The 10/20/30 rule of presentations

People are always looking for guidelines, a set of rules that takes the guessing game out of their actions, especially subjective actions.

For example, how long should my PowerPoint presentation be?

Naturally, this depends on your subject matter and what you’re trying to accomplish. The presentation I used for my business writing seminars run about 100 slides; ditto for the PowerPoint presentation skills sessions I teach. I use dozens of slides while teaching conversational public speaking.

Those are exceptions because they’re daylong discussion-oriented gatherings. Most of us are making presentations that run an hour at most. More modest PowerPoint slide decks are called for in those cases.

So let’s take a truly high-stakes presentation, the entrepreneur pitching his or her idea to a group of hardboiled venture capitalists. Millions of dollars and the future of the company are at stake. You must be influential in those situations or your dreams might be doomed.

Venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki

So who better to formulate some PowerPoint guidelines than Guy Kawasaki, a venture capitalist who has sat through hundreds of presentations, and is himself an accomplished presenter in great demand. According to Kawasaki, most PowerPoint presentations – even in the high-stakes game of venture capital pitches – are pure tripe. As he puts it, 60 slides about a “patent pending,” “first mover advantage” or “all we have to do is get 1 percent of the people in China to buy our product.”

Kawasaki decided there’s a better way, and it boils down to a three-number rule called 10/20/30. To elaborate, your presentation should be no more than 10 slides, last no longer than 20 minutes, and the type on your slides should be no smaller than 30 point.

Do as Kawasaki says and not as he does, for I’ve seen Guy Kawasaki present several times and, at least at that time, he used more than 10 slides and carried on for more than 20 minutes.

That was just fine, though, because he’s an intelligent and entertaining presenter. Most of us are not, making his 10/20/30 prescription a very solid one. It forces us to focus on fewer and more potent ideas, images and text messages.

Try it for yourself. Compress your presentation. Distill your message to the essentials. Be succinct so that when you finish the audience is left wanting more, rather than dashing for the exits.

Leave A Comment:

If you are already a member, please log-in to leave comments.
Not a member? Please register.
Have you forgotten your password?