My biggest pet peeve is boring nonprofit and foundation staff. Terrible PowerPoint presentations from someone from the social sector make me want to scream out “you have the most powerful and emotionally wrenching material out there and all you could come up with is this dry, picture-less, graph-filled PowerPoint about your 10 year strategic plan?!” People make award winning movies about the work that we do everyday, Al Gore’s PowerPoint won him the Nobel Peace Prize, and you can’t keep your staff and board members awake for a ten minute presentation? You should be ashamed of yourself or at least be willing to admit that there is a problem. Luckily there is help out there when we get PowerPoint impaired and forget that the work that we do is about telling stories about the real people that we are helping. Here are some of my favorites:
Andy Goodman- A great communicator who has a fabulous and free monthly newsletter about how to get your messages across.
Cliff Atkinson- His book Beyond Bullet Points reminded me that Power Point is supposed to be a tool to get messages across, not a barrier to real communication.
Chip and Dan Heath- Made to Stick was one of my favorite books this year because it teaches you how to tell effective stories that create results.

Who would you add to this list of communication gurus that are helping us change the world one awake board room at a time?