One Bucket at a Time

“The central theme of this book that a presentation should be a conversation is ingenious. Humans have evolved for hundreds of thousands of years to communicate by conversation. We are mentally structured to do so.


"For anyone seeking to set themselves and their ideas apart, this book is well worth the read. Eric Bergman’s techniques are a window to the future of this important human activity.”


—John Sweller, PhD, Emeritus Professor of Education, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

To be truly successful, presentations have to be both meaningful and memorable. The presenter has to have something meaningful to say to that specific audience at that moment in time. And the presentation has to be delivered in a memorable way.

One Bucket at a Time is the key to developing and delivering presentations that are meaningful to the audience and memorable in their message.

Author Eric Bergman takes readers on a journey through the human mind, focusing on how to structure and deliver presentations that make it easy for those listening to actually listen. His premise is simple: The only reason for bringing people together in any form of speech or presentation is to listen to someone share something of value. There can be a presentation without slides, but if there is no speaker, lecturer or presenter, there simply cannot be a speech, lecture or presentation.

If the audience is reading, writing, texting, looking at slides, scanning their social media feed, sending an e-mail or reading a document, they cannot be listening. And, ultimately, if they’re not listening, what on earth is the point?

One Bucket at a Time focuses on presentations from the audience's point of view which, truly, is the only perspective that counts. How does the audience, as a collective group of individuals, process what someone else is saying? Using an analogy of a tank, bucket and trough, Bergman outlines exactly how information best travels from sender to receiver if the goal is to engage the audience and have ideas remembered.

Using a combination of leading research and stories gathered from four decades of helping others, he shares incredible insights that can help anyone develop and deliver presentations that are heard, understood and retained by those listening. "After all," Bergman points out, "who goes to the trouble of developing and delivering a presentation to be quickly forgotten? Yet I would argue that the vast majority of the thirty to forty million presentations delivered each and every day are forgotten as soon as they finish."

It doesn’t matter whether you're preparing a presentation for online or in-person delivery. It doesn’t matter whether it's a project update, a new business pitch, a lecture to undergraduates, an employee information session, a webinar or a keynote address to thousands One Bucket at a Time is designed to enhance your ability to have your ideas understood, remembered and acted upon by your audience.

Successful presenters know that capitalizing on how people listen is the key to their success—to having ideas understood, absorbed, remembered and acted upon. As you will learn from this invaluable resource, the best path to presentation success is to develop meaningful content and deliver that content memorably, one bucket at a time, into the long-term memory of those in attendance.