Bill Gates appeared at the TED conference last week and made a presenting mistake that put his usual gaffe-ridden style in the shade.  He made the classic mistake of not respecting his audience: http://tinyurl.com/b5um5b

And it’s a shame, because he was talking about important, life-saving work that he and his Gates Foundation are doing around the world, specifically on stopping malaria and improving education. 

In many ways, it was a typical Bill Gates speech, perhaps a little better than most.  It was well-written, if a little self-absorbed, and the slides were neither overwhelming nor too wordy.  Not bad for the Chief Perpetrator of Power Point. 

To be sure, Gates evidenced his usual nervous, self-conscious body language, and he needs to work on his voice, but by now we’re familiar with those problems.  They weren’t really getting in the way of his delivery, because his status as one of the richest men in the world means that we’ll listen even if he looks like an uncomfortable nerd. 

The disaster happened about half-way through the speech, in the section on malaria.  Bill suddenly moved toward a little table placed in the middle of the stage, and released a (small) swarm of mosquitoes into the crowd, as he put it, of millionaires. 

He commented that he wanted the crowd to get a sense of what poor people were up against. 

I suspect most people in the audience had experienced mosquitoes before, if not perhaps the malaria-carrying kind, so the remark showed an insensitivity to the audience at that simple level.  But at another, deeper, level, it showed a lack of respect of the audience, and here’s where the presentation really went south. 

Respect for audiences should be paramount in a speaker’s mind, and that means treating them like adults, free to decide what hazards they want to face for themselves.  To release mosquitoes on a crowd feels like token harassment, and takes decision-making power away from that audience.  It’s arrogant and presumptuous.  And it’s a cheap stunt. 

Just because you’re a billionaire doesn’t mean you get to treat audiences like guinea pigs without their consent.  Respect for an audience should be the first and last thing a speaker thinks about when giving a presentation.