GUEST POST from Paul Sloane

The simplest way to categorize innovation is into two types – incremental and radical.    Incremental innovation is an improvement in an existing thing (e.g. product, process or service).  Radical innovation is finding an entirely new way of doing something.  For example if you had been making spectacles in the 1950s then plastic lenses instead of glass lenses would have been an incremental innovation. Contact lenses or laser eye surgery would have been radical innovations.  Some writers include a third category – disruptive innovation, where the entire industry is disrupted (e.g. Uber) but it seems to me that this is just a variant of radical innovation.

Larry Keeley in his excellent book, Ten Types of Innovation, divides all corporate innovations into ten categories.  These are:

1. Profit model – how you price your product or service and make money. E.g. Gillette innovated with the razor and blades model.
2. Network – external relationships and partnerships. E.g. Toshiba collaborated with UPS to repair Toshiba laptops.
3. Structure – how you organize your company.  E.g. W. L. Gore has a renowned ‘flat lattice’ where teams form without formal structure.
4. Process – doing things differently. E.g. Zipcar radically changed the car hire process.
5. Product performance – new products or features. E.g. Dyson launched a transparent vacuum cleaner with no bag.
6. Product system – how your product connects. E.g. Mozilla used an army of independent developers to create Firefox and its plug-ins.
7. Service – additional support and enhancements. E.g. Zappos empowered customer reps to send flowers or order from a competitor.
8. Channel – how you get to market. E.g. Amazon’s Whispernet service allows users to order and download a Kindle book in one minute.
9. Brand – the promise you make. E.g. Virgin. From Cola to Space travel, all the many Virgin companies share a fun, challenger image.
10. Customer Engagement – the client experience. E.g. Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft gives players a collaborative gaming experience.

Keeley advises that you analyse your current innovation offerings and identify opportunities in other categories.  He argues that the most successful companies innovate in several different categories.

It is clear that a firm can innovate in each of its structural functions – e.g. in Sales, Marketing, Operations and HR.  So each department can have separate innovation objectives and metrics.  In fact since every product, service and process in the business will be made better or replaced at some stage you can argue that there an infinite number of possible innovations and types of innovation.  Everything can be innovated.

Perhaps it is more helpful to say that there are two types of innovation – successful and unsuccessful.  Successful innovations improve value for the client and the business.  Unsuccessful ones do not.  It varies by industry but generally the majority of new product launches fail to meet their objectives and that does not include all the ideas that fell by the wayside or did not pass through the gating process.  Innovation is a difficult, costly and risky game however many ways you categorize it.  Nonetheless, it remains an essential game to play,

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GUEST POST from Paul Sloane

Can you innovate and improve business performance by copying another company from an entirely different industry?  This is what the Henry Ford West Bloomfield Hospital in Michigan did when it wanted to transform its customer service and operational efficiency.  The hospital borrowed some of the practices of a five star hotel and hired a new CEO who had previously worked for Ritz Carlton.  The hospital copied the hotel’s emphasis on customer service and high catering standards.  Hotel rooms are standardized and designed to be easy to clean so the hospital did the same with its operating rooms and wards to improve efficiency and sanitation.  The hospital’s redesigned kitchens developed a strong reputation for locally grown organic foods and have generated new revenues by catering for corporate and community events. [1]

When Ray Kroc bought a small chain of restaurants from the McDonald brothers he wanted to achieve new standards in process  control and assembly line techniques. He used the Ford motor company as his role model and copied the assembly line methods used there. They became the basis for the worldwide success of McDonalds. [2]

The German Engineering company Siemens sponsors the Hallé orchestra in the UK.  The Hallé is a leading symphonic orchestra based in Manchester.  This gives Siemens opportunities for corporate hospitality at sponsored concerts but the company also uses the orchestra as a role model.  When managers at the local Siemens plant want to learn about leadership or teamwork they will often call in a conductor or players from the orchestra to contribute ideas.  Siemens also collaborated with Hallé Concerts Society to devise a series of workshops for managers using singing to explore and deal with discomfort. [3]

When the Sales Director of one large company found that his sales team were not making enough cold calls he diagnosed the problem as a lack of courage.  He took the British Army as his role model and asked a senior officer to come in and advise on methods to build bravery in the team. The company implemented a number of ideas including medals for outstanding performance.

To use this technique it is important to identify the aspect of the business which most needs improvement. In the examples above this involved customer service, operational efficiency, leadership, teamwork, and courage. Then choose a leading player in another field who has mastered the skills you need. If possible, form a relationship and ask for co-operation. Things which might seem obvious in their sector may be entirely new in yours. Innovate by copying your corporate role model.

Notes

[1] Described in Ten Types of Innovation by Larry Keeley

[2] See An Assembly Line of Innovations

[3] Release on Siemens and the Hallé employee singing workshops

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GUEST POST from Paul Sloane

Paul Sloane explains how to use the Power of the Random to boost Creative Problem Solving.

Sloane studied Engineering at Cambridge University. He worked for IBM in manufacturing, sales and marketing. He was Marketing Director and then Managing Director at database company Ashton- Tate. He went on to be VP International and CEO of software companies. He now helps organisations improve innovation. He is the author of over 20 books on lateral thinking, leadership and innovation. His talk shows how you can use simple powerful methods to break routine thinking habits.

Watch the TEDx talk here.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://ted.com/tedx

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GUEST POST from Paul Sloane

There is much talk in the innovation community about the need to produce a minimum viable product (MVP) and bring it quickly to market. But what exactly constitutes a MVP and what is its purpose?

In his seminal book, The Lean Startup, Eric Ries defines the MVP as a version of the entrepreneur’s product which enables a full turn of the Build-Measure-Learn cycle with minimum effort and the least amount of development time. The purpose of the MVP is to test one hypothesis.

Every startup business is predicated on a number of assumptions.  For example, typical assumptions might be:

• Customers need our product.
• Customers will value this particular feature.
• Customers will find our product more convenient than X.
• Customers will pay Y for the value we provide.
• Customers will be able to install and use the product without help.

Each of these is a separate and testable hypothesis. Ideally, we would produce a separate MVP for each hypothesis and test it with a different small group of customers.  You would start with the biggest and most fundamental assumption and ship a product which tests that assumption. The product will lack many fine features that you intend to include in the final product but that does not matter. What matters is that it enables you to get an answer to the key question – is this assumption valid? If the answer is negative then you have gained an invaluable piece of learning. There is no point in carrying on to build the full function product.  You must rethink your whole plan.

The point of the MVP is to learn something important quickly. Sometimes the MVP is so minimal that it is hardly a product at all.  When Drew Houston founded Dropbox he wanted to test the hypotheses that people had a real problem with file synchronization and would use a cloud based solution. Building a working prototype was very difficult so he did something much simpler. He made a video. The video showed how the product would work; Drew narrated the story of how a user could store and retrieve his files.  The video worked and drove a tremendous number of enquiries. It was the MVP which validated the assumptions.

Another minimal approach is what Ries calls a smoke test. Customers are given the opportunity to pre-order a product which does not yet exist. The smoke test measures just one thing – whether customers are interested in trying the product. Nonetheless this is a highly useful piece of input.

A more ingenious approach is the so-called Wizard of Oz test. Here customers think they are interacting with the full automated product but in fact a small team of people behind the scenes carry out all the functions of the product or service. This was the method used by Max Ventilla and Damon Horowitz when they were developing Aardvark, a highly sophisticated web service which could produce answers to complex subjective questions. Using humans to replicate the service was costly but allowed the key assumptions to be tested with a small number of customers. Eventually Aardvark was sold to Google for a reported $50m.

In 2004 Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskowitz and Chris Hughes raised $500,000 in venture capital for their fledgling company Facebook.  At the time they had 150,000 users but virtually no revenue. A year later they raised a further $12.7m.  How could they raise so much money so early? Crucially they could demonstrate to investors that they had validated two key assumptions about their business model.  More than half the users came back to the site every day. This proved that customers found the product valuable (what Ries calls the value hypothesis). Secondly, their rate of growth was staggering – within a month of launch at Harvard almost three-quarters of undergraduates were using it. This validated the growth hypothesis.

The MVP is often a low-cost, low quality product but the accelerated learning it delivers can mean the difference between life and death for the startup.  Craigslist and Groupon both started with small low-quality product offerings.

Stop believing your own publicity.  Instead, test your biggest and riskiest assumptions quickly with a Minimum Viable Product.

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GUEST POST from Paul Sloane

As a boy brought up in Florida, Jeff Bezos developed a keen interest in computers.  He graduated from Princeton in 1986 with a degree in computer science and electrical engineering. He then worked for an investment firm in New York before quitting his well-paid position in 1994 to start Amazon, just as internet commerce was beginning to take off.  He started the company in his garage where he wrote the software systems for online commerce.  He opened his virtual bookstore in 1995.  The success of the company was spectacular. Within two months of opening sales were running at $20,000 a week and they continued to escalate.

Amazon.com went public in 1997.  Traditional bookstores responded with their own websites but none was as appealing, as agile or as successful as Amazon.  Bezos diversified his product range first with CDs and videos followed by electronic goods, toys and clothes.  Sales leapt from half a million dollars in 1995 to $17 billion in 2011.

Amazon pioneered many innovative practices such as recommending what customers would like based on an algorithm which compared previous buying patterns with those of other consumers.  Although its sales of new books were growing very healthily, in 2002 Amazon introduced a service whereby people could sell second-hand books through the company’s website. This was surprising as it appeared that each second-hand book sale meant the loss of a larger-margin new book sale.  The move was controversial and Jeff Bezos sent out an open letter explaining Amazon’s actions. In it he argued that selling second-hand books was good for customers and therefore good for the industry.

Amazon developed tremendous IT skills and capacity as it grew rapidly selling books and other products on-line. It was a giant in B to C (Business to Consumer) products. After the dot.com crash in 2000 Amazon found itself with excess IT capacity in its data centres. It offered web services to businesses and became a leader in B to B (Business to Business) web services – a completely different field from its original strength. By 2015 Amazon Web Services was the world’s leading provider of Cloud infrastructure services.

Jeff Bezos realised that there was a potential customer need for an inexpensive reader for electronic books. But Amazon had no experience or competence in electronic product design or manufacture. Amazon’s strengths lay in excellent web services, software and logistics. For the company to launch its own hardware product would be a major step into unknown territory. Yet that is what they did in 2007 with the launch of the Kindle.  It became a tremendous success.

The company continued to experiment and innovate in a remarkable number of fields.  It produced its own TV and Film features.  In 2013 it announced plans for drone deliveries.  Not all the innovations succeed.  In 2014 Amazon entered the smartphone market with the release of the Fire Phone.  It was considered to be too gimmicky and it flopped.

Bezos has a diverse range of business interests. He is the founded an aerospace company Blue Origin, to provide private space flights.  In 2013, he purchased The Washington Post newspaper.  In 2016 his personal wealth was estimated to be some $60B making him one of the five richest people in America.

Lessons for Innovators

Disrupt your own business before someone else does.

Offering second hand books at low margin threatened Amazon’s higher value new book sales but this did not bother Bezos.  He wanted to own that segment of the market too and to prevent a competitor from seizing it.

Innovate in another field with your spare capacity.

Bezos led Amazon on a remarkable pivot.  Because of its internal IT expertise and spare server capacity the company became a leader in web services for businesses – a completely different field from its core business in consumer goods delivery.  Do you have unused capacity that can be put to an innovative use?

Anticipate customer needs.

Amazon was selling conventional books but Bezos could see that some people would want to read electronic books on computers.  He stole a march on competitors by developing Amazon’s proprietary e-book reader, the Kindle.  It was attractively priced and scooped the market.  For a book seller to build a consumer electronics product device was a risky venture but it paid off.  What will people want to do differently in the future?

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GUEST POST from Paul Sloane

The Shell Gamechanger initiative was launched in 1996.  Its mission was to deliver innovative options that have the potential to drastically impact the energy future.  Soon after its inception, Gary Hamel wrote this comment, ‘The Gamechanger programme is still fragile. The 1998 slump in oil prices threw Shell into a frenzy of cost cutting. Whether Gamechanger will survive in its current form remains to be seen. But it has demonstrated unequivocally that entrepreneurial passion lurks everywhere – even deep in the canyons of a 92 year-old oil company.’  Well the programme has survived but how is it doing and is it delivering on its mission?

I recently visited the Shell Technology Centre in Amsterdam and met Marian Marino, the Spanish woman who leads the Gamechanger intiative.  She has staff of eight and they all have different nationalities.  To ensure diversity and freshness people are rotated out of the group after a maximum of four years.  They encourage ideas from within and without Shell.  The criteria they use in evaluating ideas are as follows

1. Novelty – is the idea fundamentally different?
2. Value – could the idea generate substantial new value?
3. Ability to execute  – can the concept be proven?
4. Why Shell? – does this play to Shell’s strengths and strategy?

Here are some facts and figures about the programme.  Since it started it has received over 10,000 ideas and helped over 1700 innovators around the world.  Over 100 ideas have been turned into reality – this equates to around 1% of submissions.  Currently they receive an average of 250 credible ideas per year.  Around half of the ideas are external and half internal.  An average of 10 ideas per year reaches proof of concept (4%).  A smaller number achieve full implementation and you can see some of them on the Gamechanger web page. One of the big ideas to emerge is the Floating Liquid Natural Gas plant – a massive 600,000 tonne ship containing a complete LNG plant.  Traditionally, LNG plants are built on land. But Shell is now constructing the largest offshore floating facility ever built.

Daniel Pusiol, an external expert in nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) proposed adapting NMR techniques to measure mingled fluid flow (oil, gas and water) in a pipe.  Working with Daniel, Shell developed a way to apply the technology of medical MRI scanners in the energy industry. GameChanger helped Daniel develop a prototype, the “flowmeter”, which can improve understanding of the way fluids, like oil, move through porous rock.

One arm of the Gamechanger programme, Shell Technology Ventures, invested in Glasspoint, a solar power company that uses its renewable energy to increase crude oil production.  It deploys rows of curved mirrors in greenhouses to turn water into steam, which is then injected into oilfields to heat heavy crude oil so it will flow out more easily.

Shell does not do crowdsourcing as such but it has four open innovation vehicles, External Technology Collaborations, Shell TechWorks, Shell Technology Ventures and Shell GameChanger. Initiatives like Shell LiveWire and Shell Ideas360 encourage entrepreneurship among a wider audience. Shell is now sponsoring XPRIZE, a global competition challenging teams to advance deep-sea technologies for ocean exploration.

If an external inventor or entrepreneur submits a promising idea they are assigned a ‘co-proponent’ to help them through the screening process.  The initial screening is carried out by a panel of just two people and they promise a response within 48 hours.   If the external idea appears to meet the criteria then Shell offers three routes forward.

1. Proprietary – the idea is acquired by Shell and they develop it.
2. Licensing – this is particularly applicable when joint capabilities and development are needed.
3. Venturing – a new company is set up to bring the idea to market.

Compared with companies like Dell or Unilever the number of ideas submitted and approved for the Shell open innovation programme appears low.  But their aims and criteria are very different.  Shell Gamechanger is serious about substantial ideas.  They do not want minor improvements to gas stations.  They want to be the first port of call for a company or inventor who has a big idea that can change the nature of energy generation or conservation.  They want to change the game.

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GUEST POST from Paul Sloane

We often treat an unexpected or surprising happening as an irritation or distraction.  It delays us from getting on the with job so we quickly work around it.  But sometimes it pays to step back and ponder the meaning of the chance that serendipity has just handed us. Consider these four unexpected occurrences.

1.  In 1928 a Scottish bacteriologist returned from his vacation to find that one of his petri dishes had a strange mold growing in it.

2. In the early 1940s a Swiss engineer went for a walk with his dog in the Jura mountains.  When he came home he saw that his trousers and the dog’s fur contained many tiny seed burrs.

3. In 1946 an engineer at Raytheon discovered that a candy in his pocket melted when he worked near an active radar tube.

4. In the 1970s a technician working for a music accessory company wired a circuit incorrectly.  The component made a weird moaning sound.

Each of these incidents could have been treated as an annoying accident.  Most people might have cleaned the petri dishes, brushed out their trousers, removed the sticky sweet or rewired the circuit correctly.  Fortunately for us the protagonists in these stories all welcomed the unexpected event, investigated and then acted.

1.  Sir Alexander Fleming saw that the mold had rejected the bacteria in the dish.  He had discovered penicillin – almost by accident.  It was a piece of good fortune that led to the development of antibiotics and the saving of millions of lives.

2. George de Mestral examined the burrs under a microscope and saw that they had tiny hooks which caught in the trouser fabric.  He went on to develop a new way to fasten materials – Velcro.  The word comes from the French words Velours and Crochet – a Velvet Hook.

3.  Percy Spencer developed the world’s first microwave oven because of this accident.

4.  Scott Burnham adapted the strange wail into a guitar-pedal sound.  He invented the Rat, a pedal that thousands of bands from Nirvana to Radiohead used to enhance their music.

A new book on the process of invention, Inventology by Pagan Kennedy, claims that almost half of all inventions started with a serendipitous process.  Often this was the result of ideas or discoveries that people had while working on something else.

Kennedy goes on to say that inventors are often polymath connectors, ‘who by luck or design are able to bring together knowledge from several fields’.  She points out that the people most likely to solve problems on the Innocentive crowdsourcing site are outsiders to the field of the problem.

When something unexpected happens don’t get annoyed, get curious.  Find out why.  The customer with a weird complaint or a weird use for your product is one hundred times more interesting than the customer who is happy using your product in a conventional way.  Welcome the surprising.

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GUEST POST from Paul Sloane

Which are the most innovative companies in the world? There is no way of absolutely measuring levels of innovation but three eminent groups compile different lists using different methods and of course they get different results. Forbes publishes a list based on a measure of how much investors have bid up the stock price of a company above the value of its existing business based on expectations of future innovative results. Their top 15 companies in 2015 are:

1. Tesla Motors USA
2. Salesforce.com USA
3. Alexion Pharma USA
4. Regeron Pharma USA
5. ARM Holdings UK
6. Unilever Indonesia Indonesia
7. Incyte USA
8. Amazon USA
9. Under Armour USA
10. BioMarin Pharma USA
11. Baidu China
12. Aspen Pharmacare South Africa
13. Monster Beverage USA
14. Catamaran USA
15. Vertex Pharma USA

The full list of 100 international companies is worth perusing. Notable entries are 27. Netflix, USA, 45. Starbucks, USA 53. Reckitt Benckiser UK. Proctor and Gamble, Apple, Nike and Google do not get into the top 100!

The Forbes methodology uses the wisdom of the crowd. ‘Our method relies on investors’ ability to identify firms they expect to be innovative now and in the future. You can learn more about our research on innovation by visiting learn.theinnovatorsmethod.com. Companies are ranked by their innovation premium: the difference between their market capitalization and a net present value of cash flows from existing businesses (based on a proprietary formula from Credit Suisse HOLT).

Boston Consulting Group publish a list based on a survey of 1500 senior executives. So it tends to consist of large companies with strong brand awareness. Their top 15 are:

1. Apple
2. Google
3. Tesla Motors
4. Microsoft
5. Samsung
6. Toyota
7. BMW
8. Gilead
9. Amazon
10. Daimler
11. Bayer
12. Tencent
13. IBM
14. Softbank
15. Fast Retailing

The magazine Fast Company publishes a list of the 100 most innovative companies based on their perception of ‘businesses whose innovations are having the greatest impacts across their industries and our culture as a whole’. So they include many smaller high-tech US companies. Their top 10 are:

1. Warby Parker
2. Apple
3. Alibaba
4. Google
5. Instagram
6. Color of Change
7. HBO
8. Virgin America
9. Indigo
10. Slack

There is a wide divergence between the lists reflecting their different approaches. The Fast Company list is the most volatile with many changes year to year while the BCG list reflects the public love affair with Apple and the public recognition of big names. The Forbes list is the most international with many dynamic entries from Europe and Asia.

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GUEST POST from Paul Sloane

The Internet of Things (IOT) will have a dramatic impact on product and service innovation. Gartner group forecast that the number of wirelessly connected products will increase from 5 billion today to 21 billion by 2020 (not including smartphones or computers). Everyday objects from kettles to T-shirts will have sensors that can detect when, where and how they are used.

Stephen Hoover, CEO of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) puts it this way, ‘I can instrument and understand what my customers are doing with my products across the world. I can understand if those devices starting to fail. I can understand the environment they’re in and adapt their behavior to be responsive to the local environment.’

Companies will need to fundamentally rethink their products and the user experience. Manufacturers have the opportunity to bypass traditional distribution channels and forge personal relationships with their end-users by offering web based services. Where previously products wore out and were replaced by new versions the IOT offers the promise of products which get better with updates and new releases.

Rolls-Royce uses sensors in its jet engines to monitor performance and to detect problems. It has turned its product into a service and charges by engine usage rather than outright purchase. Babolat makes tennis racquets whose sensors can send data which allows analysis of your tennis strokes, giving the company the opportunity to offer coaching services. John Deere supplies agricultural equipment which can receive and sense data on weather and soil conditions to as to advise on when and where to sow seeds.

Where previously products wore out and were replaced by new hardware the IOT offers the promise of products which get better with updates and new releases. When Tesla discovered that its cars had a problem with uphill starts it released a software patch to fix the problem. Similarly when they wanted to add a “crawl” feature which lets drivers use slow cruise control in heavy traffic, the company broadcast a software release that delivered the new feature to all existing Tesla cars.

In 2014 Google bought home-automation company Nest for a massive $3.2 billion to give it a strong stake in IOT technology. Nest systems can lower your heating bills and warm your house just as you get home but they can also send alerts or shut off home heating systems if sensors detect fire, smoke or carbon monoxide.

‘Once the things in the IoT are connected and given a voice, they become more than just ‘things.’ They become part of a living experience shaped by interactions among people, places, and objects, among product, nature, and life,’ said Olivier Ribet, VP of High Tech for Dassault Systemes. ‘They become contributors to what beckons just beyond the IoT: the Internet of Experiences.’

Companies will need to think innovatively about customer needs. CEOs must ask, ‘In the IOT what is our new value proposition?’ Firms will have to hire software engineers to design and deliver service solutions based on usage data. They will need data analysts to review all the data they gather from their devices. In other words every company will have to become a service provider and a software company – or perish.

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GUEST POST from Paul Sloane

Have you ever been bored rigid by a presenter?

How can you avoid that fate if you have to make a presentation or give a talk? Here are the worst sins that speakers commit. Avoid these mistakes.

1. A Weak Start. The first impression that you make on the stage is very important. It should be positive and animated. Many presenters make a feeble start. They look down and mumble their first words or worse still, they make an apology. The audience wants you to succeed. They want you to be professional, informative and entertaining. So meet their expectations.

2. Over-use of PowerPoint. Slides can be useful – especially for showing charts or images. But many speakers load up their presentation with too many slides containing too many words. Then they read the slides. The audience reads the slide and does not look at the speaker. This is what’s known as, ‘death by PowerPoint’.

3. No Clear Message. Often presenters try to cover too much ground. They overload the audience with data. There are many different messages but there is no clear theme. Ideally your talk should have one central idea. And your pitch should have a structure that communicates the idea. For example you might start by talking about a problem, you might tell a story, you might propose a solution then you might end with a call to action – something you want the audience to do.

4. No Human Interest. Many talks are crammed full of facts, data, charts and statistics. They are dull. There are no stories. People relate to stories about people. So if for example, you want to improve customer service do not drone on about the percentage of net recommenders. Tell a story about someone who gave great service. Describe them and the situation. Make the story come alive.

5. Lack of Enthusiasm. A speaker who lacks enthusiasm cannot generate enthusiasm in the audience. Many presenters deliver their content in a dreary monotone, reading dry statements from a script. They send the audience to sleep. Your job as a speaker is to inform and entertain. You should look the audience in the eye and speak from the heart. Walk about the stage (but not too much). Vary your voice – pitch, speed of delivery and volume. Try to include some humor or something interesting and unusual; but keep it relevant to the topic.

6. Too much Me and not enough You. A big mistake is to make the talk about you, your company, your issues and your achievements. The audience is interested in their problems. You have to make your presentation relevant to them. So if you give examples about your company then draw out larger issues and lessons that are relevant and useful to your listeners. Count how many times you say ‘I’ or ‘we’ and count how many times you say ‘you’.

7. No Rehearsal. Many speakers make elementary mistakes on stage. They struggle with the equipment. Things they should have checked do not work. Their slides are out of order. It is clear that they have not rehearsed. You should practice your talk before the event so that you can be confident about every aspect of it. On the day of the event you should check all the equipment on stage and be familiar with all the logistics.

8. Overrunning on Time. This is a sin that many presenters commit. Event organizers and audiences do not appreciate a speaker who overruns his allotted time. Worse still, the speaker compounds the error by rushing towards the end to cram in all his remaining slides. If you have a 45 minute slot then practice a talk that fits comfortably into 40 minutes. That way you can end the talk in a strong, confident manner and take the time to really deliver your key message, If you have time over you can always offer to take questions.

Practice your presentation and deliver it with confidence and enthusiasm. Get your message across. You will enjoy it. More importantly, so will your audience.

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