By my own personal standards I consider myself an amateur when it comes to delivering public presentations. I’ve been doing it for a few years now and have, maybe, 300 presentation hours under my belt. I haven’t delivered presentations to audiences of 1000+. I think my biggest audience was 500 max, but I’m not the kind of person who gets an ego boost from standing up in front of a huge crowd.

When I first started delivering presentations I was working under the idea that I could simply develop a presentation then deliver the same presentation multiple times to different audiences. However, as I look back on the presentations I have given and the presentations I’m going to deliver (in fact I’m en route to one as I write this), I’m pretty sure I’ll never give the same presentation twice. My reasoning for this is pretty simple, I don’t want to.

To consistently give the exact same talk (canned presentation) or a minor variant, would be limiting myself, and, in my opinion, disrespectful to the audience. You might be wondering, “How can this possibly be self limiting?” Delivering the same presentation means I’m limiting myself from learning from the presentation I just gave. I believe there is always room for improvement, not gilding the lily mind you and going over the top, but just making it better. In fact, I feel an obligation to future audiences to make my presentations better. If I don’t go for improvement when I know I can isn’t that snubbing the audience and saying, in effect, “I don’t value your time”? Is that acceptable?

Let me give a concrete example to bring my point home. Currently I’m on a Frontier airlines flight from Minneapolis to Dallas via Denver (their warm chocolate chip cookies are great by the way) where I’ll be delivering two talks at the Share Cloud conference. One of my talks at the conference is entitled “You Can Do What in Windows Azure?!” During the session I show a number of things you can do with the Windows Azure platform that you are probably not aware of. I gave a similar talk in January, but felt I could do better. Specifically I felt the 10+ demos I did as a part of the talk were interesting, but they weren’t really connected. They were simply one-off demos. For Share Cloud I scrapped the demos and built a new set of demos from the ground up. This time the demos are all connected and tell a great end-to-end story about the possibilities of the Azure platform by showing how all of the great features can work together. I’m really pleased with what I’m going to present tomorrow and I hope the audience is as well. Of course I’m sure I’ll be improving upon it in the future.

If you’re at the Share Cloud conference tomorrow stop on by and let me know how you think the talk went.

Gotta get back to my chocolate chip cookie before it cools off.

ag