The Presentation Cookbook: Conversation with Luka Krejči

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  Luka Krejči helps people rethink how they share ideas, influence others, and ultimately earn that Yes from the audience. To increase the chances of getting that Yes, Luka studies and finds levers in everything from storytelling, journalism, psychology, and design, to verbal and nonverbal communication.

Following a career in consulting and telecom, Luka started his presentation agency, Prezentacija in 2012. He has since delivered several hundred workshops on creating and delivering successful presentations. He trains, mentors, and consults individual clients, startups, and large multinationals such as DT, Erste, Nomad Foods, Heineken, Carlsberg, and Lidl.

In this conversation, Luka discusses his new book, The Presentation Cookbook.

Geetesh: What inspired you to write The Presentation Cookbook?

Luka: The idea of writing this book has been in my mind for years. I have been doing presentation training, coaching, and consulting for 13 years. A book is just another channel through which I can share my message. The problem was that I never had the time or the idea of how to pull it off. With COVID and the lockdown cancelling all my training, I got the time I needed.

With the “cookbook” idea for the title that hit me one day, I finally had a clear vision for the book: cookbooks are based on recipes grouped into different types, and each recipe is a combination of text and visuals. That visual is, in my case, a slide that accompanies each recipe. Each recipe functions on its own, but if you master all the recipes, you will master presentations in general.

For it to be more than just another presentation book, I made over a hundred illustrations and comics with the help of an illustrator. Another cookbook element applies to this book: Recipes are the author’s vision, which will work for most people in most situations. However, there is always room to play around with. Our dinner guests have different tastes, needs, experiences, and expectations. Therefore, depending on the occasion, people can use more or less of an ingredient. You can substitute blueberries for raspberries or add something of your own. The more experienced we get, the more eager we are to experiment.

And finally, the recipe is independent of tools and equipment. Once you figure out your messages and visuals, you can implement them in PowerPoint, Keynote, Prezi, Canva, or any other software. The Presentation Cookbook is not about the tools. It’s about what you need to say and show the audience, irrespective of the slide-building software you’ll later use. It’s about ideas on how to prepare a presentation that increase your chances of getting a YES. With that being said, it is also not about presentation delivery. I am currently writing another book on presentation delivery.

Geetesh: How do you hope The Presentation Cookbook will change the way people approach presentations?

Luka: I hope they see presentations for what they are: a chance to stand out, quite literally. A lot of smart people go unnoticed, especially if they are not very extroverted. They wonder why somebody else always gets a raise or a promotion, but at the same time, they avoid any chances to expose themselves. There’s no better way to do it than with a well-thought-out presentation. Any skill you have, technical or otherwise, if you couple it with presentation skills, you will become a superstar.

It requires effort, but it’s not rocket science. People often comment on how the recipes are logical. A lot of them are just common sense. Yet, in our presentations, we often do exactly the opposite. I know the recipes work: not only do I use them myself, but I also trained more than 4.000 people through my programs. There are so many client success stories that it’s no longer a matter of hope. The only hope is that more people will try it out and see for themselves what it brings to them, no matter whether they apply it to sales, pitch, product launch, management, or any other kind of business presentation.

Once you have some success, it’s easy to keep going because you’ll want more of it. The only way to master any skill is to keep trying until you get it. It’s very difficult at the beginning. It requires effort and time. That’s the motto of this book: successful presentations require effort and time. However, if you take presentations seriously, you’ll have seriously good results.

The book helps with that mindset as the first chapter focuses on why presentations are important. It also focuses on all the positive things you might experience if you have a good one. And the opposite, of course. With you having the right mindset, the next four chapters are about the specific practical tools guiding you through the whole presentation creation process: defining the presentation concept, crafting a storyline, coming up with the right visuals, and finally visualizing and communicating numbers.

The book brings you from ground zero to the point where you have a clear idea of your concept, story, and visuals. You just need to type it all in, using your slide-building software of choice. And then, my next book will take it from there – how to prepare for delivery, and how to deliver it.

Geetesh: You’ve worked with clients for over 10 years—what’s one common mistake that professionals still make in their presentation slides, and which ‘recipe’ in your book helps fix it?

Luka: Following up on the last question and expanding on my answer, I believe the main opportunity for increasing our chances of a successful presentation comes from treating it as proper work and applying (and adjusting) the proven recipes throughout this process.

First and foremost, a presentation is a mental project. Only then will it be a visual project, and finally, it will be a physical project. A presentation visual, a slide, is just a consequence of what the message is, how clear you are about it, and how much time you’ve invested in developing it. I often say that a slide is just a picture of what’s in the presenter’s head.

Today, most slides are bullet-point-based. It’s just a consequence of starting to work on the presentation the evening before you have it. There is nothing more you can do at that point. It’s a fairly random list of information without an overarching message, because there was no time to clarify the message. This text is then embellished and decorated with generic imagery, which adds little value to the audience’s understanding of what you’re trying to say. For example, an image of a lightbulb when the slide is about an idea. We write about the idea in bullets and then find a visual for the word “idea”, which, for most people, is a lightbulb. Instead of visualizing the word idea, we should visualize our idea. That is, if the point of the slide is to help people understand what your idea is. Slides are used to effectively communicate our messages, not to be eye-candy. Chapter 3 of the book is all about developing the right visuals, and Recipe 4.9 deals with this phenomenon of generic imagery and how to make something much more effective.

Geetesh: Have you received any surprising feedback from readers since the book launched?

Luka: The original version of the book in Croatian has been on sale for two years now, so I’ve received plenty of feedback even though the English version on Amazon is just out. People send me pictures of themselves reading the book in unusual places. One person sent me a picture of the book so worn out from using it that I sent him another one for free. I was so happy because the book wasn’t just an addition to the bookshelf but had been used heavily. That’s the whole point: you read it, apply it, refine it, return to it, etc.

I love hearing people looking forward to their next presentation, and not dreading it, as they did before. I love hearing that it turned out well and that they got praise for their presentation. A client whom I helped with a pitch presentation got into the pitch finals at CES in Las Vegas, being in the top 8 out of more than 30.000 entries. Now that’s a very specific and measurable outcome.

The most surprising feedback is the same one I get from my workshops. Perhaps it’s not that unexpected anymore. The feedback is that the book and the recipes apply to so much more than “just” presentations. They apply to any kind of persuasive communication, such as e-mails or talking to your boss in the hallway. In the end, that is not that surprising, because everything I study and teach rests on human psychology, how the brain receives and interprets information coming in from the outside, and how it makes decisions based on that information. A book on PowerPoint would be useless five years from now. The Presentation Cookbook deals with effective human communication. It could have been written 30 years ago. It should be relevant 30 years from now. At least that’s my hope. Time will tell.

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.