Great check off list for ALL speakers on Pamela Slim's blog appropriately called "Compulsive Attention to Details..."
One of the best of many good tips - always bring a Flash Drive of your PowerPoint and support materials separate from your laptop - (and be sure any video clips you embed in the PowerPoint are in the same file in the Flash Drive.)
All professional speakers should know/do these things automatically, (particularly never to stand behind a lectern/podium,) but it is a terrific comprehensive list to remind all of us of some of the things we forget.
And thanks again Guy Kawasaki for the link!
Compulsive obsession with details will save your neck when giving presentations
Based on some terror-filled moments which included a smoking laptop in Frankfurt, Germany, realizing that I had loaded the wrong presentation onto my laptop as I started a talk to a large group in Washington, DC, improvising 20 minutes of air time for a radio guest that was 20 minutes late, having materials not show up for a high-dollar workshop I was presenting and feeling my skirt split down the back as I crawled under a desk to plug in my laptop, I developed a guiding set of beliefs for presentations:
- Materials shipped ahead of time might not arrive
- Your laptop could blow up at any time
- Classrooms or conference rooms are never set up the way that you request
- Any guest presenters in virtual or live events will screw up logistical details and get confused as to when, where and what they have to present about
- Equipment will break
- If you bring only one set of clothes, you will rip or spill coffee on them
And based on these beliefs, I developed the following practices:
When traveling out of town by plane to an event:
......And read more from Pam Slim here: Complete post!