I wasn’t sure what to title this post because there are many lessons to be learned from this story. I’ll just tell the story here and link to it in later posts as necessary. After Ashanthi’s comment about me being “amazingly patient and polite” I thought I would share yet another incident where I’m a little less ‘polite’ when I lose my patience… 
There have been a few situations in my life where it was not my role or position to say something. Often, I did anyway and in the end, everyone thanked me including the person whom I felt should have been the one to take action. I blogged about one such situation here and this next story happened just yesterday:
Yesterday was the final class of my Global IT management course and all 9 teams were to present their projects. Each team had a 30 minute time limit (which is quite long!) to present followed by a 10 minute Q&A period. Our team presented 3rd and we finished well within the 30 minutes.
One of the subsequent teams was presenting a project about GIS (Geological Information Systems). The project was quite interesting, but I will outline the problem(s) below:
Mistake#1: They were explaining a LOT of theory that all of us knew already. For example, I believe they showed like 3 or 4 SWOT diagrams. For the non-business people: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. They showed other charts and had points of things we learned in class that would apply to any project and didn’t add value to theirs in particular.
Mistake#2: They were making jokes and when no one laughed the 6 of them up front would giggle to themselves for a good 3 seconds. 3 seconds might not seem like long…but it’s an eternity if no one is laughing except you…
ULTIMATE Mistake#3: 1 and 2 are forgiveable; I don’t really care. BUT when a time limit has been set and you’re blatantly disregarding it, I get annoyed because now everyone’s time is being wasted. 40 minutes had already elapsed and the presentation didn’t show signs of coming to an end. I was shocked that the professor wasn’t saying anything while his assistant was even yawning. These guys knew that they were well over their time limit and didn’t pick up the pace at all…they just kept explaining every single detail on every slide.
- Yes?
- I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude…but are you guys almost finished?
- Well…
- Or are there some sections of this that you can skip?
- Well…ummmm….
- You’ve been going on for a REALLY long time now…maybe…can you just summarize some key points and wrap it up?
- Well, OK
He quickly flipped through another 5 or 6 slides without saying a word. Earlier, each slide was taking about 2-3 minutes; I couldn’t believe that these guys were potentially going to keep us there for another 10-20 minutes! Afterwards, I went over and told the team that I didn’t mean to be rude or disrespectful and they were all very understanding. One of the guys was telling me that he kept telling them to hurry up. A girl behind me, who I had never spoken to before, called my name and showed me that she had made a sign on an 8×11 paper that said (in big letters): “TIME IS UP!!!” LOL! I didn’t see it since she was behind me, but that just confirmed I wasn’t the only one…
The teacher explained that he didn’t say anything because last semester a team got upset at him for interrupting when they were overtime. Before the next team went up, he told the whole class what I told him: “Please keep your presentations within 30 minutes. Like my colleague here [pointing at me] said: ‘In the business world you’ll often only have 15 minutes and if you’re not finished, people don’t care. They stop listening. Time is money, they have other things to do.’ Please remember the time limit.” The assistant also came up, smiled and said “Thank you for your interruption.” Someone had to do it and unfortunately it had to be me again…
Before someone leaves a comment saying: “How would you like if that happened to you!?” Let me say: that wouldn’t happen to me; I stick to time. If you have 30 minutes, make sure all your key points come up within the first 10-15 minutes. Always be as concise as possible when presenting. It’s difficult to capture an audience’s attention for more than 15-20 minutes let alone 45. This reminds me of pastors who give 1 hour sermons…unless you’re EXTREMELY charismatic no one listens to someone blabbing for an hour.
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