Readings
LATITUDE
The Eloquent Engineer By Jun Echevarria, P.Eng., and Bob Serrano From about $25 through major online retailers
engage with your audience—clients, colleagues, bosses, boards, neighbours, whomever. Most of The Eloquent Engineer’ s anecdotes reflect Mr. Echevarria’s career. Working as an engineering professor and a business executive, he’s learned the importance of simplifying messages so that everyone—professionals and lay people alike— understand what’s being presented. One of the biggest lessons? Know your audience and craft your message accordingly. If you’re sharing project highlights with engineers, your message should be much different from one aimed at non- engineering managers making budget decisions. “You need to present your proposal in a language that your audience understands,” say the authors. “By using words that are familiar to them, you can better guide their thought process to align with yours—make it easy for them to follow where you’re going and hopefully lead them to the same conclusions.” The authors continue: “When it comes to making great presentations, it’s all about them . In other words, it’s YOU who needs to adjust.” The book provides simple, straightforward tips and advice on how to make those adjustments. Attractively packed with colourful graphics and photos, it covers both the theoretical and the practical with easy-to-follow examples. Case in point: a chapter that examines how the brain processes words, sounds, and pictures is followed by chapters on how to choose the best imagery and font to convey your message. Many of the lessons will help you design and choose better visual aids, but PowerPoints are just tools. They should never be the centre of a presentation. It’s the message that matters, say Mr. Echevarria and Mr. Serrano. The book is an approachable and well- designed resource to help you inform, explain, or persuade. Indeed, almost half of it looks at effective presentation delivery—everything from practising your presentation to avoiding stage fright and making a great first impression. It is possible to connect with your audience in a way that has them listening, agreeing—and never, ever falling asleep.
COMPELLING PRESENTATIONS WILL KEEP YOUR AUDIENCE AWAKE—IN A GOOD WAY Be honest. Are you guilty of painful presentations that put your audience to sleep, metaphorically or otherwise? Do you resort to jargon over clear, concise messages? Are your slides packed with heavy detail in tiny fonts? Do your Gantt * charts hurt the eyes and fail to showcase your astute analyses? “Now, this slide is a little hard to read, but if you look at your handout. . .” There’s a better place to land, says Jun Echevarria, P.Eng., a Calgary electrical engineer, and he aims to guide you there in his first book, The Eloquent Engineer. Mr. Echevarria collaborated with his long-time friend Bob Serrano, a fellow Calgarian and a creative advisor for a global engineering company. The two complement each other well. Mr. Echevarria has a master of science degree in electrical engineering and an MBA, as well as professional credentials in project management and business analysis. Mr. Serrano runs his own freelance design and production firm when he’s not working as a creative advisor. Growing up in Manila, they sang together in a choir, then reconnected as adults after they’d moved to Calgary. Through real-life stories, The Eloquent Engineer serves as a great guide for engineers, geoscientists, and technical professionals of any other ilk with a need to translate complex and confusing content into compelling, persuasive, and memorable presentations. The creators want you to better
SUMMER 2018 PEG | 53
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker