Someone showed me another Steve Ballmer stage moment, in which the big guy cavorts in the sweatiest shirt since Elvis played Hawaii.

Watching it gave me terrible flashbacks to an incident long ago, and prompts the question: what’s the worst presentation you’ve ever done?

We’ve all had them. The speeches where you just want to flee the stage, run to the car park, drive until you’re deep in the forest, and stay there for the rest of your life, living off beetles and wood fungus, safe in the knowledge you’ll never run into anyone who was in the audience that day.

Mine was a speech at an interstate product launch. The day started with preparations for a pre-dawn flight. Stumbling around in the dark I forgot, for the very first time in my business life, to put on deodorant.

Sitting on the plane, I thought: hey, how bad can this be? Maybe deodorant isn’t really necessary, just one of those things that the international hygiene marketing conspiracy has thrust upon us in the last hundred years. After all, the term ‘B.O’ was coined by an ad writer just like me, creating a problem that hadn’t previously existed, to sell more Lifebuoy soap.

Mister Overconfidence Comes To Town

I got to my destination – hmm, warm weather here – and went to the venue for a rehearsal. I’d had a run of good presentations in the previous month, and was full of misplaced, up-and-coming-executive overconfidence. I figured I’d be able to wing it with the new material.

Show time. I stepped up to the lectern with my written notes. The house lights went down to black, for this was the era of weak projectors, and the lectern spotlights arced up. The reading lamp on the lectern? Not there. I couldn’t read a bloody thing.

The armpits went into peak flow. Twin tsunamis of clammy sweat fanned out across my nicely pressed shirt. My mouth filled with some sort of internally-generated tongue anaesthetic. I stared at the audience. They stared at me.

Quick, tell them a story, I thought. I launched into an anecdote. A tried and true, ‘break glass in case of emergency’ story that had never failed to get things off to a good start in other cities.

But I wasn’t in those cities, was I?

You’re Not From Round Here, Are You Boy?

Since then, years of experience has taught me that this is the town where humor goes to die. They hate any attempts at levity. You know the Chinese entombed soldiers that tour the museums of the world? That’s what the audience felt like. Neat rows as far as the eye could see, still, cold, stony. All eyes fixed on a point somewhere on the wall behind you.

Solid gold, guaranteed audience pleasing stories sailed past them untouched and went ‘splat’ against the back wall. I soldiered on, knowing that at least I had a big video finale. A pre-shot interactive thing where I appeared on the screen looking down at the lectern, so I could have a conversation with a less-sweaty version of myself. That would pull the whole show together.

Too Tricky For My Own Good

Or would have, had the under-rehearsed AV guy not started the tape in completely the wrong place, leaving me delivering lines that made no sense whatsoever, like some piece of abstract performance art.

Did I mention that this was a presentation on how to do better presentations?

Any questions? No, just a deep-space vacuum silence.  They’d moved from indifference to outright hatred.

Following me was a presenter from a competitor company, a local guy. He made a few unsubtle jibes about out-of-towners coming in and thinking they could teach the locals a thing or two. Let me assure you, the audience lapped that up.

Internal and External Drowning of Sorrows

Drinking the pain away at a nearby restaurant before the flight home, I heard the sound of sliding shoe leather and ominous clinking. I turned to face the stumbling waitress as she tipped a full tray of beers all over me.

People on the flight home quietly asked to be moved to another seat, rather than sit near the crazy-looking man in the window seat, his suit reeking of BO and beer.

“Mummy, does that man have a mental illness?”

Lessons From All This

1.    You need a major presentation trauma every so often to remind you to be better prepared.
2.    Deodorant is not a consumerism conspiracy, it is a miracle product and we should give thanks for its existence.
3.    No one died. Even when your worst fears become reality, it’ll all blow over and nobody will remember it except you.

The effects of global warming go to the highest levels of power. As things heat up, conditions become more jungle-like. And where there’s jungle, there’s monkey colony behavior, particularly among leaders of countries and companies.

Like displays of physical prowess from alpha warrior monkeys to warn off up-and-coming males.

Or making a very public display of mating with the most desirable females.

And then there’s this.

Steve Ballmer and his crazy on-stage monkey dances have attracted a lot of media attention and on-line ridicule.

But when you consider Ballmer’s situation, his approach makes a lot of sense.

Following Up Bill

Taking over from Bill Gates is a difficult follow-up act. There has been a lot of presentation analysis of Gates, usually as a direct comparison to Steve Jobs, focusing on his crowded slides and his Kermit-y vocal tones. I think this criticism missed the point of what Gates was: the king of the developers.

I worked on some of his roadshows in the 90’s, where he’d fly into town and do six or seven hour-long presentations in a day, to wildly differing audiences – clients, staff, government, hard-core coders. Everyone would try to catch him out with some obscure question about code compatibility, and he’d answer all of them with a level of detail that suggested he’d been working on nothing but that issue for the last month, rather than driving a global corporation.

His whole persona underlined the fact that, whatever his motivations, he was brainier than anyone else and that’s a quality you want in a software guy.

Stepping Into the Buzz Aldrin Role

Then in comes Ballmer. He could so easily become a Similar-But-Not-As-Good Guy, like the one that took over from Steve Jobs on the Apple speeches. Whatever his name is.

Rather than going for Gates-Lite, Ballmer has carved out a distinctive entity for himself, by working to his own strengths.

He’s enthusiastic, energetic and outspoken. Rather than try to tone it down like a regular CEO with conservative speech advisors, he’s turned it up to 11.

And he’s a big, dominant-looking guy. If he had a Gates physique, the monkey dance and the teeth-baring would look weird and creepy, like Tom Cruise on the Oprah couch. But the antics really suit Ballmer’s size and shape. His stage moves remind you of a scene from Jungle Book.

Sometimes Mad Is Good

Sometimes the possibility of mild insanity is a good thing in a leader, though Ballmer is clearly less mad than his stage persona. I bet the Microsoft staff appreciate having a fundamentalist warrior at the helm, confiscating audience iPhones and howling threats at the competitors. These are the leaders you follow, because they’re on a mission, and if that involves building a pyramid of competitors’ skulls in the lobby, all the better.

The unpredictability factor also helps keep the audience interest up. Most audiences can tell you what the average CEO will say before they say it. “These are challenging times. We must all work smarter, not harder. We shall be rolling out some exciting new initiatives. We are all one team. Etc.”

Not Steve. Just as decades of audiences went to see Ozzy Osbourne just to see if he’d bite the head off a bat again, Ballmer audiences know they could be just a moment away from an outburst that will melt Youtube’s servers. That’s a big incentive to make people turn up, and pay attention.

And it’s worked. The fact that we even know his name via mainstream media is a major endorsement of his communication strategy.

You go, Ballmer! Ignore the critics and keep it simian!