How Steve Jobs beats presentation panic

Editor’s Note: The following article is reprinted from CIO.com. Visit CIO’s Macs in the Enterprise page.

...What Jobs did next, according to Carmine Gallo, author of The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, was vintage Jobs (and a model for how presenters should deal with stage crises): He did not panic. He did not look hot under the collar of his trademark turtleneck. Hishours of practice and intimate knowledge of every inch of every slide made him comfortable enough so that he could jump around to another part of the presentation (in this case, to look at photos). Jobs “trouble shooted” his problem by asking the audience (and, presumably, his back-stage engineers) for a little networking assistance. “You know, you could help me out. If you're on Wi-Fi, if you could just get off,” he pleaded, to roaring audience laughter. “I’d appreciate it. We're having a little problem here.”

And he sprinkled in several more bits of humor to diffuse any audience insecurity. “I’ve got time,” he joked, while waiting for the audience to “police each other.”

/// My comment:

Live demonstrations do NOT always go as well as rehearsed, so it's critical for the presenter to be prepared to work around these types of issues. They must be able to retain the audiences attention and get the message across. We all know technology isn't 100% perfect all the time.

Data congestion thwarts Steve Jobs' iPhone demo By Jordan Robertson, AP Technology Writer | June 7, 2010 SAN FRANCISCO --Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs was thwarted Monday in his attempt to show off how clearly the newest iPhone displays Web pages, apparently because too many people were clogging the airwaves at the conference where he was on stage. Jobs tried three times during his keynote to do a side-by-side comparison of the iPhone 4's screen resolution versus its predecessor's. He was trying to call up The New York Times' Web page, but it wouldn't load because too many devices in the room were operating over Wi-Fi, swamping the frequency. Jobs switched to backup phones for the demonstration, but he was still stymied. "Well jeez, I don't like this," Jobs groused. He abandoned the demo while staffers investigated. Technological glitches at technology conferences are common, but less so at Apple's carefully choreographed events. Last month at a demonstration of Google Inc.'sInternet television technology, Google representatives had trouble showing how easy it was supposed to be to switch back and forth between browsing Web content and TV programming. Google pleaded with attendees to shut off their wireless connections, as did Jobs on Monday. He asked bloggers and other people in the room to turn off their wireless connections and put their computers on the floor. "I think bloggers have a right to blog, but if we want to see the demos we're going to have to do it," he said. The demos immediately after that went smoothly. But a later demo of a video-calling feature that requires a wireless Internet connection was sluggish at times.