Presentation Secrets Of Steve Jobs: How to Be Great in Front of Audience

208 REFINE AND REHEARSE

OS X... Please join me in a moment of silence as we remem-

ber our old friend, Mac OS 9.”^1

Jobs walked back to the casket, put the box back in, closed the

lid, and gently laid a rose on the top. The audience ate it up. Jobs

made his point, and he had a lot of fun doing it.

Jobs has fun, and it shows. Despite relentless planning and

preparation, hours and hours of rehearsal, and near-fanatical

devotion to getting every slide and every demo just right, some-

times things go wrong, but Jobs doesn’t let the small stuff get to

him. He’s going to have fun, whether a demo works or not.

“Let’s take a look at how big this market is,” said Jobs as he

described the market opportunity for the iPhone at Macworld

2007. Suddenly, his slides failed to advance. “My clicker’s not
      working,” he said. As he walked to the right of the stage to check
      the computer, the slide seemed to advance. “Oh, maybe it is
      working. No, it’s not.” Jobs picked up another clicker but it, too,
      failed to work. He smiled and said, “The clicker is not working.
      They’re scrambling backstage right now.”^2 The audience laughed,
      and after a few more seconds of trying to fix the clicker, Jobs
      simply paused, smiled, and told the following story:

You know, this reminds me, when I was in high school, Steve

Wozniak and I—mostly Steve—made this little device called

a TV jammer. It was this little oscillator that put out frequen-

cies that would screw up the TV. Woz would have it in his

pocket. We would go out to a dorm at Berkeley, where he

was going to school, and a bunch of folks would be watching

“Star Trek.” He would screw up the TV, someone would go

to fix it, and just as they had their foot off the ground, he’d

turn it back on, and then he’d screw up the TV again. Within

five minutes, he’d have someone like this [contorts his body;

see Figure 18.1]... OK, it looks like it’s working now.^3

I n t h is one -m i nute stor y, Jobs revea led a side of h is per sona l it y

that few people get to see. It made him more human, engaging,

and natural. He also never got flustered. I have seen even some

experienced presenters get derailed over smaller problems.