I give a lot of presentations. As a college instructor, I present at least once every week, and usually multiple times. I’ve also presented in business contexts and to general audiences. The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience by Carmine Gallo caused me to rethink how I’m delivering my content. I had seen every Steve Jobs video available online, including all of his keynotes, before reading the book. But it took Gallo’s insights to distill what made Jobs’s presentations so great in a digestible form that I could use.
Gallo’s book is based on the premise that Steve Jobs’s presentations were excellent. If you don’t agree with that and you didn’t like his style, then don’t pick up this book. You can watch any of Jobs’s presentations on YouTube. And if you haven’t, I highly recommend watching some of the most famous ones (introduction of the iPhone for example) before picking up the book. They will give you context because Gallo refers to specific presentations in just about every chapter. In fact, if you haven’t seen them, you may want to watch them as they’re introduced in the book, although it will add many hours to your reading experience.
Most of Jobs’s presentations featured slides. Therefore a significant amount of the advice in the book relates to making slides. If your presentations don’t involve slides, you will find about one third of the book’s content not applicable to you. Jobs’s slides were very different from most of the slides we see in business and academia. They had almost no text. Gallo clearly explains how Jobs made this work
Much of the non-slide advice is common sense: practice, vary your use of voice, be passionate when presenting, use demos, break up your presentation, etc. Yet the combination of all of it into a single volume and the way that Gallo elucidates these points make the book a one stop shop for improving your slides. I never got bored reading this common sense because I love Steve Jobs and even though I already knew almost all of the anecdotes in this book, they really made the advice come alive. If you don’t know much about Steve Jobs then you might not find the book quite as exciting.
The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs is a great book to improve your presenting skills, especially if you make presentations with slides. Its advice about making slides is unconventional and will make you rethink how you do them. Its other advice is mostly common sense but is really well illustrated. If you’re not familiar with Steve Jobs or you have not watched his keynotes you should watch some of them either prior to reading the book or simultaneously with when they are presented in each chapter. If you don’t like Steve Jobs/Apple then this is not a book you will enjoy.