Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

Presentation tip #1

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Posted 20 Dec 2011 — by Charles Martineau
Category Education, Presentation Tips, Presentations

I’ve seen many aca­d­e­mic pre­sen­ta­tion in the past and now many as a phd stu­dent and there are few (if not many) things that annoys the crap out of me about pre­sen­ta­tions. I’ve decided to start a new “sec­tion” on the site on how to improve your pre­sen­ta­tion skills. I am not the best pre­sen­ter in the world but I always want to con­tin­u­ously improve my skills. For those who wish to improve their pre­sen­ta­tion con­tent and deliv­ery, you may want to dras­ti­cally change every­thing you do or grad­u­ally improve step by step (cer­tainly for the risk-averse aca­d­e­mic envi­ron­ment). I sug­gest you to start with this sim­ple tip…Here’s tip #1:

Never use any pow­er­point or other soft­wares’ templates

(except for a sim­ple color back­ground like “gra­di­ent” in Keynote which I like to use)

Why? Because, for some rea­son, pre­sen­ters, like to fill in all the use­less com­po­nents of the tem­plate such as: slide num­ber, name of the author(s) at the bot­tom of every slides, and hav­ing the school (or com­pany) logo on all the slides! Also, tem­plates tend to come with fancy and unim­por­tant design. All this adds some noise to your visual aids! I have made a sam­ple pre­sen­ta­tion design that looks extremely famil­iar to what we see in academia:

Here’s what’s bad:

1) We have all seen this ter­ri­ble tem­plate. The color boxes are use­less. Why are there any boxes in the first place? That mid­dle cir­cle is point­less (in fact its often use for the slide number).

2) Hav­ing the slide num­ber at the bot­tom of each slide is again use­less. Pre­sen­ta­tions with slide num­ber (out of the total slide num­ber — e.g. 5/55) only allows the audi­ence to gauge how long there is left to the pain at sit­ting in front of some­one read­ing their slides. Even if the pre­sen­ter is good — what’s the point of slide num­bers anyways?

3) On the sec­ond slide, why the hell do pre­sen­ters like to put their name, their insti­tu­tion, and often the con­fer­ence name at the bot­tom of each slides! First, we all know the name of the presenter(s) and the insti­tu­tion from the title slide — if we don’t, we will refer to the paper that the author(s) is pre­sent­ing (the audi­ence nor­mally has a copy). At last, the peo­ple in the audi­ence know which con­fer­ence they are attend­ing. It is OK to men­tion it on the first slide but even that — the audi­ence hope­fully know where they are.

Get rid of the noise with sim­ple slides like these ones:

(imag­ine the intro­duc­tion slide with VERY FEW words)

Sim­ple no?

So… why I have decided to go into academia?

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Posted 15 Nov 2011 — by Charles Martineau
Category Education

I am often ask by my entourage why I have cho­sen a career in acad­e­mia. For some rea­son, my first answer tends be: “I am fas­ci­nated by nerds.” I like to read biogra­phies of aca­d­e­mic nerds, what strug­gles nerds went through in their aca­d­e­mic life, why some nerds are good at teach­ing and some or not, why some are weirds (we are all weird one way or the other), etc.… they are sim­ply fas­ci­nat­ing peo­ple to me. They often don’t get the respect that they deserve by soci­ety. I am also a nerd… since the day that Chuck D (from Pub­lic Enemy — one my favorite music group of all time) came to my uni­ver­sity when I was an under­grad to give a speech and said “be a nerd at what you do!” Gotcha Chuck!

Will my work be any good?

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Posted 11 May 2011 — by Charles Martineau
Category Education

I often hear stu­dents say­ing: “I won­der if my work is any good-I don’t know if it is ok…” con­cern­ing a paper that they are about to sub­mit to a pro­fes­sor. Over the past year, dur­ing my mas­ters, I real­ized one thing: You will never know if your work is good until you get your grade back (duh!). Then, I under­stood that we should focus only at increas­ing the prob­a­bil­i­ties (and not the cer­tainty) of doing good work. We can do so if we pay a spe­cial atten­tion at what makes a paper/thesis/work wrong or bad.

Sim­ply do a list of all the poten­tial things that you can imag­ine that can make your work bad and tackle each of those points. Hence, you are increas­ing the prob­a­bil­i­ties of mak­ing a good paper/work. It is eas­ier to focus on what is wrong than what is right.

Opting for a masters degree? Will you do a research or a supervised project?

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Posted 13 Apr 2011 — by Charles Martineau
Category Education, Research

There are more uni­ver­si­ties around the world that offers the chance for many to pur­sue their stud­ies via a Mas­tersdegree with two dis­tinc­tive path­ways: (1) aca­d­e­mic research and (2) super­vised project (i.e. doing an intern­ship some­where like in a com­pany with more courses). For this short blog post, I will argue why doing an aca­d­e­mic research is not as bad as you may think… in fact you can get a lot of prac­ti­cal (yes I said prac­ti­cal) skills.

In a dream world, stu­dents should do both: super­vised project plus research! But this is not the case for many universities.
So what are the prac­ti­cal skills you can develop from writ­ing a research in a aca­d­e­mic setting?
1. Train yours thoughts and argu­ments to be con­sis­tent and logical.
2. Become a bet­ter writer (per­son­ally, this was very ben­e­fi­cial for me)
3. No room for BS in your writ­ing — hence, learn to con­straint yourself
4. Learn to search, find, orga­nize, and con­cep­tu­al­ize infor­ma­tion (in this abun­dant world of information)
5. Learn to be inde­pen­dent and autonomous
6. Develop a sense of curiosity
And as a bonus:
7. Meet some famous pro­fes­sors and researchers from top schools and real­ize how dis­con­nected they are from real­ity haha­haha — this point (#7), not really practical!
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Why academia must ban standardized exams such as GMAT, GRE, LSAT, SAT, etc.

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Posted 05 Apr 2011 — by Charles Martineau
Category Education

Why should they? Because these par­tic­u­lar stan­dard­ized exams go against what I call the “fun­da­men­tal val­ues” of intel­li­gence: curios­ity, cre­ativ­ity, and originality.

Do you find any of these three val­ues in a stan­dard­ized exam such as the GMAT? No.

As said in Nas­sim Taleb lat­est book “The Bed of Pro­crustes”:

“I sus­pect that IQ, SAT, and school grades are test designed by nerds so they can get high scores in order to call each other intelligent”

It is not because you get a high score on a stan­dard­ized exam that you are intelligent…it sadly means that you have lost X amount time of study­ing for a point­less test. These tests do not test your intel­lec­tual capac­ity. You are only test­ing a test.

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Book talk: The Naked Presenter by Garr Reynolds – let’s hope for better presentations in this world!

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Posted 27 Feb 2011 — by Charles Martineau
Category Books, Education

(Full dis­claimer: Garr Reynolds, the author of the book “The Naked Pre­sen­ter”, was my pro­fes­sor when I stud­ied at

Kan­sai Gaidai Uni­ver­sity in 2007. I was blown away by how good this teacher was at teach­ing, shar­ing his knowl­edge, but more impor­tantly to make us hun­gry for curios­ity. Thus, some may say that I am not objec­tive when I rec­om­mend this book but I can’t see how any­one would dis­like this book either.)

Who’s Garr Reynolds?

Garr Reynolds is one of today’s top experts to con­sult when it comes to mak­ing pre­sen­ta­tions either as a researcher, busi­ness per­son, etc. We all had to go through a crappy expe­ri­ence at lis­ten­ing some­one speak­ing in front of an audi­ence using Pow­er­Point where the speaker reads the slides which are full of text (which no one reads) and where we don’t feel engage what­so­ever. Garr was a for­mer Man­ager of World­wide User Group Rela­tions at Apple Com­puter in Sil­i­con Val­ley. With Apple, Garr worked with user groups (brand com­mu­ni­ties) in the U.S. and Japan and deliv­ered pre­sen­ta­tions, soft­ware demos, and keynote addresses to the firm’s most loyal cus­tomers. It is then that he found is love to present but also how to present well! He noticed that in the busi­ness world, the qual­ity of pre­sen­ta­tions was just sim­ply quite pathetic!

Garr’s love for pre­sen­ta­tion led him to cre­ate a web­site called Pre­sen­ta­tion Zen (PZ). At PZ, Garr teaches his insights and tips on how to deliver pre­sen­ta­tions with a touch of Zen and Japan­ese cul­ture. Garr saw in the study of Zen many lessons that we should apply to the world of pre­sen­ta­tions. His web­site became the most pop­u­lar web­site on pre­sen­ta­tion and decided to write a book called Pre­sen­ta­tion Zen. This book became a best seller and one of the top busi­ness books of Ama­zon in 2008. His first book was an all-around book on how to deliver good pre­sen­ta­tions and go beyond Pow­er­Point with a touch of Zen.

His sec­ond book, Pre­sen­ta­tion Zen Design, which was released in 2009 focused specif­i­cally on how to cre­ate bet­ter designed pre­sen­ta­tions. He shares his lessons on design­ing effec­tive pre­sen­ta­tions that con­tain text, graphs, color, images, and video.

His lat­est book which was just released is called The Naked Pre­sen­ter. That is the book I will briefly write about and seri­ously recommend.

The Naked Pre­sen­ter: Deliv­er­ing Pow­er­ful Pre­sen­ta­tions With or With­out Slides – A must for any­one who speaks in front of an audience

Garr’s lat­est book aims at teach­ing pre­sen­ters how to com­mu­ni­cate the essence of your mes­sage by strip­ping away all that is unnec­es­sary (i.e. point­less slides, text, etc.) and embrac­ing the ideas of sim­plic­ity, clar­ity, hon­esty, integrity and most impor­tantly PASSION through your “naked­ness” or “nat­u­ral­ness”. This book teaches the core of pre­sen­ta­tions – ten (plus one extra) deliv­ery prin­ci­ples that begin with the let­ter P. They are: Prepa­ra­tion, Punch, Pres­ence, Pro­jec­tion, Pas­sion, Prox­im­ity, Play, Pace, Par­tic­i­pa­tion, and Power.

Why Naked?

Taken from the con­cept of Japan­ese pub­lic bath called Onsen (温泉  in Japan­ese) where every­one who is in the bath is naked, Garr makes a link on how Japan­ese bath can make you more pre­pared to make bet­ter pre­sen­ta­tion of your core mes­sage. As in pub­lic bath, pre­sen­ters should be naked: remov­ing the unnec­es­sary and expose what is most impor­tant. The ten Ps teaches you how to be naked.

Quick insights on some of the ten Ps – prepa­ra­tion, punch, and Pas­sion.

Prepa­ra­tion: At school, I see stu­dents prepar­ing their pre­sen­ta­tions the night before the pre­sen­ta­tion day…what the hell? No won­der there is so many crappy pre­sen­ta­tions out there. It takes time to pre­pare a good pre­sen­ta­tion. Hence, the first P takes a big part of the book. It teaches how to find time to pre­pare you pre­sen­ta­tion, the neces­sity to under­stand your audi­ence prior your pre­sen­ta­tion and the power of story (sto­ries is what makes pre­sen­ta­tion sticks in people’s mind). Good prepa­ra­tion gives you the chance to remove the unnec­es­sary of your core message.

Punch: To make your core mes­sage stand out it needs to PUNCH in the state of people’s mind. For instance, does your core mes­sage chal­lenges con­ven­tional assump­tions? Is it in any­way per­sonal? You will find that when you core mes­sage as a PUNCH fea­ture, build­ing a story around your core mes­sage becomes eas­ier, hence it makes you more open to the audi­ence and eas­ier to grab people’s attention.

Pas­sion: One way to show your true naked­ness is by show­ing your emo­tions through pas­sion! When you are pas­sion­ate by your work, project, prod­uct, and etc there is no way that you shouldn’t demon­strate that pas­sion to your audi­ence. By doing so, you’re engag­ing your audi­ence in your pre­sen­ta­tion (as long as you make them feel why they should also be pas­sion­ate). Grow­ing as a kid, it was easy to go in front of the class and just be joy­ful and pas­sion­ate but for some sad rea­son, grown-up pre­sen­ta­tions are always too seri­ous. We demand seri­ous pre­sen­ta­tions — but why? This kills the vibe for cre­ativ­ity and engage­ment. The book teaches you how to express your pas­sion through professionalism.

Pre­sen­ta­tions is all about hav­ing conversations

Hav­ing Garr as a teacher, read­ing is blog and his two pre­vi­ous book reli­giously, and always pay­ing atten­tion to all the great pre­sen­ta­tions that you find on the web, is lat­est book made me real­ized some­thing that I never really noticed or taken seri­ously. When you present, you are sim­ply hav­ing a dis­cus­sion or con­ver­sa­tion. For some rea­son, my mind always clas­si­fied pre­sen­ta­tions and con­ver­sa­tions in two sep­a­rate groups. But this is not the case! Once you real­ize inside your mind that you are sim­ply hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with your audi­ence, it is much eas­ier to express your true self and be authen­tic because you remove the bar­ri­ers to for­mal­ity. As said by the author:

“Just like a good con­ver­sa­tion­al­ist, a pre­sen­ter with good pres­ence will con­nect with you on some level and demon­strate with sin­cer­ity that, at least for the moment, he or she does not wish to be any­where else than right there hav­ing a dia­logue with you.”

Fol­low the Pre­sen­ta­tion Zen movement

I highly sug­gest every­one to fol­low Garr’s blog Pre­sen­ta­tion Zen. This will make you a much bet­ter pre­sen­ter on a weekly basis. You will be hooked on the web­site and you will turn your­self to Garr’s three books. By doing so, we will live in a much bet­ter world where there will be bet­ter pre­sen­ta­tions because there is no such thing as bor­ing knowl­edge, only bor­ing presentations.

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Why I would (only) be tempted to do a PhD

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Posted 18 Feb 2011 — by Charles Martineau
Category Business organization, Education, Finance

The impact of Karl Popper

By April this year, I will have com­pleted my Mas­ters (M.Sc.) in Inter­na­tional Busi­ness with a spe­cial­iza­tion in Finance. Hence, I must find what I want to do next. Of course I want to find work, but I have to admit that I am tempted to do a PhD. Why? First, I like research. It can be really fun when you have an intel­lec­tual curios­ity. My research has been mostly in finance but my lat­est research and Master’s the­sis also involved pol­i­tics and eco­nom­ics. Also, both my super­vi­sors and I plan to pub­lish this research in a good jour­nal. Should I con­tinue in this field of study through a PhD? Not really. In the past two years I have found the field of research that I am truly pas­sion­ate about, that is: method­ol­ogy in social sci­ence from the Karl Pop­per’s per­spec­tive which nav­i­gates around the idea of piece­meal engi­neer­ing. Apply­ing Popper’s ideas to the busi­ness field and finance would be quite intrigu­ing. Fred­erich Hayek did it (vol­un­tary and invol­un­tary) to eco­nom­ics and George Soros, a big fan and a stu­dent of Pop­per, devel­oped its finan­cial spec­u­la­tive tac­tics around Popper’s philo­soph­i­cal teaching.

Another inter­est: frac­tals and chaos theory

Every time I can put my hands on a book or read­ings on frac­tals and chaos the­ory I can’t ignore it. I am not a math­e­mati­cian and I must face the fact that to truly grasp the under­stand­ing of frac­tal and chaos, if I am not mis­taken, I have no choice but to be really good in math. Nonethe­less, I under­stand the con­cepts of both chaos and frac­tals and I would love to see how both can be imple­mented in the field of social sci­ence with a par­tic­u­lar atten­tion to busi­ness orga­ni­za­tion. If a sim­ple equa­tion with no ran­dom­ness can lead to chaos, imag­ine when a busi­ness lead­ers when it tries to order their busi­ness strate­gies and orga­ni­za­tion to achieve its goal in the sim­plest mech­a­nism to evade com­plex­ity! Chaos within a firm is always pos­si­ble. Hence, I don’t ques­tion how a busi­ness leader can avoid chaos (since we can’t put our fin­ger on the true cause of chaos) but how to limit chaotic con­se­quences and decrease its occurrence.

I guess I’ll move on…to some­thing new

Can I find some school or depart­ment that does this kind of research? I haven’t found any…yet!

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About reading…

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Posted 27 Dec 2010 — by Charles Martineau
Category Books, Education

Just find time to read!

I just read an “old” blog post (Nov.2010) by Mitch Joel — the man being Twist Image (a mar­ket­ing con­sult­ing firm located in Mon­treal) and author of Six Pix­els of Sep­a­ra­tion on how read­ing books is such a valu­able asset to the human mind and cre­ativ­ity. When he (and you may include me) talk about read­ing we don’t mean news­pa­pers or mag­a­zines. Yes they are impor­tant assets to under­stand to some “degree” what goes on all around the world but you must read books that goes deep in long thoughts. It takes more time but how more valu­able! I use to read the Econ­o­mist mag­a­zine inside out (a great mag­a­zine) but read­ing bits of every­thing with­out going in depth left me on my appetite. I quickly real­ize that I should spend more time read­ing books that go deep in thoughts and argu­ments. Some fic­tion books are also great too to develop a deeper under­stand­ing of many sub­jects such as Ayn Rand — Atlas Shrugged on economics.

In its blog post, Mitch Joel describes how much he likes read­ing and how much he feels that he never reads enough despite the fact that he reads all the time. Well I feel the same. Species like me and Mitch Joel who reads all the time have a thirst of knowl­edge that is inde­scrib­able. We feel that no mat­ter how much knowl­edge­able we can get we always remain igno­rant. What mat­ters is not what we have read but what we haven’t yet read! This thought might suck for you but seri­ously is what keeps us going. We will die in this state of mind but that’s alright. Those who read a lot increases the chances to be suc­cess­ful in life.

The role of pro­fes­sors on influ­enc­ing kids on reading…

When I was a kid I hated to read books until my Eng­lish pro­fes­sor in grade 10 made me read a fic­tion book involv­ing some mafia wars and all sud­denly I real­ize that read­ing can be quite enter­tain­ing. From that time I just start­ing to read a lit­tle then over the years the num­ber of books I read increased expo­nen­tially (well almost!).

I met a young high school pro­fes­sor not long ago and told me a lit­tle trick on how to get kids hook on read­ing. He says to stu­dents that “any­thing can be read”. For instance, there is a kid in his class who loves hockey but hates read­ing. So the pro­fes­sor asked the stu­dent who was is favorite hockey player and he answered Wayne Gret­zky. The pro­fes­sor went to the library and got him the biog­ra­phy of Wayne Gret­zky and lent it to the kid. Guess what? The stu­dent read the book with pas­sion and then started to read other books on hockey. Now, some might argue hockey books may not be what is con­sid­ered the deep­est intel­lec­tual and cre­ative read­ing but it is a start! That is what is impor­tant. [side note: for those who thinks read­ing books on hockey do not have some “intel­lec­tual” assets..you should read Ken Dry­den — The Game]

The rea­son why I have a sec­tion books / aca­d­e­mic papers is to increase the inter­est of my friends and oth­ers on read­ing! I can promise you some­thing, once you read any book in my list you’ll want to read more and more…Or sim­ply go to the library and walk around and just look at books! I can promise you that a book will grab you interest.

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