By Chris Sheesley Anyone motivated to read this article already knows active listening skills through exposure to it in training and books. Yet, if you’re like most people, you find it strangely distasteful to be either the giver or receiver of active listening technique.
By Susan de la Vergne Technical presentations are fabulous examples of public speaking! Engineering and tech presenters are funny, concise, and engaging. Most of them can’t wait to grab a microphone, fire up their succinct, well-designed PowerPoint slides and launch into an hour or two of riveting information transfer!
By Susan de la Vergne Bullet lists on slides are nothing more than the presenter's speaker notes. That's it; that’s all they are! The words, ideas, details, facts that the presenter is standing there saying are right there, verbatim, on the screen.
By Susan de la Vergne Once upon a time, people thought of reason and emotion as opposites. One is rational, the other irrational. One is ordered, the other chaotic. One is controlled, the other runs wild.
By Susan de la Vergne In the 1960’s, the brilliant and sarcastic mathematician-turned-comedian, Tom Lehrer, once went off on a short tirade about interpersonal communication. Yes, it was as hot a topic 45 years ago as it is now. In his rant Mr. Lehrer observed, “One problem that recurs more and more frequently these days in books and plays and movies is the inability of people to communicate with the people they love—husbands and wives who can’t communicate, children who can’t communicate with their parents, and so on.”
By Susan de la Vergne My boss several years ago was a masterful meeting leader. Even when he wasn’t officially leading the meeting, he was good at it. What was his secret? He did his homework. He prepared. He had not only completed whatever assignment he had, but he’d also gauged the situation and participants beforehand.
By Susan de la Vergne Phil is a manager at a biotech company in Colorado that's been acquired by an even larger one in Texas. The acquisition has been a rough ride so far. People in the acquired company don’t like the new management, and the new management hasn’t made any effort to improve that opinion.
By Susan de la Vergne Brace yourself. I'm going to make a shocking recommendation about how to prepare slides for technical presentations. Here goes: Don't use design templates. Ever. You know the ones I mean, those decorative templates in PowerPoint and other slide products with the colored frames, borders and bars, and the dots and doodads in the corner. They're a terrible idea! Why? Because design templates detract from your presentation rather than improve it.
By Susan de la Vergne Technical professionals and engineers tell me the one thing that really bothers them about the whole business of writing is how messy it is. There’s no one right answer to anything. You can phrase something this way or that way, and either one is good. You can organize your subject matter one way or a different way, and both are right.
by Susan de la Vergne Imagine you’ve been invited to a presentation by a molecular biologist who is planning to tell you, in some detail, about the life cycle and behavior patterns of bacteria, describing research about the ways in which bacteria operate both individually and collectively.
