Review: The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience

The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience by Carmine Gallo
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If you are expecting to learn how to create Powerpoints using Steve Jobs' methods for presentation, you're probably going to not be happy. Jobs' wasn't known for his Powerpoints, and many of his best speeches used very few slides with no bullet points. Instead, Jobs used images, usually pictures, or simple text, like a word or number, to represent the topic. This book is about the presentations he gave, but also about the process behind his presentations, the efforts to create messages that started early in a product's life cycle, the constant practice, the checking of the venue before the presentation, the props, the pacing, and more. You do learn a lot about how Jobs did presentations. But you also learn that his methods consumed a lot of time that a normal employee might not be allowed to spend, and it required control over the marketing message, the venue, other presenters, etc. that only a CEO could pull off. You learn that most of Jobs' method is not replicable by normal employees. Sure, there are useful hints here and there, but overall, this is more of an appreciation of Jobs than a how-to book. Strangely for this kind of book, there are also sections that are purely motivational. It is as if the author determined that his readers would predominately be amateur presenters that would never approach the major league skills exhibited by Jobs, so he resorted to a motivational message. No matter, I found the detailed review of some of Jobs' big presentations, breaking down the messages, dissecting the length of different parts, and other insight into Jobs' process to be very interesting. I'll never be known as a presenter, but I can appreciate Job's level of expertise and professionalism in his work.

I listened to the audiobook version of this book. While you might think that a book on presentations would benefit with a lot of pictures of slides, speakers, and venues, this is not one of those kinds of books. The descriptions are so well done that you don't need to see pictures, and you don't miss them. An unexpected very good job on audio.

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