Then after, the poor design elements are eradicated, we have to address poor public speaking skills. An entertaining speaker can make a bland presentation work. A bland speaker can’t do anything with an entertaining presentation.

Essential TED stuff… technology, ENTERTAINMENT & design. Simple concept.

How he can compare what he did to 99% of the millions of presentations given daily is laughable. Most presentations are about sharing business information – not about wacky ideas of replacing PowerPoint slides with dancers.

Most of the PowerPoint presentations we work on have a large financial stake. Just last month we assisted with a presentation for a meeting that led to a successful billion dollar acquisition. I’m sure there was some dancing around the board room table once that deal was done.

People love to hate PowerPoint and bashing it sure helps sell books, blogs and TED Talks like John’s. It helped make Ed Tufte famous and sell lots of books. John’s claim that bad PowerPoint contributes to the poor economy is ridiculous. Yes, I would agree that “bad” PowerPoint probably has contributed to many lost sales, lost business deals and millions of wasted meeting hours.

From my view, I see PowerPoint as an amazing business tool (Keynote, Prezi, etc. included) that helps businesses communicate critical information efficiently when the “tool” is used correctly. Besides the daily use of PowerPoint by millions that contributes to the buying and selling of probably billions of dollars of products and services, the many budget and business strategy presentations with big financial implications, I would argue PowerPoint’s use is a large positive contribution to the economy. I’d also like to point out to John that over my 25 years in the business of creating PowerPoint graphics I have hired many freelance presentation graphics designers that by day were dancers and musicians, but at night they did freelance graphics work that put bread on the table and paid the rent.

Illustrating a message with dance instead of slides is a nice idea and done extremely well by John and the Black Label Movement dance troupe. Maybe I’ll try a little dancing around the room at my next management meeting presentation.

It is obvious that the dancers in this TED Talk were professional and well-rehearsed. I’d suggest you try that with your next high stakes PowerPoint presentation. Hire some professionals, plan it well, rehearse often and you will find PowerPoint will perform well for you and deliver the results you need.

With a clear story and structure, the age old issue of too much text or wacky animations are so much easier to avoid.

You can only do this by using the most powerful presentation authoring tool known to man – a pad of paper and a pencil. Once the story is in place, you have room to develop visual supports that will ensure your audience is engaged and with you for the whole journey.