Thanks to a comment by The Friendly Ghost I’ve been made aware of the current series running in The Guardian Newspaper in the UK on Great Speeches of the 20th Century. The newspaper is doing more than merely reprinting the speech text:

Each day for two weeks you can collect a free booklet containing a historic address and the Guardian’s coverage of the speech from the time. The speeches are introduced by prominent figures ranging from FW de Klerk on Nelson Mandela’s statement to the Rivonia trial to Mikhail Gorbachev on Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin. Complete your collection with a CD featuring extracts from 10 great speeches free with the Guardian on Saturday May 5.

The series kicked off with Churchill’s We Shall Fight on the Beaches; moved on to JFK’s Ask Not what Your Country Can Do For You and covers the following list:

• Nelson Mandela An ideal for which I am prepared to die April 20 1964
• Harold Macmillan The wind of change February 3 1960
• Franklin Delano Roosevelt The only thing we have to fear is fear itself March 4 1933
• Nikita Khrushchev The cult of the individual February 25 1956
• Emmeline Pankhurst Freedom or death November 3 1913
• Martin Luther King I have a dream August 28 1963
• Charles de Gaulle The flame of French resistance June 1940
• Margaret Thatcher The lady’s not for turning October 10 1980
• Jawaharlal Nehru A tryst with destiny August 14 1947
• Virginia Woolf A room of one’s own 1928
• Aneurin Bevan We have to act up to different standards December 5 1956
• Earl Spencer The most hunted person of a modern age September 6 1997

I’m planning to bookmark the speeches and the debate around them for future reference, as well as asking my Dad to pick up a copy of Saturday’s Guardian and send over a copy of the CD.

Back on March 30 I entered a Toastmasters Speech Contest in Silicon Valley which was held at SAP. I gave this speech on my first months in the US in the mid-1970’s, when I arrived as a graduate student to study sociology at Tufts University. Every word is true, describing things that actually happened to me.

I won the contest and and went on to the next level. Unfortunately I had added some killer phrases and a compelling conclusion while forgetting to do a word-count or rehearse with a stop-watch. I went over the 7:30 maximum allowed time by a few seconds and was disqualified.

Still, it was ton of fun. An adrenalin rush. Every speechwriter owes it to their clients to stand on the podium from time-to-time. Experience an audience first-hand. Otherwise, you’re like a celibate writing a sex-manual. You might describe the position accurately, but until you assume it yourself you don’t know Jack.

Speechwriters, communicators and innovative thinkers often find inspiration outside their chosen field. HP Innovation kingpin Phil McKinney has an excellent blog and podcast on the creative process required for engineers to deliver the next Killer Innovation. He quotes comedian and author Steve Allen on sources of inspiration:

Good lord, I just open my eyes and ears, and they rush in. Ideas knock you down if you don’t brace yourself. All you need is to be aware, actually aware, of everything around you - sights, sounds, even smells, such as that of perfume stolen from a passing women.

I was reminded of the serendipity of inspiration when reading the Weekend edition of the Financial Times this morning and came across a fascinating interview in the House and Home section with architect and interior designer John Stefanidis, who was born in Egypt to Alexandrian Greek parents, moved to the UK to study at Oxford University and has run a design practice in London for more than 30 years.

Stefanidis comments on the importance of color in his work, and the varied sources of inspiration he finds:

Every colour has an emotive charge. The ways colours contrast, marry, embrace and clash are like life itself. All colours are valid. There are infinite shades of colour in the spectrum, not excluding black, of which there are hundreds more. Every shade of blue is my favourite colour, as well as pink, grey, green and red.

© Nikhil Gangavane

On my first trip to India I took a paper cornet of each coloured powder lined up in conical piles outside a Hindu temple - powders made from petals or leaves and applied to the forehead by the faithful. These cornets contained the colours for the first fabrics I created and have served as inspiration ever since.

© Elena Pokrovskaya

But then so have stones, leaves, flowers, photographs, melodies, shells, magazine illustrations, paintings, scribbles on air journeys and trucks on the freeway.

© Jan Kranendonk

As McKinney, Allen and Stefanidis all show, while inspiration partly relies on serendipity, it’s our responsibility to engage the intentional processes which allow it to happen. To learn the creative disciplines which deliver on the flash of insight. To carry the paper cornets home and keep them close at hand. To nurture our sources of inspiration.

Next time you write a speech you want the audience to remember, search for a colorful phrase or provocative comment in the world beyond your desk.

Speechwriters in high technology companies often face the challenge of communicating complexities in a simple manner which audiences can understand. The universe is a complex machine which no-one really understands. Books have been written on the ways we interpret the evidence of our senses. None of them are easy to understand. Are they?

Then along comes a short video which can take you further down the path of understanding how we perceive reality in five minutes than a dozen philosophy books would in a month.

I found it easy to envisage the techniques employed by this video being used by a technology company wishing to communicate complexity in profoundly simple, even provocative, ways.

Take five minutes to check it out and let me know if you think I’m smoking something or if you agree.

Ready? Steady? Go!

Experienced speechwriter Fletcher Dean has launched a new podcast series, hosted on his Speechwriting 2.0 blog. So far there are two postings:

The first podcast raises the question of who owns a speech - the speechwriter or the speaker?

The second podcast draws a parallel between speeches and love-letters. Just as you would not dream of writing a love-letter to a stranger, you should not even think of writing a speech until you know as much as possible about your audience.

Fletcher delivers his podcast in a measured, instructional tone. If you are interested becoming a better speechwriter or public speaker subscribe to these podcasts and learn more about the art of speechwriting from one of the masters.

A recent podcast of the wonderful BBC Radio 4 programme, Start The Week, featured an interview with Bamber “Your Starter For Ten” Gascoigne, host of the long-running TV quiz show University Challenge. This was a fixture on British television during my formative years. I’m still embarrassed to admit I failed the qualifying rounds at Leicester Univeristy in 1972 and so never appeared on the show along with the other scruffy undergraduates of the era.

Gascoigne is an established author and historian who has launched a fascinating Web 2.0 venture - Timesearch - an intelligent search tool that organizes results on historical time lines.

Timesearch is an invaluable tool for the professional speaker or speechwriter. Suppose, for example, you are an executive at the Hewlett-Packard Company scheduled to speak in Sydney at a Chamber of Commerce event. A simple query in Timesearch focussed on Australia in the 1930’s would show the major events that occurred at the time Bill & Dave were establishing HP:

you can immediately see that the Sydney Harbor Bridge was only seven years old when HP was started in the Palo Alto garage in 1939. Robert Menzies became Prime Minister that year. Both useful local references to build into your notes. Icons to the left and right side of each reference link to Google Images and other website search results to enable easily building your speech content on this topic. So far, so good.

But what if Timesearch allowed wiki-like user generated content to be added to the 10,000 entries Gascoigne has entered into the current database? Now that would be way cool. It would, for example, allow HP’s archivists to add the company timeline and show the intersection of HP’s history with world events. Family histories and details of individual lives and locations would enrich and extend the tool. Gascoigne revealed plans on Start the Week for this exciting option as the next stage of development for Timesearch.

For now, the tool offers a valuable source of ideas for your next speech.

Consider one more example, using fascinating historical cross-references to demonstrate cultural sensitivity. Say you were addressing a visiting delegation from Korea:

How impressed would they be to hear you quote the fact that Koreans invented bronze movable type 60 years before Gutenberg built his press in Germany?

Use Timesearch today to enrich your presentations. And check back shortly to see if it allows you to load your own data into it so your biography becomes a part of world history. Timesearch: when things happen to good people.

Creating a Bestseller and a Bestselling Career: 101 strategies and tactics

Over 100 NSA/NC members and guests enjoyed a morning with the “NSA power couple” Karyn Buxman-Godek, CSP, CPAE, and Greg Godek, ABC, RSVP. One of NSA’s most romantic and successful couples shared their secrets for creating a “best-selling career” – combining public speaking and writing books. They promised to deliver the goods on how to:

• Write books quickly
• Create killer keynotes
• Employ humor secrets from comedians and storytellers
• Successfully and effectively market like a maniac
• Generate speaking opportunities
• Harness your creativity

Karyn has been a fulltime keynote speaker for 20 years. As humorist, she founded The HumorLab, an organization that researches the art and science of humor. Greg is best known for his 2.5-million-copy self-published book, 1001 Ways to Be Romantic. Around NSA he is known as the editor of the Writers PEG e-zine, and as a marketing maniac willing to brainstorm with anyone.

Karyn and Greg built best selling careers as information brokers by combining the best of both worlds. She’s a speaker who writes; he’s a writer who speaks. Between them, they cover a lot of territory. It is summarized in their list of 101 Strategies and Tactics for success — no matter if you are more comfortable holding the pen or walking the podium. In the hope that I won’t contravene the Fair Use copyright laws I’ll list those that impressed me - to get the full list you would’ve had to have paid your $70 fee to attend the event.

Jump off the cliff

Take risks with your business. Avoid paralysis by analysis. Mimic the software industry — release version 1.0 and then refine and re-release. Version 1.0 of a your book may be 3 pages each of 12 chapters that will expand and grow as you gather feedback from people you share ‘pre-publication’ copies with in exchange for proofreading and their suggestions about what to add. (NOTE: Some use a blog in the same way - as a test market for your ideas and a forum to gather feedback.)

Write a great title

Books like Who Moved My Cheese? and Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus are mega-hits because of their title. Likewise, those that people ask for in Barnes & Noble as that seven habits book or the Prophecy thing sell as much by virtue of their title as their content.

To test-market a title share the idea with your favorite Starbucks barista then casually ask the next time you are in there if they remember the title. If a couple of dozen strangers can recall it then you have a winner.

Invest in designing the book cover

People do judge a book by its cover. So invest in the services of a pro designer to create your cover. Avoid covers that scream ‘Self Published’ to the world. Greg finds it useful to ask his designer for three concepts:

1. The cover you want
2. The cover Random House would create
3. A wild and crazy cover — within reason

Select the best font and images from these three and the result will be a killer book cover. The cover must address the audience. Be wary of putting your picture on it unless it’s a souvenir book (to sell from the Back of Room after speaking when the audience is fired up and wants a piece of you.)

Writing the book is the easy part

It’s all about marketing, positioning and branding. Publishing is a detail. Publishers are not really interested in selling books. They look first to grow their catalog with new titles. It’s your job to push product. Greg recommends negotiating long and hard to get a couple of thousand extra copies at cost + 10% (NOT wholesale - that’s one way the publisher rips off authors!). Use these books to power your publicity machine. Send a dozen at a time to local radio stations that will interview you and then give away copies to listeners who call in. Run a coordinated and relentless publicity campaign. Use the book to build your reputation and career. Professional speakers use their book to secure speaking engagements. Reach media people via the Radio-TV Interview Report. Use the book to generate articles about you. Tie into topics people are interested in. Coordinate with the annual cycle of news coverage (Valentines, Christmas etc.)

Speaking tips

As much as Greg told us about being successful in the publicity and publishing worlds, Karyn shared more about what makes a successful speaker. Writing might net you $1 a copy, speakers can command fees of $3-10K a speech. So you wanna make $100K a year? Do the math.

Look for humor in real life

Use stories instead of jokes. Funny means money. You don’t have to make stuff up - real life is full of humor. Audiences appreciate humor that makes you the fall guy. Most adult humor comes from pain. Triples are funny (A-one, A-Two, A-Three). Use funny words: “Chihuahua” beats “a dog”. Keep a humor file. Keep a file of ’saver’ moments (for when things go wrong on the podium - lights fail, mike cuts out, PowerPoint goes black, you trip over). Get Jeanne Robertson’s book Don’t let the Funny Stuff Get Away and Terry Paulson’s book Making Humor Work.

Look for sponsors

If an event can’t afford your fees, get a sponsor. Local and regional sponsorships from major corporations are easier to come by than a national contract. Approach sponsors who want access to your audience. Tie the benefits of your speech back to product they wish to sell. Check out Aldonna Ambler’s talk from the 2oo4 NSA Convention on Corporate Sponsorship on the NSA website.

Look to improve

Invest in annual coaching. Invite other speakers to come see you. Join a Mastermind group. Always over-deliver. Stay active in the NSA. Read in your field and keep a clipping file. Study your competition. Use Mind Mapping to develop ideas. Show up to the conference early and attend other sessions. Track your topic with Google Alerts. Invest in an audio recorder and keep it with you.

Ethnomethodology is concerned with the methods (the “people-methods”) by which that social order is produced and shared in different settings.

It seeks to describe the practices individuals use in their descriptions of different settings. It examines in minute detail the ways in which people participate in a taken-for-granted world and raises questions about how this is accomplished.

This might strike some people as asking questions about the bleedin’ obvious. But wasn’t it asking questions about the “obvious” that got Newton, Galileo, Copernicus and others started? Their insights came as a result of asking questions about the very things others took for granted.

Ethnomethodology claims we are all constantly making use of unstated “methods” in our daily lives to create a “taken-for-granted” world which we feel we “know” and can be “at home” in. We perceive our social world through a series of patterns we have built up for making sense of and coping with the variety of situations that we encounter everyday.

These patterns are often repetitive, confining even.

We use patterns to define ourselves in contrast to another: the presenter vs. the audience; the speaker vs. the listener; the same-old same-old conversation between husbands and wives, parents and children, executives and staff. Some call this their “comfort zone”. People new to public speaking feel discomfort and fear when they step out of their comfort zone and stand on the podium. It’s not part of their pattern.

As Adi Da Samraj writes in his poetic parable The Mummery Book:

(c) 2007 The Avataric Samrajya of Adidam Pty Ltd

The Mummery of life-and-world-and-death is a constant Melodrama—made of opposites and contraries. And life is always “self-and-”other”—in a Growling! pit.

There is only a pattern. Patterning, in Clicks! and Clacks! Appearance, Shift, and Change. Always repetitions—and, yet, never the same.

The countless pairs are not Recognized, As Is, by the always ego-”I”—in its waking, dreaming, and sleeping, here. The oblivious little play of twos—never exactly Founders, in their One. Forever—there is only “she” or “he” or “it” or “that”, and the always-remaining “I”. The “I” and the “other”—forever waiting, for the One-and-Only One. The One That Always Already Is—Infinitely Expanded, Beyond the persistent point of ego- “I”. Beyond the egg of attention, and its Klik-Klak visions of eternal “difference”.

– Adi Da Samraj, The Mummery Book

The creation of social order by a group of benighted egos minimizes the chaos of random human interaction and the confusion which would be experienced if we saw everything as if it were the first time. When that order breaks down you get the social interaction typical of the insane asylum. There’s value in the comfort zone, but also limitation.

Executive Communications Lessons:

By examining how a stable social order is created out of the independent actions of individuals Ethnomethodology has value for someone creating a presentation that’ll be given to a group of individuals assembled into an audience.

Knowing more about the glue that holds everything together provides insight for the savvy speaker.

The question is what level of understanding we want. Is it enough to know the big picture rules (when to kiss, bow or shake hands) or do we need a more detailed grasp the the minutia of social order.

Yes, we do, say the Ethnomethodologists.

By conducting a microscopic analysis of the ‘technology of interaction’ – the structures that underlie conversations – we have a framework to understand:

1. The setting of a talk (which could be a face-to-face discussion between two people or a presentation to a large audience by an executive) and how that “affects the shape, form, trajectory, content or character of the interaction”.
2. The form of the institution where the talk is delivered and how that dictates the type of presentation delivered and the ‘turn-taking’ mechanisms enjoyed by presenter and audience member. (Think about the unstated assumptions that dictate when it’s “OK to ask a question” and when it’s “rude to interrupt”. Realize that this differs between, say, a small group of C-level executives meeting in the Boardroom and a mass of techies in the audience at a Conference.)
3. The ways in which the participants ‘conspire’ to create the context and constantly reaffirm the fact that they are participating as an audience member at a public presentation (This might sound weird at first, but think of all the unstated assumptions that a good grade school teacher, or seminar leader, leverages to ‘impact’ their audience.)

One limitation: In taking a relativist stance ethnomethodology cannot make moral judgments about meanings. Therefore it cannot address problems such as inequality and power. But, realistically, this isn’t a big problem. There’s not a lot of mileage in revealing how centers of power and inequality affect communications within corporations. Everyone is pretty clear on who has the chops by Grade Level and Title when it comes to communicating. It’s obvious that people pander more the CEO’s sense of humor and are willing to laugh at his jokes than they are with people of lesser status in the organization. Dictators go mad because everyone agrees with them. Get over it.

Next time I’ll consider some specific lessons from ethnomethodology around what is called situated actions. Being aware of this will sharpen your capability as a public speaker to think on your feet — to anticipate alternative courses of action and their consequences while in the middle of a presentation.

My first major series of Deep End topics is an assessment of a sociological theory known as Ethnomethodolgy to see if it’s got anything useful to say for those of us involved in public speaking, presentation skills coaching, speechwriting and executive communications.

Ethnomethodology is an obscure branch of sociology. It’s concerned with the ways in which social order is maintained. It describes the practices (the methods) people use to describe social settings.

Ethnomethodology was all the rage in the mid-1970’s when I was a graduate sociology student. It attracted those of us who were looking for an alternative to structural-functionalism (Talcott Parsons seemed such a boring old fart) and were tired of mainstream Marxist sociology (Karl Marx was another boring old fart).

It was a ‘hip’ social theory. It promised the excitement of Street Theater and Happenings. It didn’t take the fact of social order for granted (Yeah! Anarchy Rules, OK!) It encouraged people to see things around them as if for the first time. This resonated for students who’d experimented with hallucinogenic drugs. It was an intellectual cleansing of the doors of perception. It appealed to anyone enthralled by the afterglow of the sixties that bathed the student population of Europe in the early 1970’s.

It was cool. Obscure. Angular. Immediate. Some went on to build careers out of theories like this. The rest of us got $20 haircuts, entry-level jobs in corporations and conveniently developed amnesia for these angry critiques of our late adolescence.

So it’s with a sense of deja-vu I return to Ethnomethodology to see if it has any value for my life, thirty-five years after I first studied it. Are there any useful nuggets I can find to help my work in executive communications in the 21st Century? Will I see speechwriting as if for the first time?

My search, inspired, as I have said, by Roy H. Williams, is a deep dive into and report on the core elements of the theory that are relevant. I’ll strip out the academic jargon. And, frankly, plagiarize the academic sources without the usual attribution, but I will include a full set of references for sources I use.

My next posting in the series will examine what the heck Ethnomethodology is all about and why should speechwriters bother examining what everyone else takes for granted?

On my last morning in DC I visited the International Spy Museum. It opened in 2002, post 9/11, in a city which had only just escaped devastation by a fourth gang of saboteurs operating behind enemy lines with impunity.

The Museum serves to remind us, Lest We Forget, that the history of espionage is filled with the actions of foolhardy men and women (brave fellows if they work for us, cowardly scum if they work for the opposition), who used deceit, disguise, cunning and forged documents to further their interests. Hero, villain or traitor, it depends which side you’re on. The Museum celebrates espionage in all its glory, gory detail. Espionage (spying) is the practice of obtaining information about an organization or a society that is considered secret or confidential without the permission of the holder of the information. It’s a form of warfare waged “unfairly” since the day the Trojans learned to Beware of Greeks Bearing Gifts.

It was spooky (pun intended) to learn that Washington DC has one of the world’s largest populations of spies. I wonder how many have paid their $16 admission to experience this celebration of their chosen lifestyle. I wondered if the couple with the Eastern European accents standing next to me in line were here to learn a thing or two.

There’s a delicious irony in visiting an institution which puts on an exhibit aspects of a clandestine world.

I remembered the decommissioned Regional Seats of Government in the UK which are now identified by a tourist information sign:

If it’s ‘Secret’ why, err, have a sign on the highway showing you where it is? Of course, a grammatically accurate sign would read “Formerly-Secret-Nuclear-Bunker-Now-Open-To-The-Public”.

So it is with the International Spy Museum, which has items on open display that people, literally, once died to protect from view.

The Museum does a great job entertaining visitors with a stage-managed entrance routine. We’re marshaled into an elevator and asked to choose a ‘cover’ for our visit. The make-believe is that we are being groomed to become spies:

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to take an unforgettable hands-on tour of the all-but-invisible profession that has shaped history and continues to impact world events every day.

The driving directions for the Museum warn Beware. You may be followed. The ticket proclaims ACCESS GRANTED.

All familiar stuff to anyone who rents a DVD of the excellent BBC series MI5 (recommended).

Once inside, there’s a fascinating range of 007 gadgets: tear gas pens and lipstick pistols; decoder rings, invisible ink and Enigma machines - there’s even Bond’s Aston Martin.

This, however, is the real stuff, which caused real people to really die. Example: a Bulgarian Umbrella like the one the KGB used to murder Georgi Markov on Waterloo Bridge in 1978.

The exhibits are well researched and explained.

There’s a broad swath of history and geography covered: the Rosetta Stone; Jefferson’s cypher of 1790; WWI and WWII paraphernalia; Cold War tunnels; fragments of the Berlin Wall and of the cement foundations from the US Embassy in Moscow so riddled with bugs they tore it down.

There’s a very educational video showing how to pick a lock; an eye-opening series of bugs and listening devices which, like everything electronic, have shrunk to pin-head-size over the last 60 years.

There’s a rogues gallery of traitors: from the Rosenberg’s to the CIA mole Aldrich Ames and the FBI turncoat Robert Hanssen. There’s surprising detail on the extensive network of German spies operating in the Eastern US in WWII. But nothing to explain why we placed Japanese civilians in West Coast concentration camps.

Indeed, for a Museum that celebrates the Intelligence Services, there are aspects of the exhibit that are curiously misleading. The plaque discussing the Cambridge Spy Ring wonders if the “4th Man” would ever be found. “Could it have been…Anthony Blunt”? Duh. Is this misinformation deliberate, or just coy? Is the Red Scare video on McCarthyism so hidden inside a blanket of ‘enemy within’ propaganda that all but the carefully observant would realize the enormity of the witch hunt? Or was this more deliberate irony?

And what’s with the propaganda aimed at kids? The website lists a number of special programs which made me wonder.

So, once the School Outing jollies with which the Museum presents itself wore off, I was left wondering about the narrative they’ve chosen to tell the story of espionage. What’s their back-story? How did they select among the reflections in the mirror-world of spying. What choices were made between information and misinformation?

I think, my Dear Watson, two things can be deduced.

One, the ‘secrets’ on display in the Spy Museum are very much yesterday’s secrets. The Cold War is about as recent as it gets. Google Earth in the last room merely hinted at what the NSA (no, not the NSA I belong to, the other one) gets to see and hear down the road at Ft. Meade and over in Britain atGCHQ, Cheltenham.

Two, the Museum maintains a deafening silence on espionage involving today’s villains (or heroes) working in the Middle East. I’m afraid this is a case where no matter how much history we learn, we are destined to repeat it. The difficulty of infiltrating Islam outweighs those of building a cover to fool fellow-Caucasians in East Berlin. These are times when other side enjoys the Navajo code talker advantage. Our Farsi speakers are few and farsi between.

Executive Communications Lessons

A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.
– John Le Carre

So what lessons can a speechwriter take away from a visit to the International Spy Museum? Apart from the opportunity to make bad puns. What, if anything, could the cloak and dagger world of espionage have in common with modern business? I can’t possibly begin to imagine.

OK, OK, I’ll try.

• Speechwriters often have to tell a nuanced story. After all, if things were cut n’ dried they’d hire stenographers to write the damn things.
• We practice our tradecraft anonymously, with no expectation of public recognition for our efforts. John le Carre’s novels echo the politics of some Exec Comms departments. Speechwriters do come in from the cold. Some are disappeared. Luckily, very few are tortured, at least physically.
• Corporations can lose key players to the competition. He went over to the Dark Side. The profile on yesterday’s Royal Art Historian needs to be edited out when it’s suddenly found that he (or she) was not to be trusted.
• Employees and customers need to have the past re-scripted in light of new facts. Secrets must be kept. C-Suite executives are well versed in being economical with the truth. You may think that, I couldn’t possibly comment.
• Competitive intelligence must be gathered, legally. High-level candidates recruited from competitors:
  

  Tis the easiest thing in the world to hire people to betray their friends
  – Daniel Defoe, author, Robinson Crusoe and creator of England’s first secret service

• Way back yonder staff may’ve used carrier pigeons and dead letter drops to get word back from the field to headquarters. Heck, some companies probably funded improbable, costly projects like the Berlin Tunnel to gather G2. Nowadays, we seed the web with listening devices to monitor traffic (they’re called RSS feeds).
• SIGINT only goes so far. Few speechwriters succeed without running a carefully cultivated network of agents across the company. These informants must be recruited, tested, protected and pampered. The information they supply on the operations of their business unit must be verified, synthesized, stripped of extraneous detail and woven into the seamless story of the final product. At the end of the day the speechwriter is the one whose head is on the block if misinformation has crept in.
• The Moscow Rules work as well for corporate executives at a Trade Show or Conference today as they did for those Cold War CIA case officers in East Berlin. Memorize them:

1. Assume nothing
2. Never go against your gut (Jack Welch led straight from his)
3. Everyone is potentially under opposition control
4. Don’t look back, you are never completely alone
5. Go with the flow
6. Vary your pattern and stay within your profile (PR calls this being on message)
7. Lull them into a sense of complacency
8. Don’t harass the opposition (some even enshrine this in the Employee Code of Conduct)
9. Pick the time and place for action (as Sun-Tzu well knew)
10. Keep your options open (just don’t back-date them, OK?)