Patrick Leblanc has started a new project called…SQL Lunch! The concept is to present a 30 minute topic every two weeks at lunch. One speaker, one topic, free. I think every other week is sustainable as far as finding speakers, and for those of wanting to make a small investment in professional development on a recurring basis.
I also think it fills an important void in the SQL speaking world. Right now if you want to start participating more actively in the SQL Community as a speaker, your options are:
SQL Lunch becomes one more option.
Becoming a good speaker takes a lot of practice, and some of that has to be in front of an audience. At SQLSaturday we exert a preference for local speakers, but we still have to look for a measure of experience, and make sure that we have a relatively low number of first time speakers. Much like becoming a DBA, where do you go to get experience? No good answer yet!
Patrick is going to have the same problem of course, he needs good speakers to keep people interested and coming back, but it removes the time and money obstacle. For someone who has done a chapter presentation and wants more experience, this provides another venue – and I’m not sure we can have too many venues!
He does need speakers though, and I’m betting more than few of you would like to practice your skills and give back a little bit. Sweat equity and karma, all in thirty minutes. Regardless of experience level, if you’re willing to give it a try and put in some effort practicing first, drop Patrick a note at webmaster@sqllunch.com. I’m looking forward to doing a presentation there next year, and hope you’ll give it a try too.
Note: I don’t have any stake in the project, I just think it’s a good idea.
John finally got things caught up and had time to finish the evals, here’s how I did on my presentation with 33 evals submitted:
I bought Real Leaders Don't Do Powerpoint by Christoper Witt ($15 at Amazon) on a trip, Powerpoint catching my eye and then deciding it was something I needed to read. It's not anti-Powerpoint, it's more about passion and messaging, something I've come to appreciate in both business and politics. For me the essence of the book was that to be a good to great leader you have to be able to communicate well. Some of that is body language. More of it is selling ideas and your ability to make to them happen.
You could call it speech writing and it wouldn't be wrong. As a blogger/writer there is value in shaping words for the desired impact, to me it's easily a step harder to write words that you or someone else will speak and then deliver them with the value add that only a good speaker can do. First you have to have a message, one that you're passionate about. Then you have to learn to deliver it in a way that opens doors instead of closing them.
Technical speaking is on the opposite end of this - there we're trying to portray complex ideas in a way that others can follow and learn from with typically no attempt to inspire or challenge. Technical speaking is far more teaching than speaking. Not bad, just different.
To give you a feel for the book, in one chapter the author talks about being yourself, being bigger and louder, being passionate, and being dramatic. If you don't see value or challenge in those, you won't enjoy the book. On the other hand, if you want to start down the road to real speaking, I think this book is a start and is approachable. Not sure? Think about speeches from history you admire. Was it the message or the delivery? Would it have been as good if you delivered it?
I've read it once and set it aside to read again later in the year. For now it's theory, at some point I think I'd like to try it.
I saw this post about Why I Dislike Newsgroups from Tom Larock and he did a pretty good job of summarizing the negatives, and then went to to discuss how the MVP forums are the exception. One of the comments was about the forums here on SQLServerCentral are also generally the exception to the rule and since I had a small part in how those evolved, wanted to write down some thoughts that have been pending for a while.
First, how do you make forums work? It's both easy and difficult, there's a bit of a strange synergy that happens at some point. I think the essence of it is:
When we first started the SSC forums I was opposed to doing it because they require a lot of work. I think most people set up forums and just let it happen from there, and while that might work, it doesn't usually turn into a community that mainly self monitors. Once we decided to proceed, for the first two years or so Steve & I posted every day, and part of the "secret" formula we found was offering prizes for the most good replies, which brought along a number of good people who really made the difference and took some of the weight off of us. A good moderator is key, someone even tempered and wise, and hard to find - but essential. We set the tone early on and somehow it never changed much, fundamentally Steve & I both have a great regard for beginners or those willing to ask a question in order to move forward, and that somehow became "community" - which isn't to say that the community of SSC isn't self defining and self directed!
If you own a forum, don't expect it to work without working. See above, and look at the places that do work and don't work. Many different ways of doing it, and no guarantees that the formula above is repeatable.
If you're asking a question, I'd like to think you've searched for the answer first. Sometimes it's knowing the right buzzword to search for, and we won't always know that. When we're beginners it's both easy and frustrating to ask a "stupid" question, but on the other hand, how else will we figure it out? That said, it's the Internet, so on any given day I may get no reply, a lot of replies, and then I have to figure out which seem reasonable - and that can be based on confirming what I thought, some sort of 'reputation' based on # of posts, bio, etc, or the number of "I agree" comments that follow the answer. It cost me a minute or two to get the answer back, so if I get anything valuable at all it's a win, all for very low investment.
If you're answering questions...well, that's the hard one. You're going to see questions that are badly framed, easily answered via search, home work assignments, and occasionally ones by people that have no other motive than to cause trouble. They'll post in the wrong forum, double post, fail to provide all the information needed, ask for a different answer than the right one, sometimes write in garbled English because it's been run through a translator. You'll get people that respond to follow up questions badly or even rudely, or become defensive, or sometimes offensive about your thoughts on a post.
Sound bad? It depends on what you want out of it, and your viewpoint.
One reason is to score points towards whatever prize is out there, another is because you want to give back. The latter I admire, but in practice as long as you help someone your reason doesn't matter much. Giving back - which takes time and effort - feels harder when they don't seem to appreciate your efforts.
So...here's the thing. It doesn't matter if they appreciate it. Either way, you're doing it because you get something out of it. Civilized people say thank you, but unfortunately not all of us act civilized on any given day, so you either learn to cope with that behave badly or you stop participating in conversations with all the good people too. There's nothing wrong with asking for more information, pointing them to a URL that explains the expectations, but why engage with the knuckleheads when they persist? I email the URL to the moderator and unsubscribe from the notifications because I will spend my time on people that deserve it, and I see no reason to make it a contest of wills to see who can type longer and louder. Said differently, I have nothing to prove, so if someone thinks I'm wrong, that they are smarter than I am, whatever, that's fine and rarely a source of much more than a smile from me.
I'm not throwing rocks at Tom here. What he expects is what we should all expect, but it rarely happens - so that means we either omit it from our tool box, or we bend a little. Not great choices, but the ones we have.
I've never been a fan of animation in Powerpoint presentations, and as a result almost never use them in my own presentations - both because I don't see them used well and don't have a pattern for using them well myself. Various screen transitions are ok I guess, but I'm more interested in the animation that you can do within a slide and when.
A common animation is to "fly" bullets in as the presenter talks about each one. It always feels like - and probably is - an attempt to get the audience to stay on pace with you and not skip ahead. I'd rather take in the whole slide and let that soak in while the presenter is adding value point by point. Does that mean I might not listen as carefully? Perhaps, but my counter argument is that the slide is the unit of information delivery, we talk about one slide at a time - the collective task is to share/understand information slide by slide.
I've seen in used with bearable results when modeling workflow - we start here, then here, etc, etc. Not sure that really helps my understanding, and I think it's back to controlling me/the pace of the talk rather than really helping me understand the intent of the slide.
One exception I've come to appreciate is when you want to quiz the audience? Clunky to put question on one slide and the answer on the next if you're doing more than one question, clunky to put all the questions one slide and the answers on the next. Flying in the question - elaborating and then soliciting answers, followed by flying in the answer, I think that works pretty well.
My worry is that I'm not using animation as what is essentially a fear based decision - haven't seen/used it effectively, so I've tossed it out of the toolbox. So I'm looking for input, are there times when you've seen in slide animation that helped you understand the message? Or do you have rules/patterns about when you use it?
I've scheduled another iteration of my Technical Speaking Seminar for March 14, 2009 in Orlando. It's free, and I'm hosting it on a Saturday this time to open it up to those that can't get away from work during the week. It's designed for the novice to intermediate level speaker with the intent of giving them the skills they need to do a technical presentation at a user group (preferred starting place) or a Code Camp or SQL Saturday.
It's a fun day - if a little nerve wracking for first time speakers. My business partner Steve Jones is also planning to do one in Denver, date not yet set, and we're thinking later this year we'll break it down into our short and sweet video format and get them posted on JumpstartTV as well.
Just as I did last year I'm posting my evaluation scores for review. I co-presented with Steve Jones a session about Moving Into Management that had about 50 attendees, of which 16 of them submitted an evaluation. Scores are ok, questions aren't that useful to me as a speaker, probably of more value to those setting the schedule for next year.
What is your overall evaluation of the session?4.44
How would you rate the usefulness of the overall information in your day to day environment?4.38
How would you rate the speakers presentation skills?4.81
How would you rate the speakers knowledge of the subject4.73
How would you rate the accuracy of the session title, description, and experience level to the actual session?4.63
How would you rate the amount of time allocated to cover the topic/session4.44
How would you rate the quality of the presentation materials4.44
Average4.55
I'll define a brown bag lunch as a training event held at lunch time where someone on the team does a technical presentation designed to enlighten/educate others on the team that decide to attend. The original idea was that everyone would bring their lunch in a 'brown bag', but I think it's more common that lunch is provided. They have that whole grass roots/open source/good karma feel to them. No better way to learn a topic a little more deeply than by preparing a presentation on it, and for most people it's more approachable because they know all the people in the room.
That's the intro, now to the question - do they work? I've tried it when I was managing, and sadly, it didn't work.
The first hurdle was that I needed to give them paid time to prepare the presentation. Not really fair to ask someone to give up time with family for something that is directly work related, but you have to look hard to see if you can afford to lose them for 4 hours (or more in some cases). In most cases if you want the training, you find a way to give them the time.
The bigger hurdle was that for most of them it was the first time teaching/presenting, and it was painful. I sat through one that attempted to explain every concept of UML and I think all of us were lost 10 minutes into it. That means to make the presentations work you have to devote additional time and resources (you!) to reviewing their outline, checking the slides (UML had 180 for a one hour presentation), and doing a practice run with them. For most managers this is time well spent, but time that is very hard to come by.
Perhaps the biggest hurdle was convincing the rest of the team that some good might come from the effort. Funny how the prospect of 'giving up' a lunch hour to listen to a presentation was taken as an intrusion or worse. Providing the food will offset this to a good degree, as few things motivate IT professionals like free food!
I'm always looking for input from people that have made this work, and so far I haven't found many (please do contact me if you have). If you decide to give it a try, here are some suggestions:
You could easily do worse than playing one of the many MSDN webcasts, or a series of interesting videos from JumpstartTV!
When I teach my introductory (and free) Successful Technical Speaking class to try to help beginners enter the world of speaking, what would you guess is the number one road block? Surprisingly it's NOTT the fear of public speaking, it's the fear that they won't be able to answer all the questions and will look 'stupid'. One of the questions I ask them at this point is 'does it bother you when you attend a presentation and the speaker isn't able to answer a question?'. I've not yet had anyone answer yes, because they realize that's an impossibly high standard. If a speaker can't answer a dozen questions, that's a different story - but rare.
Something about human nature wants to hold ourselves to a higher and unreasonable standard than we do everyone else, and just pointing that out moves a lot of people past this common road block. Interesting isn't it?
What attendees do look for is poise, do you melt down when you hit a question you can't answer (whether it's in scope or not), or do you handle it gracefully. I'm not fond of the 'I'll look that up and back to you' answer, I prefer to stick with a simple 'I don't know the answer to that' as my answer. I'm experienced enough to know that I'll probably NEVER know all the answers, and humble enough to openly admit it when someone asks me a question I don't know. No covering up, no bluster, just - I don't know. Think about it the next time you attend a presentation. Regardless of response, poise is the key.
Actually it was subset of the group, but Kathi & Julie from the St Louis SQL Server User Group did a great job of marketing my free Succesful Technical Speaking class. Microsoft was kind enough to provide both meeting space as well as lunch in a great show of community support. We had about 10 people attend and for most of them I think it was the right class at the right time, start the process of conquering the fear of 'I can't answer every question'.
I'm always re-evaluating this class in particular - should I rebrand it to Beginning Technical Speaking? Should I include how to use Powerpoint (I talk about technique but no hands on right now because it switches from ideas to doing), longer labs (some people tend to get very pale at at the idea of a 15-20 minute first time presentation!). I'm presenting the class again here in Orlando in September, I think I'll do one more iteration and then decide what approach to take for next year.
Part of the class is why someone wants to speak. Many reasons, but a common one is to build their resume/profile - nothing all wrong with that. Presenting is good, but you'll reach far more people by writing an article for SSC and probably have less stress because it can be a very deliberate effort. Not trying to talk anyone out of speaking, but if you're really serious, you need to do both. You'll reach different audiences and built two different skill sets. I've been talking to my friend Steve Jones about him building a writing class, but so far I haven't put forth a really compelling reason - but my best one is that not only does he have the writing experience, he sees on a regular basis lots of different styles, good and bad. We'll see!
But to return to speaking for a moment, I'll be trying to about 10 different out of Florida user groups next year to meet new people, sharpen my skills, and of course - to market my skills and training business. If you're looking for a speaker drop me a note via www.endtoendtraining.com (no, I'm not posting my email here!) and we can also talk about whether the speaking class might be a nice add on to my visit.
I commented in an earlier post about the challenges PASS has in trying to select a 100 or so speakers out of a set of applicants 2-3 times that size. I've run into a couple people since then that have asked for help/ideas on how to make it to the national level. Please note that I don't have any inside track here, these are general observations that may or may not work for PASS or any other national event:
On the other side of the fence at this point the formula for becoming rich and famous is fairly well known which really increases the number of people seeking relatively few slots. If I were building the agenda I'd be looking for:
I think PASS would serve the audience well by publishing some guidelines about how to get on the agenda and how it's set. At the least I think they should limit every speaker to one session, and require repeat speakers to sit out every third year to make room for someone new (someone suggested that this might irritate the top speakers so that they don't want to return - I have to think that would be rare, but if they are that up tight that they don't see the overall value, we don't need them anyway!).
I participated in a lunch meeting recently with a number of people from MS that work on their community efforts, and I thought one of their questions was interesting, if obvious; what do you get out of participating in the community as a speaker or group leader?
I think it falls into three buckets:
For me the first two apply. I do a one minute bio that includes what I do for a living and that's the extent of the sales pitch. Over time I hope to earn karma that comes back in the form of students in class. Just as important for me is that I enjoy helping those new to the profession grow, mainly because I see how much faster I could have grown if more help had been available/offered.
Nothing wrong the the last one, everyone reaches the point where they want validation - to prove to themselves, or their boss, that they are somebody. MS has accentuated this one - successfully I think - by making many of the community leaders MVP's. So part of this loops back to indirect marketing, hoping that listing speaker/community leader/MVP will lead to increased business (and I'm sure it does to some degree). The only downside to this one is that some point I think you should move past validation and move into the zone that only time/experience can bring - nothing left to prove.
I'm reasonably stubbon about my approach; I do the things I enjoy/want to do without worrying about the ROI. Not everyone can afford to do that, or would want to adopt such a karmic approach, but it suits me and seems to have worked so far.
At the recent SQLSaturday #4 we had a session end up finishing much earlier than expected, so we gave the attendees the option of moving to other sessions or staying for a Q&A session done with a panel up front. I've only done the panel format a couple times and by the time we finished realized we needed to learn a few lessons for next time. One is to decide if everyone should comment on each question. I think the ideal is whoever answers gives a complete/deep answer (to the extent it makes sense) and the others only join in if they have a contrary opinion. The complete answer is important, but hard to know - who can give the best answer out of the panel? We sort of went with let the most junior panel member try first, then work up from there, but I think it subtly makes the junior guy look junior - probably not fair. Perhaps another/better approach would be to make sure the panel members have similar skill levels.
I'd like to see a couple of these at each community event, there are a lot of questions waiting to be asked.
Brian Kelley posted Giving a Presentation about a week ago and is worth reading, in particular his suggestion about Toastmasters I like (but have not tried) and the link to a post by Scott Hanselman. Today my friend Steve sent me this link to Tips for Public Speaking that you might also find interesting.
The more I coach the more I'm convinced that the single biggest thing you can do to be successful is to practice. Practice gives you confidence and assuming you know your subject, you can screw up all the rest if you have to and still have a 'good' session. Note that I'm not advocating skimping on the rest, but for some reason everyone wants to skimp on the practice - just don't!
I've grown to like the presenter view in Powerpoint 2007; let's me navigate easily, and more important, lets me easily leverage notes as I often have scripts embedded in the notes. If you haven't tried it it treats the projector as a second monitor, audience sees the slide full screen, you see more of a split screen view. Where it doesn't work so well is when it's time to do the demos. The first problem is that for demos you really want a clone view, both laptop and projector showing the same thing so that you can look down and work - but thats the opposite of the dual view needed for presenter mode. It's possible to work - though sometimes awkwardly - by just watching the screen while you work, all depending on how you're situated in the room. The other part is that when you open dialogs they have a tendency to pop in the laptop window so that you have to drag them to the other display, and that gets tedious.
So, I'm looking for suggestions. Two laptops won't help, because my notes/script would be on the other machine. I like the idea of using two projectors so I can leave my slide up while I demo, but I don't think that solves my problem either. Find some quick way to toggle between clone view and dual view? Change which is the primary so that dialogs don't pop on the wrong monitor? Seems like there should be a simple answer but as you can see if there is, it's not obvious to me!
