Bedtime Story

Mike Donoghue is a member of a multinational information technology corporation where he collaborates on the communications guidelines and customer relationship strategies affecting the interactions with internal and external clients. He has analyzed, defined, designed and overseen processes for various engagements including product usability and customer satisfaction, best practice enterprise standardization, relationship/branding structures, and distribution effectiveness and direction. He has also established corporate library solutions to provide frameworks for sales, marketing, training, and support divisions.

  Communications Management   Knowledge Management   Lessons Learned  

Stop me if you’ve heard this one (well, don't really stop me...I want you to read on regardless):

A guy walks into a meeting carrying packets of materials that he hands out to the attendees. Clearing his throat after everyone gets a bundle, the man talks about who he is and what he’s going to present. Basically, he’s just walking through the beginning of the packet he’s handed out and getting everyone oriented. No problem…seems like standard procedure. But after a few minutes pass, he’s still reading the text in the presentation, word for word. Too late, you realize as the room starts to feel cozy that you’re no longer just attending a presentation…instead, you’re being lulled to sleep by a bedtime story.

Right to Read
Chances are you’ve been subjected to a similar situation. The lights were probably turned down a little, the room got a little warm because of all the bodies in there and the presenter had a calm, droning voice with little inflection. (Perhaps you are getting drowsy right now just thinking about it…)

It almost seems that some presenters forget that most of us can read. This is unfortunate since we often can visually scan a document’s contents fairly quickly, particularly those distributed for a presentation. We also are generally very busy and don’t like to have …

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