Presentation & Public Speaking Craft

The craft and decision-making around presenting ideas to an audience — when a live presentation, recording, or written document is the right medium, and how to execute whichever is chosen well.

Also known as: presentation, live presentation, public speaking, infodeck, slidedoc, slideument, storytelling (presentation), How to Speak

How authors use it

Oldest first (extraction date when no publication date is known).

Documents (2)

• Our Favorite Management Tips on Building Influence HBR Editors · 2026-09-23 Reader 🖥️
  HBR has compiled 10 of its favorite 'Management Tip of the Day' items on building influence — spanning topics from persuasive presentations to storytelling — into a single curated roundup for managers.
• Do you even need a presentation? Sumeet Gayathri Moghe (byline metadata reads Martin Fowler; published as first article of a guest series on martinfowler.com, editorially reviewed by Fowler) · 2026-09-12 Reader 🖥️
  A 'presentation' properly means the live, presenter-orchestrated act of storytelling, not the slide deck, so before building one you should work up a hierarchy of cheaper alternatives — document, infodeck, interactive web app, recorded audio/video — and reserve an actual (especially live) presentation for the rare cases that genuinely require synchronous human interaction.

Propositions touching this concept (6)

By publication month, oldest first (extraction month when no publication date is known).

2026-04

• explicitPublic speaking is a learnable skill, not a natural talent, and anyone can develop it
  Developing Your Leadership Skills toward Principal Engineering · p4

2026-09

• explicitA presentation, properly defined, is the presenter's live act of storytelling — not the slide deck or slideshow file.
  Do you even need a presentation? · p1
• explicitRecorded audio or video is usually a better default than a live presentation, because the audience controls pace (speed up/slow down/replay), gets captions and chapter markers, and the act of recording forces the presenter to cut fluff.
  Do you even need a presentation? · p6
• explicitA live presentation should be reserved for situations that specifically require synchronous human interaction — real-time influence, fielding objections, networking, energising a community — because it is the costliest option: it demands scheduling overhead and heavy preparation, and (unlike a recording) the audience cannot control its pace.
  Do you even need a presentation? · p8
• implicitCommunication media form an implicit cost/overhead hierarchy — document, infodeck, interactive web app, recording, live presentation, in ascending order of production and audience-attendance cost — and the rational choice is the cheapest rung that still achieves the communicative goal.
  Do you even need a presentation? · p9
• implicitOrganizations and individuals default to over-using slide decks and live presentations for information that would be better served by writing — otherwise there would be no need to write an article arguing readers should ask 'do you even need a presentation?'
  Do you even need a presentation? · p10

Open gaps (5)

• incompleteThe article never addresses the organizational/political reasons teams keep defaulting to live meetings and slide decks despite the overhead the author identifies (status signaling, visibility, habit, hierarchy expectations) — it treats the choice as a purely rational medium-fit decision, ignoring why the 'irrational' default persists.
  Do you even need a presentation? — read next: Read into organizational-change or meeting-culture literature (e.g. work on meeting overload, status theatre, or Cutler-style institutional-overload framing) for why the rational choice the author recommends is hard to adopt in practice.
• incompleteProduction-cost realism is thin: the author (self-described non-software-engineer) asserts you can build a web app or produce cinematic video 'without high-end skills' via coding harnesses and consumer tools, but doesn't address the actual skill floor, tooling access, or organizational approval overhead in a regulated or non-creative-adjacent workplace (e.g. a telco) where such tools may not be readily available or sanctioned.
  Do you even need a presentation? — read next: Would benefit from a practitioner account of building infodecks/microcourses inside a large, non-media, non-consultancy organization to test whether the low-barrier claim survives outside a design-forward consultancy like Thoughtworks.
• incompleteThe article is explicitly scoped as the first of a series and defers the actual craft of storytelling/narrative construction — the piece that would tell you HOW to write the story once you've decided a presentation is warranted — to 'the remaining articles.' As captured, this document only answers whether/which medium, not how to execute the chosen one well.
  Do you even need a presentation? — read next: Read the follow-up articles in Moghe's series (next: 'how to craft your story') once captured in Reader, and also Winston's 'How to Speak' (extract-winston-how-to-speak) for live-delivery craft this piece deliberately does not cover.
• incompleteThe captured Reader content is a teaser, not the article. HBR's own summary promises 10 tips on building influence — covering persuasive presentations and storytelling among other topics — but none of the 10 tips, nor any argument, evidence, or example supporting them, are present in the captured text. There is nothing here to extract a genuine unity, structure, propositions, or arguments from beyond the fact of the compilation itself.
  Our Favorite Management Tips on Building Influence — read next: Fetch the live article at https://hbr.org/2026/09/our-favorite-management-tips-on-building-influence (or re-save/re-capture it in Reader) to get the actual 10 tips and, ideally, the individual full-length HBR articles each tip is likely drawn from — the same pattern as the sibling roundup extract-hbr-management-tips-giving-feedback.json, whose 8 tips were fully captured and yielded a rich extraction. If this document resists full capture the way HBR articles sometimes do, the browser-save-to-reader skill's HBR workaround may be needed.
• uninformedNo acknowledgment of structural barriers to community involvement and public speaking: geographic isolation, caregiving responsibilities, financial constraints, neurodivergence, visa/immigration constraints that limit professional visibility. The advice assumes a degree of privilege and freedom that many engineers don't have.
  Developing Your Leadership Skills toward Principal Engineering — read next: Literature on equity in tech careers; Lara Hogan's work on sponsorship as an alternative path for underrepresented engineers