Tom Peters and his Presentation Blunders

The Excellence Edge was seminar recently telecasted by Luminary Series as a series of teleconferences on promoting Management Excellence. The show was transmitted to over 60 countries worldwide and an anticipated viewer estimates was above a million viewers to have watched this show. The featured speakers were Ken Blanchard, Marcus Buckingham & Tom Peters, I was located in Karachi and sadly had the pleasure to be a witness to one of the worst presentations by Tom Peters in my life. Tom Peters is known to be one of the best speakers on the circuit, I personally have never heard him previously, but this first experience was enough never to go back.

He kicked off the proceedings by positioning two volunteers on the stage which we assumed he was planning to use as examples during his delivery, on first glance it appeared to be a very creative idea, but after watching them twirl their fingers for a good 1-1/2 hour being referred upon a couple of brief fleeting moments, one then logically has to question the motive of humiliating two bystanders for no apparent reason.

Tom had some interesting thought provoking questions to kick start his speech, making people actually think and reflect on issues that he raised. The thought process soon continued into a prolonged ranting on every topic imaginable with him not coming to any sort of logical conclusion or reasoning, in his strange and unique style of delivery he jumped from one comment to another and dragged the viewers into a roller coaster of puzzling observations.

HIS SLIDES (Download the set of 120 slides from tompeters.com) – were probably one of the worst set ever created by any standards. A few images have been enclosed in this post to display the horrific display we were subjected too. I personally feel he used too many florescent colours, used a weird array of fonts and to top it off the font size in some were too small to be at all readable even he had a tough time reading it on the stage. Such poorly composed slides may have survived a locally delivered presentation where multiple projector screens can help compensate for design problems, but in a teleconference the system is limited to one single screen which has to focus on one object at a time, we partly had the image of a prancing Tom Peters on the stage walking left to right and vice versa and then interspersed for a brief moment were shown the brilliantly colored gabled mess of text, simply said it was disastrous. Today when I downloaded the PowerPoint presentation from Tom Peters website, I was shocked to see that he actually wanted to squeeze 120 slides into the short talk which even the best of orators would rarely do, let alone even try it.

To lead the ongoing mess he even had the pun to insert weird statements in a few slides which at first glance have little meaning but he naturally had to embark on a long and lengthy explanation, its been common practice highly recommended by professional speakers is to try and keep the slides simple and understandable the speaker himself should dazzle and mesmerize the crowd with his verbal abilities, not the other way round, and in this case Tom Peters dazzled with his slides and rambled in his speech. What an irony from such an outstanding presenter. This mathematical equation you see on the left actually means that Commerce Bank in its effort to satisfy customers has adopted a remain open policy keeping their branches open “SEVEN days a week 7:30am to 8:00pm and on Friday’s till 12:00am midnight”, I am sure it could have been presented in a more concise and simpler manner.

When he started feeling the crush for time he naturally was apologetic, started skipping slides in an attempt to warp up and drive home his message, which lead to some very weird closing remarks. The only thing I understood from his 90 minute presentation that we wanted to talk about Always Achieving Excellence. Rest was just a mumbling, grumbling talk for 90-odd minutes.

At such an important meeting it appears he came ill-prepared and should have thought through his talk and even try to improve his presentation since it was my first time hearing his talk, it could very well be is unique style of delivery, but even then it was far from an average talk. I personally have no axe to grind with Tom Peters, I just believe I had to share my feelings about the 90 minutes I wasted listening to Tom Peters.

Excellence Always…… I wonder how he ranks this presentation?

Download his entire PowerPoint Presentation here