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"This was one of those reoccuring weeks in my life, the week of the big presentation. Monday afternoon to Chroma, Tuesday morning to Woodside, Wednesday afternoon to Texaco, Wednesday evening to the Venturing Crew, Thursday afternoon to Peter Duncan, Friday to Bryan Bentz, and Saturday to Scott Lackey and Jim Jinright.
Guess I could stop here, since this summarizes my week. And I won't, specifically because I want to talk a little about what I have found to be the basis of a good presentation, and some of the things I am continuing to learn as I do more and different kinds of presentations. In Sunday School today we had a lesson on learning, and seeking wisdom. As I reread the part of the Doctrine & Covenants this lesson was based on, I was struck by how much it relates to giving a good presentation. So I am going to start this Thoughtlet by quoting from D&C 88:117-126, and putting in all caps those words related to my theme for today:
So how does this scripture relate to a presentation? Let us look
at the 16 sets of words I have capitalized in some more detail:
There are a lot of sources we can go to learn how to give a good presentation. There are a lot of different sources in the scriptures. As I have gone through this exercise, based on the source I chose to use to describe what we need to do to give a good presentation, the thing that is amazing to me is that Joseph Smith was 27 years old, with about a 5th grade formal education, when he received the 141 verses of the 88th section of the Doctrine & Covenents in Kirtland, Ohio, and this Thoughtlet is based on only 10 of the 141 verses in this section of the D&C. These thoughts strengthen my belief, my testimony, that the restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ was outside of the capabilities of any man or men, and that the presentation was prepared by our creator, the Lord Jesus Christ.
I gave the lesson (presentation) for Family Home Evening last Sunday. I read the chapter in Love Languages on Spending Quality Time. Andrea said I read way too much. Oh well! We did have a pretty good discussion after I read the chapter. It kind of set the tone for my week. I had worked really hard for the presentation on Monday to Chroma. I called Peter Duncan first thing Monday morning, and was suprised to hear him say, `Roice, this has got too big.' In looking at last week's Thoughtlet, I realized I didn't mention that the new President of Chroma came over to the house for a barbeque dinner on Monday night with Dick Coons. Peter said Dick and I came across pretty strong to him. Oh well! So as I left Monday morning for the presentation, I told Andrea that it wasn't going to go anyplace, because it was going too fast for Peter. At the beginning of the meeting Don asked us three questions:
Dynamic is in the business to develop and sell CLPs (new exploration Concepts, Leads, and Prospects for a fee and an override or the equivalent. Chroma is in the same business, focused on using the Chroma Vision tools to interpret 3-D seismic. However, during the presentation we learned that Chroma is not in the business of selling Prospects. Rather, they partner with a company in a specific geographic area and then jointly develop Prospects in that area. We thought Chroma would be interested in selling our work Offshore Texas for a fee and an override. And they are not. Oh well! I guess the fact Chroma has just closed on $20 million in investment funding focused my attention on getting $400,000 for Dynamic. Not this time.
There were two specific things about the Presentation on Monday afternoon which went wrong. First, Dick asked for a confidentiality agreement before he showed any of his data, and I asked for it up front just before the meeting. It was impossible for Peter to sign the confidentiality agreement as written, and so we started the meeting off with a no. Once the first no has been said, it is easy to repeat `No' at each of the next steps in a presentation. Second, the PowerPoint presentation I gave did not work on their computer. It would not go into presentation mode, and so it always listed other stuff on the screen. Specifically it said there were a total of 87 slides in the presentation, and we got a lot of flack from Peter and from Don about the number of slides in our presentation. They said there should never be more than about 20 slides in a single sitting. Oh well! I was disappointed and wiped out when I got home, and ended up watching a movie on TV as a distraction.
Tuesday morning's presentation to Woodside Petroleum went much better. I was over at Sam LeRoy's office about 8:30 and we reworked the presentation we gave to Chroma, cutting it back from 87 slides to 35 slides. We got there early. They did not have a Zip drive, and so we ended up setting up the portable Power PC Roger Anderson gave me. The presentation started out with some mechanical problems. First the projector would not work with the Power PC, and so I started to give the presentation just on the PC to 4 Woodside professionals, with Dick Coons and Sam LeRoy sitting on the sides. Sam said I did a lot better on this presentation than at Chroma, specifically because I realized they could not read all of the text, and I was talking to them, looking them in the eyes, connecting, and not talking to the screen. Interesting insight to me. Then the Power PC died. The cable to charge the battery stopped working, and the battery was dead and we could not get it back up. I was about a third the way into the presentation when this happened. Talk about being frustrated. I continued to talk using a white board, and Sam was able to use a third computer to bring up an example of multivariate analysis results which greatly impressed them. In fact, they were sufficiently interested I raised the price for the Offshore Texas study from $400,000 to $500,000 on the fly. Part of my logic was I didn't expect them to be interested in the entire project anyway. They are interested. They are in the middle of a strategy planning session. They will get back to me in the next couple of weeks.
I left the meeting very upbeat. I drove from the Galleria area out to Sugar Land and Chroma's office to prepare for the Wednesday afternoon presentation to Texaco. The results of my work at Chroma had not come together near as fast nor as good as Peter Duncan, Dave Eichen, nor myself wanted. I worked very hard on Tuesday afternoon and until about 10:00 on Tuesday evening to prepare material for the Texaco presentation. It didn't come together and I was tired and frustrated when I got home in time to watch Jay Leno as a distraction. I got up early, and was back down in Sugar Land at 8:00 to finish preparing. The work did come together in time to print out a Power Point file and to get back up to the West Belt and Texaco's offices by 2:15 for a 2:30 meeting. Dave had cut a CD and Texaco did not have a PC nor a projector in the conference room we went to. Oh well! They gave us some new information, and then we pulled out the PowerPoint hardcopy and went through the different images. They were not that impressed with the presentation. I think I am going to swear off of PowerPoint presentations unless they are completely self contained. We finished up at 4:30 and I was back at the house by 5:45 after fighting traffic on I-10.
Alan Peterson and I team tagged a presentation to three of my Venturing Scouts on Genealogy on Wednesday evening. It was fun, and I think the scouts each got quite a bit out of it. It will probably be 50 years before we could know the impact of this presenation, and by then everyone will be in different places, so we will probably never know the real impact of this presentation. I've come to believe that of those few presentations which actually make a difference, this time lag is a common theme.
Thursday was spent at Chroma working on the Texco project. With the new information they provided Tuesday I was able to get a lot farther than I had for several weeks. However, in the afternoon, Peter had me come into his office and talk through what had happened, where I'm at, and what the next steps are. Even though it was a one on one discussion, it was very much a presentation. Specifically when as he said, `Roice, you are involved in a lot of things, and it is hard to get you to focus,' my cell phone rang, and he said `Case in point!' Oh well! We agreed I would give a status presentation to the Chroma Energy technical team on Tuesday afternoon next week, and we would jointly come up with a plan on how to best proceed.
Friday I spent the day at Interactive Interpretation & Training working on the offshore Texas stuff. I had planned to take the Metro Bus downtown. However, when I got on the bus the driver said they didn't have change, the sign said $2.00 and the bus driver said $3.50. I had stuck $1.00 in the slot, and since I didn't understand the presentation I just got off the bus and drove downtown. Audrey and Sara I need you guys to talk me through what is involved in riding Metro downtown. Bryan Bentz in Connecticut and I spent the day working together across the phone and e-mail on the Offshore Texas Project. I am very excited about how well it is coming together. I was there working on it until about 6:00 with Les Denham. Andrea and Matt and I collaborated via cell phone as I drove home, and I went straight to Cinemark and bought three tickets to Stephen Spilberg's new movie: A.I. Wierd and kinky in parts. It is very creative, and the designs are interesting. Ice ages do not last 2,000 years (Milankovich cycles are typically 10,000 years) and glaciers would take out old buildings, so he needs to learn more about geologic processes. However, the presentation is good, and I recommend you all see this movie, if for no other reason than it will set thinking in the same way `2001 A Space Odyssey' did for my generation back in 1969. As we left the theater Matt asked me `How did you like the movie?' I went into a big long discourse on people like Stephen Spilberg and me who are still trying to please their mothers and he said `I don't care about all of that stuff.' So I asked him how he liked the movie, and he said, `It made me sad. I almost cried.'
Saturday I finished up my report for Scott Lackey and Jim Jinright about the interpretation work I did for them in Denver on the 21st. The model I built turned out pretty neat, and I'm looking forward to their response to this presentation. It consists of marked transparency sheets, separated by stacks of transparency holders. There were four drillable leads identified on their property, one of which has not been tested. It will be interesting to see what the end results are in this area.
Saturday Ben and Sarah came down for one of Sarah's friends' sisters' weddings. We got to babysit Ethan for the first time. It was a lot of fun. He likes me (or as Sarah says, `He likes men.'). Matt, Ben, Sarah, Ethan, Whizzer, and I all went swimming in the pool. It was fun. First time I've dunked Ben in a long time, and he dunked me several times. Sarah noticed I had cut down the little three branched pine tree next to the pool earlier in the morning. It died. I remember when we were trying to get rid of the weeds in that area and it was recommended that we kill the tree and plant a new one, and when I refused, the man helping said, `Why is it such an issue for you if that tree is killed?' I explained to Sarah that the three pine trees at the end of the yard represented Roice, Ben, and Paul, and the little interesting tree represented Rob. When Sarah asked which tree was Ben I said, `I don't remember, I just know it was the one that reached the ground in an ice storm and didn't break.' The good news in cutting down the tree is that I figured out a way to `keep it.' Andrea and I got out a level, and we marked it so I cut the tree branches off at the same height. This will allow me to build a seat that can fit on the three branches, and we will have a chair, all in the spirit of Phil Siverstein's `The Giving Tree.' It was fun to play with Ethan, and to look to his future. It was also scary. We ended up watching TV while we were feeding him and watching him explore our world. I had never seen The Untouchable's, and I particularly noticed that when a man was pushed off of a roof, Ethan became intent on watching it, and even though I turned his head away, he wiggled and got right back to see the splat. Even though it didn't turn out like I expected, I'm so glad I raised all of you kids before all of the stuff was on TV that is now so readily available in our living room. And just think how conservative I am compared to most of the world, in terms of what I will let into my house! Ethan is such a good baby. He is so even tempered, so sensitive to when big mean Ben would beat up on Matt (maybe it was just Matt's screaming). Ethan eats well and everything he can put his hands on, loves his puppies, explores like a geophysisicist, has a wonderful smile, and was a lot of fun. He, like I hope and pray each of you will always do, is going to do a wonderful job of giving a presentation."