Stereotypes making presentations

One advantage of facilitating international meetings is that you experience a wide range of presentation styles. Even when the speakers regularly talk to international audiences in the same company, and even in the same business sector, deeply held cultural preferences surfaced for all to see.

Sixty managers from almost as many countries met recently for their annual meeting. Some of them were asked to make ten-minute presentations on the situation in their particular regions. They were given a standard Power Point template in corporate layout and asked to restrict their presentations to five slides. What I had expected to be a rather dull event turned out to be a fascinating feast of diverse presentation styles. If I had read about this in a book I would have suspectedthe sort of crass stereotyping that I spend much of my professional life preaching against, but this is what happened:

• The German manager began with a clearly structured, detailed and informative presentation strictly according to the principles known in Germany as “ZDF”, Zahlen, Daten und Fakten (numbers, data and facts); he read from a script.

• His Mexican colleague managed to fill the same templates with pictures not of products but of people: smiling customers and barbecues with family members to celebrate successful projects; much to the dismay of the representative from corporate communications, he had even added a sombrero to the group’s logo.

• A representative from China packed her slides with moving icons.

• A woman from the US refused to reduce her 25 slides to five, arguing: “That’s OK, Rob, I’ll keep to the time limit — I’ll just talk more quickly,” and she did, much to the frustration of most of the people listening.

In fact, native speakers of English can cause problems at such meetings if they fail to adapt their language to the international audience. Often we speak too quickly, use too many idioms from sport and TV and, rather than restricting our vocabulary to the 2,000 words that can produce 70 per cent of the English used in everyday life, we try to show off by using obscure terminology.

I wonder how you feel about international presentations.