INTERVIEW MARK ROBINSON
YOU SHOULD LEARN HOW TO PRESENT Picture the last presentation you attended. What was it about? How did it make you feel? Were you inspired? If you’re a high-tech professional, the respective answers are probably – don’t know, bored and not in the least. Mark Robinson, senior software consultant at ASML through TMC, is out to change that. Jessica Vermeer
M
ark Robinson isn’t a natural presenter. “I was terrified of standing in front of a group. Hated it.” That was until he took a course called “Verbal mastery,” taught by Remco Claassen. “Remco was able to keep our attention from early in the morning until late in the evening for days in a row.” In that course, Mark learned all of Claassen’s techniques. It was an eye-opener for Mark. “I spend the next ten years applying all these techniques to keep people’s attention and my presentations kept
getting better,” he reminisces. In the meantime, he saw how his technical co-workers really struggled with speaking. “Not that they found it hard, just that the presentations were often so boring.”
ally read the text from the slides to the people. Mark was baffled. “These technical people are super smart. They don’t want people reading to them, they can read themselves. So what’s the added value of the presenter? Nothing.” As Mark walked past the company reception, an idea suddenly hit him. “I thought of a way to communicate the problem,” he says. He decided to take one of the best speeches of the 20th century and deliver it using the technical Powerpoint presentation format. “I could show how ridicu-
Reading party
So why are most presentations so mind-numbingly boring? Mark hit his boiling point in 2013. He had just attended a talk by a very senior technical manager. The manager had stood in front of a packed room. His slides were full of text and he liter-
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