How to Get Your Point Across in 30 Seconds or Less

This book is a solid must for everyone! It demonstrates simply how easy it is to lose someones attention whilst you try express your agenda, whether its to sell, talk in public or meetings, interviews whatever. If you want to be a successful communicator then read this book!

I was expecting (hoping) for something a bit new in this publication. I deal with highly technical matters in my day to day work and struggle to reduce what I need to communicate into a straight-forward concept to communicate to an audience without over-simplifying or trivialising the matter at hand.

What I hoped this would give me is strategies for understanding the level of my audience, and then methods for distilling out of my speech (letter, report, whatever) the truly relevant information, and then how to communicate that appropriately in a brief manner.

What we really have is an essay on why getting your point across is a good idea, and why doing it in 30 seconds is better. Preaching to the converted, the title would never have drawn me if I wasn't already sold on that idea.

The only aspect of 'how' dealt with is to "think about what you want to get out of the interaction, and focus on that without being sidetracked". Sadly, that is fairly obvious, the mechanics of achieving that are the challenge.

Examples are contrived and unrealistic and thus do not help to illustrate any points at all.

In conclusion; not much good, but probably of use to people who waffle incessantly and need the value of brevity explained.

It takes FOREVER for the speaker to hand over some relatively simple points. Having said that, I suspect that it's just the tape which has been over abbreviated and over-simplified. You might find it worth trying the book instead - I'm going to!