Walking for meetings - analysis of a Nilofer Merchant presentation (0)

Estonian Business School
ANALYSIS OF A PRESENTATION
Home assignment
Tallinn 2015
For the home assignment we had to choose one presentation from Ted.com. I chose about a 4 minute presentation by Nilofer Merchant on the following topic: “Got a meeting? Take a walk ”. The main reason for choosing this presentation was that I had read Steve Jobs's biographical book and there he talked how he liked to go for a walk when having a meeting and therefore, I thought it would be a good idea to get to know a bit more about something that I already know about. Also, I think that in the future, it pays off to know some easy tricks about how to make your meetings more interesting , more memorable and more healthier.
Last thing mentioned in the previous paragraph is nowadays in my opinion, one of the hottest topics and we can see it in the headlines on a daily basis . I am quite sure that people understand how important it is to take care of your health, but I in my opinion the methods offered in the media are not simple enough for people to start using them . By that I mean the ways are not that common to us and they would work better if we did not have to put so much effort into picking it up. And that is the part where comes Ms Merchant and gives us easy tips that we can use every day.
The stage is empty and suddenly the lights are turned on. There she is – Nilofer Merchant. She is a woman who established a rapport with the audience by telling a short story about a thing that is causing us more health issues and deaths than cars or Internet . This problem is called sitting.
I have to say that in my opinion her whole presentation was just like a tale, given by a relatively short and easily understandable sentences with personal examples. To make people follow her talk about the issue , she compared sitting to smoking and I think I am not the only one who knows that smoking is really bad and completely messes up your life, so it was a very good way to force people to think about their habits.
Probably her objective was to make people aware of our everyday lives that are lacking of exercises and to give them some solutions with what will accompany thinking outside the box and better life. To be more suitable for people with auditory modality she fed them numerous facts with numbers . For example: “nowadays people are sitting 9,3 hours per day which is more than we sleep at 7,7 hours per day” and lack of physical activity causes 10% of all the cancers. Her whole presentation was very informative and at the same time shocking.
Although her use of words was excellent and I do not have anything negative to say about her presentation, I still think she should have had some pictures or maybe a crooked backbone with her on the stage because then people who have visual modality would have understood her better and it also would have emphasized the seriousness of the problem.
Furthermore, in my opinion she should have moved more due to the fact that the stage was huge and at the moment she did not fill it up. I might be mistaken but I think it had been a good idea to walk during the time of presentation because then her moves would have also talked for themselves. Despite that her hand gestures were just perfect and she did not seem nervous.
To sum up the whole presentation she used some funny words and pointed at her lower back as in the beginning of the presentation. This was used to make people more lively and to let them know that the presentation is about to end. Also she encouraged the audience to move more and told that her life quality has increased greatly due to moving and having meetings while walking. In addition , she used a rhyme to make sure that her message is said out loud and clear - “walk and talk, walk and talk”. I think she reached the goal with her rhyme and whole presentation. At least I started to think differently after listening to her presentation.