SCENE: Not long ago, I attended a presentation by Peter Arvai, the co-founder and CEO of Prezi, a Flash-based app we use as often as we can as an alternative to PowerPoint. The presentation was attended by a mix of students, young professionals and educators, maybe 40 people in all.
Arvai’s presenation rambled all over the place. He seemed to have no one particular point he was driving at. Frequently, he’d turn his back to the audience, look up at his Prezi projected on a large screen, scratch his head, and navigate around the Prezi until he found the next thing he wanted to talk about. Sometimes he got a little lost as to where in the Prezi he could find what he was looking for.
On top of the seeming incoherence of his story, Arvai, as a Scandanavian by upbringing, isn’t what you’d call an animated personality type. His voice has a pleasant, sing-songy quality, like small waves lapping at a dock on a lake. His performance style doesn’t have that build-build-build-bada-bing! quality that TV packages into bites like Nabisco packages cookies.
Afterward, outside the room, I heard people panning the presentation. “Boring.” “You’d think he’d have it more together.” “I can’t believe that guy’s the CEO!”
The people who were disappointed were looking for a particular form or style from Arvai, and probably looking to be entertained for an hour by a showman, a pitchman, a visionary, a clown, or a pundit. None of that materialized, so waaaah! They were like children who didn’t get the toys they wanted for their birthdays.
These people, I think, missed the gift Arvai gave them: He showed himself learning! It was one of the most interesting and disarming games I’ve ever seen a CEO play in a presentation. To show the audience how one uses Prezi, he was willing to get himself lost in it.
In a totally unforced and improvisational way, Arvai showed how putting Prezi to best use means working with themes, chipping away and shaping them to a narrative, purposefully getting lost in the material so that you can find meaning in it, as if the information you put on the Prezi screen is a stone and your narrative is a sculpture.
I thought it was brilliant. Another thing I liked about his presentation is that it was conversational, which was good for the relatively small room we were in. Arvai showed that ‘always-on’ doesn’t have to mean always being the center of attention. You can be ‘always on’ if you step onto the stage as if a conversation were taking place before you got there and you’re joining it. That way of ‘always performing’ is more genuine and easier on the life of your batteries than if you have to crank up the voltage every time you step in front of a group of people to talk about your product.
Our friend Barbara Groth, CEO of the design company, Big Buddha Baba, put something on her Facebook profile earlier today that seems to applie to Arvai’s prezi:
“Whatever it is you’re seeking won’t come in the form you’re expecting.”
— Haruki Murakami