Lean Presentation Design: Conversation with Maurizio La Cava

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    Maurizio La Cava is a digital entrepreneur, marketer, blogger, public speaker, presentation design guru, and Founder at MLC-Design.

He is also the author of Lean Presentation Design, a top-rated freelancer, and a Professor at the European Institute of Design in Milan. His favorite quote is “Time is free but it’s priceless”.

In this conversation, Maurizio talks about his book, Lean Presentation Design.

Geetesh: Maurizio, can you tell us more about what motivated you to write your book, Lean Presentation Design?

Maurizio: When you approach Presentation Design for the first time, you have about 4-7 must-read books that nowadays make 90% of the theory about this discipline. After you read these books, you’ll start working, and you’ll find that many of the amazing guidelines that you studied are hard to apply in the day-by-day PowerPoint routine life.

The reality is that most of us have low creativity, tight timings, below-average design skills, and we do not know how PowerPoint works. However, we spend most of the time crafting presentations for our speeches, for our performance reviews, or for those of our bosses.

After a while, the fantastic books about Presentation Design are forgotten and remain a nice souvenir. When I started working in Presentation Design, I felt this frustration, and I understood that something was missing in the traditional theory.

Do not misunderstand me, I do love the theory about presentation design, but I think a bridge from theory to day-by-day life is strictly needed to take the discipline into practice.

Geetesh: What does the Lean approach mean to you, and how is it different from conventional approaches to presentation design?

Maurizio: Crafting a presentation requires time. If you work well using the correct techniques, you’ll be quick and you’ll create an effective presentation, but we both know that reality is often different.

We spend the day in and day out on PowerPoint, wasting an enormous amount of time and generating huge costs for our companies. We often do not apply Presentation Design techniques, and so we end up realizing boring presentations.

Changing the point of view, do you remember the last meeting or conference you attended where the presenter was supported by a heavy, full-of-text, extremely boring presentation? You are not alone. Presentation Designers teach us that the audience is hit by “death by PowerPoint” every time they follow a speech supported by a bad presentation.

So we can conclude that a bad presentation is a waste of time, for both the presenter and the audience.

Traditional Presentation Design helps you make impactful presentations so people don’t get affected by “death by PowerPoint”, but it does not help those who need to craft the presentation, which represents the beginning of the whole process, and to optimize the way of doing so.

Applying Lean methodologies to Presentation Design, I created an innovative approach that allows everybody, even with zero design skills, to craft effective presentations, optimizing the time spent on doing it. Thus, the presenters will have impactful presentations, and the audience will enjoy them.

Thanks to Lean Presentation Design, creating outstanding presentations becomes easy and accessible to everybody.

You can get your copy now from Amazon.com (Paperback).

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The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.