By John H. Tucker

In his crisp charcoal suit, assistant business professor Andrew Abela stands in the front of the room giving a lecture. Thirty-five sets of eyes are fixed upon him. He relates a few good-humored stories and then references the Microsoft PowerPoint graphs he handed out minutes ago. The topic of the day: How to Present Complex Information to a Demanding Audience. He isn’t addressing a Catholic University classroom; in fact, Abela’s CUA business students heard this lecture months ago. Today, the professor is in a Baltimore office building, standing in front of the senior vice president and other top executives of NeighborCare, a $2 billion long-term health care company.

The senior managers of other large companies, including Microsoft, Dell, JP Morgan Chase, ExxonMobil, Kimberly-Clark and Xerox, have joined NeighborCare in their demand for this workshop that Abela originally devised for his 500-level Market Research class at CUA. This workshop is a presentation on presentations. More specifically, it outlines a comprehensive method for communicating complicated or controversial business material to a hard-nosed corporate audience. Because his approach offers a solution to what he perceives as a significant challenge, Abela thought it deserved an intense name: Extreme Presentation™.

“In a business setting, the average audience members — often senior executives — are time-oppressed, easily distracted and behave as though they have ADD,” says Abela, adding that technologies such as the Internet have made executives harder to impress with PowerPoint presentations. “They all carry two or three mechanical devices — pagers, cell phones, wireless e-mail devices — at least one of which is bound to go off during a lecture. Presenting to them has become an extreme challenge.”

A SEED IS PLANTED
Having spent the bulk of his career in the private sector, Abela frequently was on the receiving end of market research presentations, which he says “drove me crazy” because they were boring or overly busy. “The researchers would drown us with all of these fancy statistics, which weren’t what the audience wanted to hear. We needed to be told what it all meant,” recalls the professor.

However, it wasn’t until three years ago — when his consulting work led to frequent interactions with marketing executives of major companies — that he realized market research presentations had become a major problem. “I heard again and again how difficult it was for their market researchers to present findings in a compelling way,” says Abela, who previously served as a brand manager for Procter & Gamble, and spent six years working for the strategy consulting firm McKinsey & Co.

In November 2004, the CUA professor attended Microsoft’s international market research summit at the corporation’s Redmond, Wash., headquarters, where he gave a speech on the role of market researchers. After the conference, the summit organizer wrote Abela to say that the CUA professor’s speech was the best that had ever been given in the Redmond offices — not only because of the lecture’s content, but also because of the way he presented it.

At that moment, a seed was planted.

AN EXTREME IDEA ON CAMPUS
Thinking about the ineffectiveness of the business presentations he had seen and buoyed by the positive feedback for his own presentation, Abela started researching presentation methods in January 2005. The professor says he wanted to prepare his CUA students to address the messy situation that awaited them in the business world: “I thought, ‘I don’t want to graduate yet more market researchers who are incapable of communicating effectively,’ so I had to figure out a way to change my Market Research course.”

Scouring the Internet, Abela found plenty of information on public speaking and PowerPoint how-to’s, but he saw nothing that he says “integrated the essentials” into one business presentation design. After two months of brainstorming about this, he developed the original version of Extreme Presentation.

Though simple for an audience to follow, Extreme Presentation is difficult to summarize because of its breadth — there are 13 prescribed stages, beginning with defining your presentation’s most important audience and ending with determining whether your talk was successful. The method addresses five components that every presentation should include: problem solving, storytelling, graphics, influence skills, and assessment of the presentation’s success.

Elaborating on the storytelling component, the professor says every business presentation should follow a continuous rhythm of tension and release, a pattern that has characterized good stories since the days of Aristotle. During a presentation, tension is introduced by addressing one of the company’s problems. Release comes via a solution. According to Abela, “A presenter can do this over and over so that the presentation becomes like one broad story encompassing many smaller stories — much like a James Bond movie.”

At the midway point of the spring 2005 semester, the professor taught his new methodology to his CUA Market Research class, curious to see how it would affect their classroom presentations. According to Abela, the response was amazing.

“I used to cringe at some of the presentations I got, which tended to be ugly and non-informative,” says the professor. By the end of the semester, however, Abela concluded that his students’ presentations had become better than the vast majority of those that are delivered in the business world.

THE SECRET GETS OUT
One of the students who benefited most from Abela’s new approach was senior Dana Losben, who applied it to her classroom presentation on ways to increase student usage of CUA’s Eugene I. Kane Student Health and Fitness Center.

“Dr. Abela was a favorite of all the students,” says Losben, now enrolled at the University of Baltimore School of Law. “Through Extreme Presentation, he taught me how to keep an audience focused by using story elements such as a journey, a Cinderella-type turnaround or even a tragedy.”

When Dana went home to New Jersey one weekend and told her mother, Nancy, about “the best class I ever sat through during my entire time at Catholic,” Mrs. Losben — a senior vice president at NeighborCare, who gives and oversees many presentations — became curious.

“She hooked me,” says Mrs. Losben, who studied a paper model of Abela’s design before asking the professor to conduct a workshop for her company’s sales managers and corporate trainers.

“Dr. Abela brought NeighborCare real enlightenment on presentation development,” continues Mrs. Losben, whose company now employs Extreme Presentation to teach its customers about recent radical changes in Medicare prescription benefits. “Audiences now hear our message with absolute clarity. It has changed the way we practice.”

After presenting his design at NeighborCare, the professor decided to lead Extreme Presentation workshops throughout the country during the summer. The daylong sessions reached senior-level executives of some of the most powerful companies in America.

BACK HOME AT CUA
Aside from its emphasis on Extreme Presentation, the professor’s CUA course on market research covers topics from the design of consumer surveys to the analysis of market data. Abela also reserves one day during the semester for what he calls a master class. In it, market research managers with the Washington, D.C.-based Marketing Leadership Council visit CUA and work with the students on research techniques.

The master class also gives some students an entrée into career networking. Previous sessions with these professionals have led one of Abela’s pupils to a summer internship and another to a full-time job with the Marketing Leadership Council.

Abela says he intends to continue bringing a critical eye to the way market research is taught: “Most of the textbooks out there incorporate 30-year-old ideas, but I think it’s important to stay multi-dimensional and cutting-edge.”

And above all … extreme.

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Revised: November 2005

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