It seems like we live in a PowerPoint world these days. As a provider of financial services solutions, my day is filled with meeting after meeting and presentation after presentation. The vast majority of these meetings are over the phone - especially for those 'first' appointments.
And of course, the medium of choice is our old friend PPT. Couple that with WebEx - and you've got yourself a meeting! It is from there that it is all downhill. After spending hours and sometimes days crafting this masterpiece - the meeting kicks off and jumps right to the AGENDA. From there, you jump into the next slide, the next and so on.
All the while, your audience is on the other end and you have no earthly idea what is happening. Are they sleeping, are they listening or are they busy catching up on their last week of emails. I don't know. I do try to periodically check in and ask if there are any questions. Sometimes that gives you a clue, when there is about a 10 second pause, and then: "Sorry - I had you on mute." Or even better yet, when they put you on hold and they have some lovely music playing in the background.
When they are engaged and asking questions, it is more often than not that these questions lead me to jump past slides or abandon the carefully crafted deck all together.
Because of this - I avoid PPT at all costs. Sometimes it is the necessary evil - especially when you have a large audience and you have information that needs to be on the printed page. However, more often that not, the carefully crafted deck is useless and a complete waste of time.
Especially when you are on a first appointment and your job is not to present your latest gadget, but to listen and discover. I can't solve a problem if I don't know what the problem is or they do not understand yet what their problem might be.
To me, PPT has become a crutch for verbal vomiting and self adulation and comes at the expense of valuable dialogue. I will be speaking at a conference in October, and of course the first thing they did was send me instructions about when and how to upload my PPT. I wonder what they are going to think when I say "I don't have one".
Here's a recent blog on the best and worst of PowerPoint.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8213901.stm
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Latest Threat
Last week we came across another fraud activity that I thought I would share. I was speaking at a conference last week and there was some discussion about one of the latest threats related to altering of a person's credit report. Not exactly new, but renewed.
The scam is as follows. The credit bureaus, by law, have to remove delinquent information from a consumer's credit report within 4 days of receipt of a valid affidavit of identity theft from law enforcement. Once the bureau has the form and the accounts that should be 'sanitized', they then have 4 days to remove.
Makes sense if, indeed, there was identity theft present. However, this is not always the case. The bureaus are finding that many of these affidavits are counterfeit or fictitious. In fact, they went on to describe that they are getting hit particularly hard in the Southern California area and that many suspected reports tend to all have Armenian surnames.
They then went on to describe how there are a bunch of credit repair companies charging hundreds and thousands of dollars to clear a consumer credit report. This is how they are clearing.
Flash forward 24 hours. As I boarded my plane back to Minnesota - I brought up a data study for a prospect - hoping to see if we could help them identify a particular fraud ring they were seeing. At first - the frauds that we analyzed did not seem to out of the ordinary. However, at second glance, we realized that they were all Armenina surnames out of..... you guessed it - Souther California.
This one is pretty scary. Scary - because they all tended to be verified, have good credit, no real fraud characteristics, etc.... Once that credit report has been 'sanitized', they are free to resume roaming and take everyone to the cleaners.
I am sure that once they steal their next batch of money, they just return to their 'buddy', re-sanitize and do it again.
Are our credit granting systems under attack? Is this a pre-cursor of things to come?
A.E>>>
The scam is as follows. The credit bureaus, by law, have to remove delinquent information from a consumer's credit report within 4 days of receipt of a valid affidavit of identity theft from law enforcement. Once the bureau has the form and the accounts that should be 'sanitized', they then have 4 days to remove.
Makes sense if, indeed, there was identity theft present. However, this is not always the case. The bureaus are finding that many of these affidavits are counterfeit or fictitious. In fact, they went on to describe that they are getting hit particularly hard in the Southern California area and that many suspected reports tend to all have Armenian surnames.
They then went on to describe how there are a bunch of credit repair companies charging hundreds and thousands of dollars to clear a consumer credit report. This is how they are clearing.
Flash forward 24 hours. As I boarded my plane back to Minnesota - I brought up a data study for a prospect - hoping to see if we could help them identify a particular fraud ring they were seeing. At first - the frauds that we analyzed did not seem to out of the ordinary. However, at second glance, we realized that they were all Armenina surnames out of..... you guessed it - Souther California.
This one is pretty scary. Scary - because they all tended to be verified, have good credit, no real fraud characteristics, etc.... Once that credit report has been 'sanitized', they are free to resume roaming and take everyone to the cleaners.
I am sure that once they steal their next batch of money, they just return to their 'buddy', re-sanitize and do it again.
Are our credit granting systems under attack? Is this a pre-cursor of things to come?
A.E>>>
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