The Stories Behind the Summit: 2025 Lineup Set
The Presentation Summit has always been more than just a conference—it’s a gathering of ideas, insights, and the people brave enough to share them. And in 2025, we’re doubling down
The Presentation Summit has always been more than just a conference—it’s a gathering of ideas, insights, and the people brave enough to share them. And in 2025, we’re doubling down
So Not the Plan After 23 straight years of showing up, building community, and providing people a reason to give a damn, the Presentation Summit has chosen to go virtual-only
Six Things Presenters Should Never Say The digital world is littered with articles with titles similar to this one. A Google search turns up 750,000 of them. And most of
The story I told in 2018 was one of my favorites, because, first off, it was told to me by a good friend who teaches middle school, and second, because it was 100% true although you would never believe it.
I led a webinar recently, and while it is always my aim to stimulate and inspire audience members, what struck me the most this time was what I learned from all of them.
Public profanity is a new phenomenon and I can’t quite decide if it is a nadir or a zenith. Perhaps it is both, and as such, it has fascinating implications for anyone involved in public presentation.
The announcement of Temple Grandin’s appearance at the conference has been met with tremendously positive response. Dr. Grandin’s work is groundbreaking, as is her NYT best-selling work “Visual Thinking: The hidden gifts of people who think in pictures, patterns, and abstractions.”
The “but trap” could send to our keisters any of us who write or speak in public. Don’t fall into a but trap. Think “yes and” instead.
If you were to look up epiphany at Dictionary.com, it should include the footnote “See Season No. 20 of the Presentation Summit.” In our 20-year history, no event has been more eye-opening than the four days in October over which we staged our hybrid conference.
I start with a few provisos. First, I recognize that a high percentage of my readership subscribes to a faith other than Judaism or subscribes to no faith at all.
While ruminating over our promotion with the Presentation Guild, I am reminded of the Guild’s coming-out party in 2016. They were the lunchtime sponsor Monday afternoon, and nobody there had
I recently watched Free Solo for the fourth time, so obsessed am I with the limits of human achievement and our capacity to face down pressure and risk. The parallels with public speaking are obvious, and that is why I am so looking forward to welcoming to the Presentation Summit Dierdre Wolownick, the mother of Alex Honnold.
Few moments capture the charm of the Presentation Summit better than the 30 spontaneous seconds that took place one afternoon in 2017. When good friends Mike Parkinson and Nolan Haims found themselves next to one another leading concurrent seminars, a delightful game of one-upmanship took place. Watch…
Long before Covid, the Presentation Summit dabbled in virtual, as one of our industry’s most prominent spokespeople, Garry Reynolds, lives in Japan.
It was 2010 and we rigged up Skype and the best camera and microphone we could find. It was pretty cool at the time, but now it’s laughable.
We turn the tables on one of the oldest scams in history… Reprinted from 2009 on Throw-Back Thursday… ALL OF YOU HAVE RECEIVED ONE, WE’RE SURE. The email with the
For the past 40+ years, I have been proud of the wrong thing. I attended a predominantly black high school in a predominantly black neighborhood. I once held a party at my house in which I was the only white kid. As sports editor for the Daily Californian at UC Berkeley, I interacted with many black athletes, and as a young adult, I bore witness to, advocated for, and fought alongside community leaders and policy makers, many of them black, for equal rights and opportunities. As my friend Robert said to me at the time, “you’re blacker than a lot of black people.”
When I took time off last summer to write a book about tennis, I had intended for it to be merely a diversion. Having played the sport for decades, I
I have colleagues who specialize in helping people communicate in languages other than their own. I know experts in this field, and I can say without equivocation that I am not one of them. I am pretty good at using words like equivocation in my native tongue, but when it comes to the finer points of communication across cultural divides, well…my daughters would tell you I don’t even know how to speak to millennials.
Once a year, I participate in Leadership Santa Clara, a wonderful initiative that many cities (not just Santa Clara) conduct in order to seek out and cultivate local leaders in
It came out of nowhere. A one-time patron and presenter — I’ll call him Jon because, well, because his name is Jon — called me out by name on social
If so, they are failing I grew up near Stanford University in the 1960s and I remember my mother taking me on campus for protests and marches against our country’s
Did you hear the one about how powerful Mariah Carey’s voice is? You can hear her sing even when her mouth is not open. As you can imagine, there is
When you have held annual conferences as long as I have (first one in 1989), you encounter just about everything along the way. We have witnessed all of the following:
How could a simple question during a routine workshop become such a game-changer? We were well into our day, about six hours into an all-day presentation skills workshop. My client
Every year during and after the Presentation Summit, a fascinating exchange of ideas takes shape. This happens without fail — in the hallways and ballrooms during the days of the
The height of my client-visiting season is May through August when I visit or connect remotely with dozens of client sites and meet with many hundreds of people. Almost to
Every few weeks, someone speaks out on a public forum somewhere about how bad PowerPoint is. About how it should be eliminated from corporate culture. About how it is the
Longtime PowerPoint users, including this writer, remember fondly the days of version 2003. As old-fashioned as that version was — with its awkward slide layouts, unrefined visual aids, and often-bizarre
Most presentation consultants in business today have become a bit oblivious to the common practice of referring to a presentation by the tool used to create its visuals. No other
It was 9:15a and the outdoor thermometer registered it 37 degrees, 98 degrees in Fahrenheit. A group of over a dozen of us, including several teens and one 70-year-old woman,
“I don’t see how a software tool can create trust.” “I am fascinated by your analysis of trust and how animation contributes to it.” My last post, The Phenomenon of
We no longer have four-year-olds in the house, so the most profound and egregious examples of limited attention span no longer occur on an hourly basis here. That said, I
The best-kept secret of modern versions of PowerPoint? That’s a no-brainer, as I experience it almost every time I interact with users. When I am brought into an organization to
The drama that unfolded Around CorelWORLD ’01 Reprinted from Oct 2001 The events that overtook our country on Tuesday, September 11, had a profound effect on the conference that I
One of the most common of all traits among those who speak in public is the verbal tick. Most of my clients have them, our former rabbi had them, President
This is an excerpt from the third edition of Rick Altman’s provocatively-titled book on presentation best practices. Available now in paperback, PDF, ePub, and Kindle. You can learn more about
It takes a rock star to show us presenters what is truly important in communication Did you watch the Grammy Awards last week? Winners for Best Rock Performance, the Foo
As one year turns into another, I seek topics with larger reach, in the hopes that they could function as resolutions. This one certainly qualifies: the fine art of showing