Flint's Blog

Real Leaders Don't Do PowerPoint

I just finished reading Real Leaders Don't Do PowerPoint: How to Sell Yourself and Your Ideas by  Christopher Witt.  I was expecting to read about how evil PowerPoint is and how it has turned everybody into generic presenters.  However, it really isn't an anti-PowerPoint book.  It's an extremely well written book about how to give a great, engaging presentation whether you're presenting to a small room or an auditorium full of people. 

The best takeaway that I think you can get from the book is that no two presenters are the same.  You're doing yourself and your audience a huge disservice if you try to model your presentation after another successful presenter.  You need to find out what works best for you based on your own personality traits.

There are a lot of other great tips that aren't buried in useless anecdotes like a lot of other business books. 

I like to think that I'm a fairly good presenter but after reading this book, I might need to reevaluate.

If you've ever sat through a presentation where the presenter is reading the bullets on his/her PowerPoint slides, or even worse, if you are that presenter, I would strongly recommend you give this book a read.

Post Office Cutbacks

We quietly received notice last week that the United States Postal Service (USPS) would no longer be  accepting mail from bulk mail processors on Saturdays in two of our locations (Central NJ and Chicago).  This wasn't a formal bulletin, it was sort of buried in the back of some other document and arrived less than a week prior to the USPS implementing the change.  This won't affect delivery of mail, just acceptance from large processors.

I blogged earlier this year (see here) about some changes that I thought might save the USPS some money and it's nice to see the USPS taking some actions.  However, I was a bit alarmed at how they sort of snuck this through.  Bulk mailers represent a huge revenue source for the USPS.  We prepare very "clean" mail that allows the USPS to do their job very efficiently.  We are likely the most profitable part of the USPS business (which after losing several billion last year, is saying something).  If we were to roll out a change to the Billtrust customer base that negatively affected a customer's business, you could be sure we would be as far out in front of the issue as possible.

Instead, the USPS gives their most profitable customers almost no notice and very little time to plan for the impact.  Not a great way to run a business.

Fortunately, we were able to come up with some contingency plans with some other USPS locations.  We are also about to open our fifth and sixth and print/mail facilities so the impact on our customers will be negligible.  Still, it would be nice for maybe a courtesy heads up.