69-word Summary:
New managers have a lot to learn. Supervising and coaching is a major element that most new managers lack and it’s a reason that many new managers struggle… The Manager’s Guide to Presentations won’t help you there. Managers also need to deliver presentations that motivate, persuade, inform and influence. This book is all about helping managers (and anyone else who presents) to prepare, deliver and assess presentations that motivate, persuade, inform and influence.
The Details:
- Author: Lauren Hug
- Price: $17.99 on Amazon; $7.99 as a Kindle book
- 68 Pages
Bright Spots:
- The Length: I’ve read a lot of books on presentations, and after the first 100 pages or so, they tend to get very redundant. In this book, Lauren Hug respects her readers by making her point and then moving on.
- The Tight Organization: Related to the length and the author’s ability to make her point and move on, this book is tightly organized: what to do before presenting, during the presentation and afterwards. Period. There were very times that I thought: “Huh, that’s an interesting concept and if I had unlimited time I might someday try that, but honestly I’m too busy to ever actually do that in real-life.”
- The templates! This isn’t just a book to read and put away on the shelf, never to be touched again. There are templates to help organize your thoughts on your audience’s needs and expectations, addressing your personal concerns and fears about public speaking, putting together your content, creating interaction with your audience and once your presentation is over there is a template for getting meaningful feedback. Truly, this is a book to work through… unless you buy the Kindle version, which makes it tough to write in. Which brings me to my next point…
Room for Improvement:
I do really like the templates in this book. It would be nice to be able to print them out and write on them. It would be great if downloadable, printable templates were available on the Hug Speak website. Until then, I’ll just have to re-create the templates in Word.
Who Should Buy It?
As mentioned earlier, this book is not only for new managers but anyone who finds themselves needing to put together a meaningful presentation. It’s $7.99 (e-reader version), it’s less than 100 pages, it can be read in one evening, it has templates for organizing your thoughts and it might even help you prepare for and deliver an engaging presentation that leads others to act. What do you have to lose?
