Seeing improvements!

April 25, 2014

Filed under: Spring 2014 — carlosgieseken @ 4:49 am

So in the Strategic Management class I took last fall, one of the case studies we looked at focused on Singapore Airlines. The case talked about many strategic business issues, including how that airlines spends a lot of money on the training of its staff and saves a lot of money by having its corporate headquarters in an airplane hangar rather than in a traditional high-rise.

The flight attendants, for example, are highly trained in the basics of their jobs. Since they know their day-to-day duties so well, it frees their minds up to pick up on other things, like if a customer looks tired or if they don’t have anything to read.

Well, last week we had the final presentations to the faculty for the semester-long Focus Firm projects we’ve been working on for Nike. On top of the normal anxieties I feel about presentations, this one would be to a room full of fellow classmates, students from other Cores, and several faculty. In addition, one of my two teammates was sick, so the presentation would be divided between my other teammate and I.

I proceeded to study that PowerPoint like my life depended on it. I started by printing it out and making notes on different slides that might give me color commentary for the bullet points on each. Then I started giving presentations to myself in my apartment, over and over again. Finally, about an hour and a half before the presentation, my partner and I ran through the PowerPoint out loud to each other.

When my part of the presentation started, up on one of those large rooms on the 5th floor of the Cashion academic building with the great views out to campus, I didn’t freeze up. I might have stumbled every now and again, but only because I was nervous and not because I didn’t know what was on the slides. I was able to look around the  room and make eye-contact without scanning the room, just like we had been taught in our Management Communication class last fall.

It wasn’t a perfect presentation, by any means, but it was by far the best presentation I’ve given since I started at Baylor. Since I’d practiced so much, I was able to focus on other parts of presenting that don’t involve the actual information I was talking about, and I was able to relax.