Page 188 - The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience by Carmine Gallo
P. 188

MASTER STAGE PRESENCE   169



             STEVE’S WORDS                      STEVE’S GESTURES
             “It is the most incredible product we   Picks up computer and
             have ever made.”                   opens it

             “The new seventeen-inch PowerBook. It’s   Holds up computer to show
             amazing. Look at that screen.”     screen

             “Look at how thin it is. Isn’t it incredible?   Shuts computer and holds
             It’s beautiful, too.”              it up
             “This is clearly the most advanced   Smiles and looks directly at
             notebook computer ever made on the   audience
             planet. Our competitors haven’t even
             caught up with what we introduced two
             years ago; I don’t know what they’re
             going to do about this.”



             put his hands into his pockets and proceeded to deliver his com-
             ments in a low-key monotone. Worst of all, he pulled note cards
             out of his jacket pocket and started reading from them word for
             word. As a result, Sigman’s delivery became more halting, and
             he lost all eye contact with the audience. He continued for six
             long minutes that seemed like thirty. Observers were fidgeting,
             waiting for Jobs to return.
                A post on CNN’s international blog read: “Sigman . . . read
             stiffly from a script, pausing awkwardly to consult notes. By
             contrast, the silver-tongued Jobs wore his trademark black tur-
             tleneck and faded blue jeans . . . Jobs is one of the best showmen
             in corporate America, rarely glancing at scripts and quick with
             off-the-cuff jokes.” Bloggers were relentless during Sigman’s talk.
             Among the comments: “Who’s Mr. Note Card?”; “Blah, blah,
             blah, and blah”; “Painfully bad”; and “A snoozer.”
                Sigman left AT&T that same year. Macworld.com wrote:
             “Sigman is perhaps best remembered by Apple fans as completely
             negating Jobs’s Reality Distortion Field in an incident which left
             almost half of the entire keynote audience sound asleep. He has
             been sentenced to a cruel afterlife of being the butt of roughly
             99 percent of Scott Bourne’s jokes [Bourne is a Mac pundit and
             podcaster] . . . And what will Stan do in retirement? Word is he’s
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