what he wanted us to feel toward his products. In his 2007 iPhone launch presentation, he marveled himself at his own iPhone 137 times exclaiming things like "isn't it cool" and "yeah, it's pretty nice". We should all love what we make or do that much.
2. Gets a physical response from the audience: A great storyteller creates a sense of tension and release that holds us in rapt attention.. Jobs could hold an audience's attention for a full 90 minutes without a yawn in the house whereas most presenters can't hold attention for 9 minutes. How did he do that? Looking again at that iPhone launch presentation, the audience laughed 73 times and clapped 105 times in 90 minutes. Jobs got a physical reaction from the audience every 30 seconds on average.
3. Shares repeatable sound bites: Audiences today are like little signal repeaters. Social media networks create an audience size exponentially larger than the one inside the presentation hall. Mr. Jobs packed his presentations with sound bites that got repeated by the audience and picked up in the press. He's a master at rhetorical devices.
   • Repetition: "That's 58 songs every second of every minute of every hour of every day."
   • Comparisons: "A huge heart transplant to Intel microprocessors."
   • Similar Sounds: "Reinvent the phone" was said no less than 5 times in his keynote
4. Uses memorable dramatizations: Mr. Jobs used drama to create a sense of suspense. He has unveiled hidden products, pulled iPods from his pocket and a MacBook Air from an interoffice envelope. Instead of doing a boring iPhone demo, he listened to a visual voice mail from Al Gore and called Starbucks and ordered 4,000 lattes (one latte for everyone in the audience). That didn't just accidently happen, it's all must be planned to create an engaging experience.

We all will miss Steve Jobs' innovation, but we will also miss the Great Presenter. These are some big shoes to fill.

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Original Page: http://blog.duarte.com/?p=7929

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