One of my favorite things about being a CEO is that I believe it is forwarding my life’s dream of becoming a pundit.

Pundits, you will note, only discuss the future and, the future being a distant and murky place, by the time one can prove you wrong, you’ve already moved on to the next, future subject.

I attend many, many conferences and I’ve learned a few tricks from some excellent keynotes which may be helpful to you establish yourself as a pundit within your organization.

First, show a lot of irrelevant but very cool technology. If, for example, you are asked to explain how to do service line marketing on the web to your internal team, show them a few screen shots of Second Life and explain, that in 10 years, we’ll all be avatars anyway, so what’s the point of actually trying to talk to consumers now? Your audience will soon lose you as you outline the future growth of massively multiplayer online games and begin thinking about more mundane tasks such as their checkbook balances and if they should get a new haircut.

Perfect. They are now putty in your hands.

Flash a few meaningless statistics you lifted off another presentation that lifted slides from a Forrester or Jupiter Research report. Show a few screen shots of the coolest things you’d like to do and end by showing a multi-million dollar website as a good example of what to do, even though you have a budget 98% smaller.

If anyone dares ask what the return on investment might be, explain that healthcare is complicated, that we can’t really assess the true cost of doing such things but that the future is now.

It’s important to maintain an air of righteous indignation to ensure you have the moral high ground: how can anyone question your conclusions? How can anyone point out errors in your data? To be a pundit, one must have an attitude of utter security about one’s opinions and then ensure one leaves before the future promised results.

So, a quick recap:

• Project at least 2 more years into the future as you plan to be at your organization
• Show kewl, unnecessarily expensive examples of what your organization can never achieve
• Back up your findings with a double-shot of opinion and imply anyone who doesn’t believe you is a dinosaur

I wish you the best of luck in your rise to the top. May we meet each other as fellow keynote presenters someday soon.

I’ve been working on a talk and have seen the wisdom of chucking out the traditional bulleted Powerpoint list in favor of a completely visual (read: all pictures) presentation. For the last decade, Edward Tufte has complained PowerPoint’s density of information is so low, its only media analog is Soviet propaganda. Me? I just want the audience to fall asleep less. And since we gave a webinar on how to write a good presentation, I’m taking some of my own advice. After all, if this blog were a PowerPoint entry, it would read as follows:

• Working on a talk; how best to write?
• PowerPoint tradition = bulleted lists
• But… low density of information
• Tufte says, “Soviet Propaganda!”
• Want people to stay awake
• Taking own advice

So from here on out: PowerPoint Perestroika!