The afternoon sessions at a conference are called the Graveyard Shift for good reason. The participants are comatose or worse, depending on whether it’s a weekend conference and this is the second day following a late night. The proliferation of zombie films are based almost entirely on actual scenes from corporate weekend conferences.\n\nThe afternoon speaker has two options.\n\nJazz It Up. Or. Call It Off.\n\nThere’s no middle ground. Even audience participation isn’t enough to overcome the lolling heads and dribbling delegates.\n\nSo when the after-lunch speaker slowed the pace down to give the people more time to take in each bullet point on the enormous PowerPoint presentation what was most surprising was that he didn’t notice that he had lost his crowd in the head lolling, dribbling, comatose, zombies before him.\n\nOr worse, he did, but either didn’t have the skills to change the outcome, or the desire to, or was too lazy to bother.