210 REFINE AND REHEARSE
issue. He smiles, has fun, explains to the audience what they
should have seen, and moves on.Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff
During a demonstration of Apple TV at Macworld 2008, Jobs
brought up a live connection to Flickr, a photo-sharing site. Jobs
selected several categories to show the audience how photographs
could be served from the site and displayed on a wide-screen
television in a living room. Unfortunately, the screen went black.
After about twenty seconds of trying to retrieve the images, Jobs
simply turned to the audience, grinned, and said, “Well, I’m
afraid Flickr isn’t serving up photos on that one.”^5
Jobs doesn’t let anything ruffle him onstage. Instead, he
acknowledges the problem, continues the presentation, summa-
rizes the material, and enjoys himself. He concluded the Apple
TV demonstration by saying, “All of this from your wide-screen:
movies, TV shows, music, podcasts, photos from dot-Mac and—
when they’re serving up photos—Flickr! So, that’s what I wanted
to show you today. Isn’t that incredible?”^6 Jobs never loses his
enthusiasm. The demo might not have gone perfectly, but that
doesn’t diminish the joy he has for the product.
No matter how much you prepare, something might, and
probably will, go differently from how you had planned. Notice
that I did not say something will go “wrong.” It goes wrong
only when you call attention to the issue or you let it ruin the
rest of your presentation. People are there to hear you, to learn
something new about a product, service, or initiative that could
improve their lives.
When a demo fails to come off as smoothly as Jobs had
rehearsed, he never loses his cool. He says something like, “Oops,
that’s not what I wanted” or “I need some help here, guys; this
thing isn’t working.” He will take a few moments to get it work-
ing, and he will do so very calmly.
In one presentation, Jobs could not get a digital camera to
work, so he had some fun with it, tossed it to an Apple employee
in the front row, and said, “I need an expert to fix it. It’s too