interesting presentations - how to survive having the wrong powerpoint slides

Today I gave two presentations for our starting Executive MBA students. Both of the groups I spoke to were a great audience, but the second presentation for the GDMs went much better than the first, simply because I had the right powerpoint slides for that one! For the first presentation, I found myself staring at the slides for something I had done back in January. Not a fun moment. I decided that the only thing I could do was to do an ad lib mashup between the slides on the screen and the notes I had in front of me. Needless to say, it was not the most polished presentation which I have ever done in my life.

I'm posting the slides of the correct presentation here for a little while, because somebody in the second group requested this and I wanted to make my intended presentation available to the first group.

[4 September 2006 update: To conserve bandwidth, I have removed the link to the powerpoint slides, but if you're interested, drop me an email (my address is in the questions and answers post)]

This may seem like a cautionary tale against relying on things like powerpoint slides. All I can say is that sometimes people do things a certain way because that's what they chose to do. Other times it's not like that and certain formats are just expected.