Nicholas Barry

Being effective and accountable requires that you be able to control your environment, and this sometimes means you have to manage your peers (or your boss) to make sure you get what you need.

I'm fortunate because my peers are all responsible, talented people who do good work. I know I can rely on them. Despite this, I still sometimes need to manage them a little bit to make sure I can deliver on my commitments. They manage me a bit, as well, if I haven't gotten back to them about something they need.

For example, I keep very good track of which response letters I've sent to Karen for review. If I haven't heard back on something for several days, I'll drop in her office and check up on it. I tell my interns to do the same thing with me - if they haven't heard back about a letter they sent to me, they should ask me what's going on with it, to make sure I haven't misplaced it or forgotten it.

The important thing, in my mind, is to keep track of what you depend on others for (whether those "others" are your subordinates, colleagues, or bosses). Hold them accountable to what they have committed to delivering to you. Do it in a friendly way, but let them know that you rely on them to accomplish your own tasks on time.

I hate Powerpoint. Do you hate Powerpoint? Almost everyone I know hates it. Normally I don't write about technology stuff here, but this is important, because so many people give mind-numbingly boring presentations using Powerpoint.

I was recently at a conference, and was blown away by several presentations I watched by two presenters. I asked one of them afterward, and she told me she had used the web service called Prezi to produce the presentations. Below is the first presentation I made using Prezi. Without the benefit of our narration, you may not get much content out of the presentation, but you can see how the presentation looks and feels.

What makes Prezi amazing is two things, in my mind. First, it uses a completely different paradigm from Powerpoint. Prezi is not based on slides, and does not force you to chop up complex ideas into slide-sized pieces. It also doesn't force you to shoehorn a nonlinear idea into a linear format. The way it accomplishes this is through a completely different, non-slide paradigm. Instead, it provides you with a blank, endless canvas on which to formulate ideas and draw diagrams. You create a presentation by choosing a path through the canvas. This makes it easy to create a narrative that doubles back on itself, returns to earlier points, and shows hierarchical and interrelated ideas.

The second thing that makes Prezi amazing is its professional look and feel when presenting. When you create a path throughout your canvas, Prezi automatically zooms and rotates the view as necessary to focus on whatever you want to show your audience. The result is a wonderfully polished presentation. It takes much less effort to create a beautiful presentation than it would with Powerpoint.

Because of the ease of creating engaging presentations that don't oversimplify complicated issues, I would love to see more people using this web service. Try it out!