Earlier this month I spent an evening in the Palo Alto Community TV studios being filmed for the monthly Toastmaster Time TV production. This long-running show features speeches by members of different San Francisco Bay Area Toastmasters clubs. Archived speeches go back to 1997.

Delivering a speech in a TV studio

I’d given my speech, A Tale of Two Cities, a couple of times before at different Toastmaster Club meetings. I thought I knew it well enough and felt comfortable with the content. However, being in the studio was a new and totally different experience. Not only was there the darkened room with the bright lights in my face and the camera angles to become comfortable with (“speak to the red light as if it is a person”), there was also the challenge of projecting myself into the fish-eye lens of the camera versus the responsive face of a member of an audience.

Dealing with two cameras was a challenge – I wanted to make a seamless transition from one camera to another and not be caught looking at the wrong lens. Watching for the red light was something that takes getting used to.

There was also the “hurry up and wait” aspect to sitting in the studio for over two hours while the producer assembled the volunteer crew, arranged the lights and resolved all the technical issues. Then, suddenly, it was time to deliver the speech without a teleprompter or notes. I thought I’d remember the content. I was wrong.

I hit the main points with one glaring exception. My close depended on an earlier reference to the smells of Paris: the Gauloise cigarettes, the garlic and the girls perfume. But when I reached the end I suddenly realized I’d forgotten to set this up. C’est la vie.

Lessons learned

Learning to present on camera is a skill that takes practice, my first attempt made me realize just how many pieces of the puzzle need to be in place for it to look natural. Being a part of Toastmaster Time gave me a deep appreciation for what the executives I support in my day job go through when they are on camera. Providing notes on a comfort monitor or card is essential. Schedule sufficient time before the broadcast for a run through. I’d recommend speechwriters and executive communications managers give a speech in a TV studio in order to appreciate the challenge clients face.

Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim kicked off the 2011 Gateway to the US program jointly hosted by ANZA Technology Network and CCICE at the Computer History Museum in Mt. View. His keynote reviewed the challenges and opportunities start-ups face in contrast to established companies.

He claims that the current uncertainties in the world economy favor start-ups. Andy shared his own experience starting Sun in the early 1980s when the economy was on the ropes. In 2001 economic hard times made Google’s paid search a viable alternative to expensive banner ads and the company took off.

Andy shared the five reasons new ideas fail and also listed the most promising areas for start-ups to invest in the I.T. space.

Hear him share his insights into why start-ups are more innovative than established companies by viewing the edited highlights from his keynote below.

A panel of distinguished judges at the National Speakers Association Annual Convention selected Allison Massari as the winner of the ‘So You Think You Can Speak’ competition late Sunday.

Allison, a 2010 NSA Northern California Pro-Track graduate, had made it to the final group of six contestants after being selected by the Northern California Chapter as the most promising speaker who had been a member for two years or less. Judges selected finalists from videos of dozens of candidates submitted by chapters around the country.

The evening event was judged by convention chair, multi-millionaire speaker Randy Gage; world class communicator Glenna Salsbury and business transformational speaker Roxanne Emmerich.

The six finalists were asked to present a three-minute keynote to the 1,500 convention attendees. The judges gave each presenter valuable feedback and then selected three finalists who gave a second three-minute presentation.

Allison was the only woman in the final six and her powerful stage presence rocked the room. Both presentations were stories from her main keynote, delivered to clients worldwide, about the challenges she faced overcoming the terrible pain of being burned alive in a head-on 60 mph auto accident.

NSA Northern California Chapter members celebrated Allison’s win and look forward to toasting her at their local chapter meeting later in the year.

How does someone prepare for a Toastmasters International Speech Contest?

In the second part of my podcast interview with Toastmasters District 57 winner Christine Robinson, we discuss the upcoming 2010 Toastmasters International Convention.

Very few women have ever won the World Championship, and Christine is only two speeches away from that possibility.

Every one of us at Christine’s home club, the Speakers Forum in Concord, CA, is doing all we can to help her prepare and practice a new speech for the final round of the contest.

To hear how she plans to prepare for the event, click on the podcast icon below.

Interview: Christine Robinson - Part 2 [ 6:00 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

How are winning Toastmasters speeches created?

I asked Christine Robinson, whose speech The Empty Chair won the District 57 Spring Conference May 8, 2010, held at the California Maritime Academy in Vallejo California.

In this podcast interview, Christine discusses the original motivation for the theme of the speech and then shares the mechanics of writing and practicing the speech.

Her speech is rooted in the passion and conviction for the topic: “It had it’s own vitality…it is time, now more than ever, to fill our chairs, to be present for others.”

Tomorrow, I’ll share Part 2 of the interview, where Christine talks about the upcoming contest in Palm Desert.

To hear Part 1 of the interview, click on the podcast icon below.

Interview: Christine Robinson - Part 1 [ 6:27 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Meryl Streep opened her soul to the Barnard College graduating class last Monday. In a compelling commencement speech acknowledging the value of single-sex education, she celebrated both the power of a women’s perspective and the power of empathy to bring real change.

Ethos, Logos, Pathos

Her speech employed the classic Aristotelian elements of persuasive public speaking: ethos, logos and pathos.

She used ethos to establish her bone fides as an Academy Award winner and famous actress (albeit a person suffering a fame that separates her from “friends, from reality, from proportion”).

There was minimal logos in the speech. But she did include data from The Economist about women’s effects on economic growth and, tongue in cheek, on the research she’d conducted in high school on how to attract boys with peroxide hair and brand name clothes from the pages of Seventeen and Vogue – decades before the Devil wore Prada!

Above all, with wit and charm, Streep employed pathos to establish an emotional bond with the audience. She told emotionally appealing stories – of herself as a young girl swaddling her Betsy Wetsy doll; as an undergraduate, unkempt as the Velveteen Rabbit; as a new mother giving a very different commencement speech full of certainty and “earnest full-throated cheerleading”.

Adolescent pretense

Having proclaimed her fame and success, and built common cause with the women in the audience, she invited the graduates to explore the darker side of outward success in life, of what lies behind the inner door:

Cobwebs, black, the light bulbs burned out, the airless dank refrigerator of an insanely over-scheduled, unexamined life that usually just gets take-out.

She invited the audience to identify with her as a woman who had, like them, suffered the pretenses of adolescence, of acting a role to “pretend quite proficiently to be successful … as have many women here, I’m sure.”

For Streep, the pretense reached a zenith in high school. She deliberately set out to become the “generically pretty high school girl” with a child-like cute giggle, lowering her eyes at the right moment to appeal to boys, “at the same time being accepted by the girls, a very tricky negotiation.” So successful was her characterization she later used it in her portrait of Linda in The Deer Hunter, to the delight and fascination of President Clinton.

Celebrating Single-Sex Education

In contrast to her artificial role in high school, attending Vassar when it was still—as Barnard is today—a single-sex school, allowed Streep the room she needed to flourish.

“I didn’t have to pretend, I could be goofy, vehement, aggressive, and slovenly and open and tough and my friends let me.”

Empathy

Streep contrasts her 1978 role as Linda in The Deer Hunter with her 2006 role as Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada. Clinton might have lusted after the submissive Linda but, claims Streep, it’s a measure of how far the world has come that men today tell her they can relate to Miranda – a woman who signifies the thankless position of the misunderstood leader. She finds it a cause for optimism that straight men today have the ability to empathize with a woman protagonist. Women are brought up to identify with male characters. However, it’s rare that men can identify with women characters.

The emotional expression of empathy for strong woman speaks to Streep of a generational shift in attitude:

Men are adapting…They are changing their deepest prejudices to regard as normal the things that their fathers would have found very, very difficult and their grandfathers would have abhorred and the door to this emotional shift is empathy.

Unique Perspective

This newfound emotional capacity for empathy is, for Streep, the transformative light by which consciousness changes. When light shines through the cracks, there is the possibility of a “completely different perspective”. This possibility is heralded by an age when women are awarded more medical and law degrees than men; when “around the world, poor women now own property who used to be property”; when the employment of women has contributed more to global GDP growth than new technology and the rise of India and China.

Streep challenges the graduating class to apply the unique perspective their single-sex education has given them in the world. They can “speed progress” solving the crucial global problems of human rights and gender inequality.

Off-hand delivery

Her self-depreciating speech was delivered in a deliberately off-hand way; speaking to her audience in the manner of shared dorm-room confidences; offering them a glimpse of her own uncertainty and doubt behind the façade of fame; free of conventional oratory in the way that only someone with a couple of Oscars could.

Here’s a video of Streep delivering her speech.

Nearly 300 members and guests of NSA/NC spent Saturday May 1 at the Achieve! The Professional Edge showcase of professional speakers from across Northern California.

I took to the podium with Jim Carrillo to demonstrate how easy it is to create a video on YouTube in under 10 minutes.

I then asked people to share their impressions of the day. See what they had to say in this YouTube video:

Nancy Duarte (whose company designed the slides in “An Inconvenient Truth”) did a riveting analysis of Steve Ballmer’s Windows 7 launch speech transcript.

She color-coded Apple campaign references; unnecessary filler words or phrases; confusing words, phrases or statistics; Ballmer’s references to himself; upgrade fixes problems, and bold statements with no supporting information.

Nancy’s analysis is a useful technique for all professional speakers to critique their own presentations and see where there is room for improvement.

(Thanks to Rebecca Morgan of SpeakerNetNews for flagging this!)

The left-of-center British newspaper The Guardian has broken the news that beleaguered British Prime Minister Gordon Brown paid Washington, DC based West Wing Writers fees totaling $40,000 for speechwriting services. The most recent fee of $7,045 was paid for editing his March 4th address to the Joint Session of Congress. Speculation is that Brown felt the need for American assistance with his rhetoric on a number of occasions, both as Chancellor and Prime Minister.

The relatively small fees would indicate that the American speechwriters tweaked the talk for cultural nuance, rather than deciding wholesale the content of a speech given by a foreign head of state. Nevertheless, reports The Guardian, because the work was done for a foreigner:

Details of the payments have emerged from documents West Wing Writers filed with the US justice department, required because the company was working on behalf of an agent of a foreign government – Brown.

It could be argued that by preventing the potential misunderstanding of British phrases such as “batting on a sticky wicket” or “horses for courses” the speechwriters more than earned their fees. On a more serious note, the need – in a world facing global challenges – for culturally appropriate language in important speeches must involve not just accurate translation into different languages by trained linguists, but the advice of speechwriters who understand the audience in the country where the speech is to be delivered.

Consider the alternative. Brown makes reference to the disparaging “Old Europe” phrase coined by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in the era of the Bush White House. Better a second pair of eyes on a speech attuned to local sensitivities than leaving a clanger like that in a text.

Judge for yourself if the dour Scot received value for money:

Representing data in a unique and compelling way

This brief presentation by Hans Rosling revolutionized the way I understand statistical data. He gave this presentation at the TED Conference in February 2006. The TED Website explains:

Rosling is professor of global health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, his current work focuses on dispelling common myths about the so-called developing world, which (he points out) is no longer worlds away from the west. In fact, most of the third world is on the same trajectory toward health and prosperity, and many countries are moving twice as fast as the west did.

What sets Rosling apart isn’t just his apt observations of broad social and economic trends, but the stunning way he presents them. Guaranteed: You’ve never seen data presented like this. By any logic, a presentation that tracks global health and poverty trends should be, in a word: boring. But in Rosling’s hands, data sings. Trends come to life. And the big picture — usually hazy at best — snaps into sharp focus.

Rosling’s presentations are grounded in solid statistics (often drawn from United Nations data), illustrated by the visualization software he developed. The animations transform development statistics into moving bubbles and flowing curves that make global trends clear, intuitive and even playful. During his legendary presentations, Rosling takes this one step farther, narrating the animations with a sportscaster’s flair.

The good news is that since Google bought the rights to Professor Rosling’s Gapminder software, anyone can create these animated demonstrations of their own statistical data and use them in presentations. What’s not to like about that?

It’s worth downloading the Hi-Res version to get the impact of the charts on a full screen, or click on the icon below to watch the low-res version.