Good example of Effective Use of Agenda

I think that almost every presentation can benefit from using a clear agenda. It gives you as the presenter a structure to your message and helps the audience understand your message easier (according to research done by Prof. Richard Meyer). Most agenda are a text list of topics and each time you switch to a new topic you use a title formatted slide to introduce that topic area. And in many cases this is very effective. But you may want to consider using a graphical agenda slide that shows the topic areas in graphical format. A great example of using a graphical agenda slide is in a presentation from this past summer by Kevin Turner, COO of Microsoft. In his presentation that you can download or view at http://www.microsoft.com/msft/speech/FY06/TurnerFAM2006.mspx , he uses a five tier graphic to show the five topic areas he will talk about. Each time he starts a new topic, he comes back to the graphic with only the upcoming topic area highlighted and the other areas muted. This is effective because it clearly shows what he will be talking about next and is visually more appealing than a simple text list. Think about a graphic that would work as your next agenda and use it to increase the visual appeal while keeping the structure clear.