Before the Mic: Conversation with Glenn Gibson

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      Glenn Gibson is the author of the book Before the Mic and Director, Global Technology Evangelist at Hyland, a leading software company. Glenn is an award-winning public speaker with a passion for technology and has collected several IT certifications such as a VMware Certified Professional, Citrix Certified Administrator, and Microsoft Certified Professional.

As a native of Scotland, his passions include all things Scottish; kilts, bagpipes, whisky, (real) football, meat pies as well as playing the drums and expanding his ever-growing vinyl collection.

In this conversation, Glenn talks about his book, Before the Mic.

Geetesh: Glenn, in your book, Before the Mic, you go to a place where very few authors have traveled. You don’t talk much about design or delivery of presentations, but you look at how you can ‘compose’ presentations. What does ‘compose’ encompass? Please share your thoughts.

Glenn: Composing basically involves everything that needs to happen before the mic, hence the name of the book! But specifically, this book focuses on making sure that the words themselves accomplish the goal of the presentation, before a slide is ever touched.

It’s SO tempting as a presenter to fire up a slideware application and start creating slides straight away, perhaps because finished slides equate to progress! But, it’s really hard to think clearly when you are trying to craft your message, your key points and bring them to life with stories and analogies at the same time as choosing pictures, icons, colors, fonts, diagrams, existing slides, all while trying to balance how much text you should project to accompany the words you will actually say.

Can you imagine Bob Dylan, Bono, or Taylor Swift writing songs with their guitar AT THE SAME TIME as designing the accompanying stage lighting, backdrop graphics, and pyrotechnics for the live performance of the song? No! That would be ridiculous. Yet isn’t that what we are doing as presenters, when we are trying to create something that sounds great and looks great at the same time?

I love drawing a correlation between song writing and presentation writing because an artist will focus on writing something that SOUNDS great, before they think about augmenting it with additional visual effects. Great presentations, like great songs, are not dependent on any visuals at all. If you are old enough to remember when MTV used to actually play music videos, you will have experienced the phenomenon that visual accompaniments to songs can enhance or ruin great material! For example, I love the song “Separate Ways” by Journey, but I wish I’d never watched the cheesy music video!

Conversely (also from the early 80’s), the rousing song “Money for Nothing” by Dire Straits, is made EVEN better by their memorable and iconic video.

My book focuses on writing presentations that are meaningful, memorable, and motivational, that inspire the audience, and are a joy to deliver before a slide is either created or needed. This approach takes the pressure off the slide design, and puts the focus where it should be – the content. And it makes the creation of slides much easier, because by the time you start working on them you can focus solely on design and let yourself have fun with the accompanying visual concepts.

Geetesh: What motivated you to write this book, Glenn? Is there a story behind the existence of Before the Mic?

Glenn: My motivation in writing this book is really to help people shine when they are on stage. It’s the most satisfying feeling EVER sitting in an audience listening to someone absolutely rock their presentation, knowing that I played at least a small part in helping them sparkle.

As far as the content for my book, it kind of wrote itself! Over the years, a lot of people have asked me for guidance with their presentations, and I found myself repeating a lot of the same advice over and over. For example, so many presenters start with the Agenda slide – which effectively means that the presentation has no introduction, it just gets straight into the material. There’s such an amazing opportunity at the beginning of every presentation to make the audience care about the topic prior to previewing what will be discussed. I made a “hack” for myself that I would always have at least one slide between the “title slide” and the “agenda slide”. If I’d forgotten to write a meaningful introduction, this hack would force me to include a brief introduction establishing WHY the information was important to the audience. That would then remind me to go and find a story, an analogy, a statistic, or whatever, to make my topic compelling. The point is that this hack became something I’d rely on myself and I’d also recommend it to others.

I write presentations for a living and am often working on several at the same time, and I must write many of them QUICKLY. I started writing down lots of the tips and hacks like the one I just mentioned, that use to aid my own writing process, and this started filling up a lot of pages.

The challenge most presenters have isn’t really in WHAT to do, as there’s tons of amazing advice out there, but really HOW to apply said advice. It’s easy to say “have three main points” and talk about the three little pigs, but how to actually distill down business content into a three-part story is another matter. I realized that I could (and should!) share my process to help as many people as possible.

I did start looking for a book that focused solely on everything that happens before the mic, but I couldn’t find the perfect one to recommend. This was the trigger to me that I might be able to write it myself.

I took a sabbatical from work, and my wife, probably tired of hearing me talk about writing this book, booked me a cabin in Pennsylvania to go and write it. That was probably the fastest week of my life, spent completely absorbed in the topic of writing presentations. Days felt like hours, roaring fires would turn to ashes before I realized I was cold, and the book started coming into existence. It was a magical experience only topped by hearing stories of people who tell me how much my completed book has helped them write their own amazing presentations.

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.