⚡️Power-Up Newsletter 12 It’s the morning of the big presentation. You wake up early, skin still glowing from the face mask you wore to bed. Your lucky socks and “special occasion undies” slide on with ease after a great shower. Moe from Marketing pulls one of their classic unprepared routines and goes waaaaay over time on topic 2. You try hard not to roll your eyes. One little problem: there’s only 10min left for the meeting and you have about 15min of content (plus the inevitable questions) to get through. This is not good. Unfortunately, Exec number 2 has other plans. Realising that they are due to head to an even more important next meeting, Exec 2 asks if you can summarise the key takeaways in 5min. A few more execs agree and now everyone is looking at you.
Welcome to Corporate Life - a place where you’re expected to summarise tons of work into 5min. Thankfully, the BLUF principle can de-risk this scenario tremendously. BLUF is a military acronym that stands for: Bottom Line Up Front As the name suggests, it’s about putting the important details first. I use this technique in all of my key work presentations. Some people refer to it as an executive summary, I just call it slide 2 - because slide 1 is usually just the title slide 😅 A good slide 2 tells the audience:
The rest of the slides take them through the points mentioned in a lot more detail. All of this should be accomplished in a slide that takes no more than 2 min to present. It can be 1 or 2 slides, but I like to aim for a single slide. The biggest concern most people have with the BLUF technique is that they’re not able to tell the story how they would like to - with a long beginning, middle and end. Newsflash - the presentation isn’t about you. It’s for the audience. BLUF is awesome. You can use it in your writing (reports or blog posts), emails and presentations. The benefits that BLUF delivers are:
There are two critical components to a great BLUF slide:
🎁 As a bonus for newsletter subscribers, here is a link to my Discovery Checklist which you can use to better plan out your presentation and BLUF slide Back to our story… And just like that, you look like a star as you clearly communicate your slide 2 to the Executive team in under 5 minutes. Yes, you didn’t get to show the alternative scenarios you worked on. But, you can still send it out in an email for the Execs to read through. Oh and next time, make sure you’re first on the agenda 😂 I hope you're having fun applying these presentation secrets to your work. Is there a particular area that you currently struggle with? Let me know with a reply and I will create a lesson just for you 🏆 That's all for Edition #12! Hope you have a fantastic week! ✌️ + ppt Fareed. Did someone forward this email to you?
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ex-Management Consultant teaching busy professionals how to make their presentations pop! Go from Boring to Brilliant with my weekly tips to power-up your presentations ⚡️
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