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SSSSCENE 17CCCEEENNNEEE 111777

Toss the Script

Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used

to an environment where excellence is expected.

STEVE JOBS

S

teve Jobs is the consummate presenter for twenty-first-

century audiences who want to engage in conversations,

not lectures. Jobs has a casual speaking style, an informal-

ity that, as discussed in the preceding chapter, comes from

hours of practice. Practice allows him to work largely without a

script. During demonstrations, Jobs conceals notes discreetly from

the audience but never reads them word for word. The notes serve

only as cue cards for the next step in the demonstration. Jobs per-

forms largely without notes for the majority of his presentation.

As suggested in Scene 8, most presenters create “slideuments”:

documents masking as slides. Slideuments act as a crutch for medi-

ocre presenters who read every word on the slide, often turning

their backs to the audience to do so. Jobs does have a script—largely

in his head. His slides, which are highly visual, act as a prompter.

Each slide has one key idea and one idea only.

After Jobs pulled the new MacBook Air from a manila enve-

lope in the “holy shit” moment at Macworld 2008, he explored

the new computer in more detail. As you can see in Table 17.1, his

slides contained very few words but contained just enough infor-

mation to act as a prompter for one idea—one theme per slide.^1

Jobs went on to explain that MacBook Air had the same

processor used in all of Apple’s other notebooks and iMacs. He

marveled at the fact that Intel could step up to the challenge,