The third and final day of the Conference. As always at these events, my brain has reached overload by this point. Here’s my ‘class notes’ from the sessions I attended Friday. I’ll write up my subjective impressions and report on hallway conversations and networking on the flight home.

Breakfast Panel What’s going on in the speechwriting world?

Panelists:

David Murray, editor, Speechwriters Newsletter
Rich Greb, facilitator, Chicago Speechwriters Forum
Jan Cook, founder, Washington Speechwriters Roundtable
Dana Rubin, founder, New York Speechwriters Group

Warning! We’ve been outed! Thanks to Rob Lowe and the West Wing, people know about speechwriters – we’re more visible now than ever. But speeches are not going away and blogs will never replace speeches (according to David Murray). That said, here’s my blog on the main points I captured from the free flowing early morning panel discussion and audience Q&A:

Steve described the process whereby he leveraged transformations at UPS (such as district managers renewing their focus on customer service, or the move to the company being an enabler of the global supply chain) into effective messaging. His guiding objective is to

Position UPS executives as thought leaders and powerful brand ambassadors through public speeches, events, by-lined articles, Op-Eds, White Papers and other repackaging channels.

In other words: find the downstream potential in each and every speech – maximize every second of the executives time at a venue beyond what they say on the podium – turn ‘delivering a speech’ into an event rich with possibilities that gives the speech content extra bounce. Schedule meetings with press, key customers, analysts. Place senior managers closer to key stakeholders.

The strategy of Steve’s Exec Comm Department includes:

They sweat the details by:

A huge win for Steve was when Thomas Friedman was researching The World is Flat and happened to Google the phrase synchronized commerce. Friedman found dozens of references to past UPS speeches that had been repackaged by Steve’s team, as this example illustrates. Friedman dedicates a section of his book to UPS, identifying them as his #8 world-flattener in a section titled What Those Guys in the Funny Brown Shorts Are Really Doing. As Steve dryly observed, you can’t buy that kind of PR. And it all began with the simple process of making the transcripts of executive speeches available online and searchable outside the firewall. Does your company do this?

Steve produces an annual $1million event which brings world-class political leaders such as Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, President H.W. Bush, President Carter and Polish leader Vaclav Havlal together with academics and CEO’s from major customers. This is co-branded with the prestigious Harvard Business School Publishing. Very little on the Agenda overtly  ‘sells’ UPS. The goal is to stimulate dialog and debate around issues such as globalization. Funding future events is secured by the measurable $25 million incremental revenue which resulted from past events.

By positioning his team at the intersection of creativity and strategy Steve has earned a seat at the table when senior management  frames the future of the company.

Steve is to the average speechwriter what an army general is to an infantry grunt. He plans the campaign and grabs victories from the jaws of defeat. The rest of us dig foxholes and practice duck and cover when the corporate big guns fire. (Hey! I needed a coupla good military analogies being so close to the home of the Commander in Chief, n’ all)

Hal Gordon What speechwriters can learn from a great American orator – Robert Green Ingersoll

Hal is a freelance speechwriter who currently writes for Shell Oil in Houston and blogs for Ragan Communications. He’s written for both the Walt Disney World and top advisors to President Ronald Reagan (from Mickey Mouse to Ed Meese). His blog explains all about Ingersoll. Ingersoll’s best speeches show him a masterful orator and a fiercely intelligent and independent thinker. He openly wore the badge of his atheism – which in 19th Century America got him into about as much trouble as it would in some corners of the Heartland today. This speech on Chinese exclusion masterfully skewers the limited horizons and profound lack of cultural understanding in the USA. As then, perhaps now:

There’s a lot more where this came from here. Read it and weep.

Dawne Simmons From speechwriter to speaker: What you can learn by taking the podium

Dawne walks the walk and talks the talk. One of the rare breed of speechwriters who also know how to speak in public. She’s a dynamic independent consultant who participates in National Speakers Association trainings.

Her claim, which I fully agree with, is that by mastering the art of public speaking you learn to do what you are asking those you write for to do. You step away from the computer monitor and leap the divide that’s represented by the truism: Those who can, do, those who can’t, write about it… 

Indeed, I have often wondered how many authors of sex manuals are actually great lovers? How many cookbook editors can create a meal that would actually delight the palette? Do the editors of travel guides really enjoy exploring foreign parts? Speechwriters might be able to describe the motions, but not until they’ve assumed the position and engaged in the act with an appreciative audience can they really understand what it takes to get it up. Speaking to an audience is an act of seduction. If you’ve not experienced the sweat on your palms and the palpitations of the heart as you present your naked voice to an audience for the first time then in some real sense you are still a callow virgin.  Writing text, even if you annotate with pointers for techniques and timing, is not the same as participating in an uncensored relationship with consenting adults.

So, where was I. Oh yes, Dawne’s class. She challenged the audience face up their fear. Toastmasters is a great place to start. There’s a club meeting near you this week, guaranteed. Being both a writer and a speaker advanced Dawne’s career. Public speaking changed from a stumbling block to a stepping stone for success. Bottom line:

Practice both speaking and speech writing, they go together like a left and right shoe!

Bill Crain Speechwriting (fun)damentals: How to wow audiences and win business

Bill is an independent consultant who writes for ExxonMobile and was recently hired as a speechwriter for the government of Thailand. By the  afternoon the crowd had thinned out and I was just about to do the same . But I’m glad I stayed for this post-conference seminar. It was filled with more practical tips and tricks than  rest of the conference put together. Bill provided a great handout with step by step checklists:

He included a bonus selection of samples from commercial speeches he had written and extracts from well-known speeches by Martin Luther King, Churchill and Shakespeare.

Bill’s work pushes the envelope when he looks at major factors reshaping speechwriting today, including those of globalization and the shift in the geo-political axis toward Asia which he and I agree is changing the form of acceptable business communication. He also acknowledges discoveries in quantum physics and human potential psychology as relevant factors. His most unique views are around suggesting meditation as a practice to unlock creativity and the power of the still quiet voice within. He has studied the Sanskrit chakra system used in Indian ayurvedic medicine and suggests the relevance of different chakras to speechwriting. Considering the ascent of the chakras from  bodily base to crown he interprets the color and quality of each for a speechwriter, suggesting we review each speech to ensure it includes at least a reference to each element.

Specifically:

The root of the body at the base of the spine is associated with the color red and signifies the family, health and issues of physical survival. For speechwriters: how does your topic pertain to the family and to human health and safety?.

The sacral area of the body and sexual organs associated with the color orange signifies sex, power and money. For speechwriters: how does your topic affect men and women differently? What are the political and economic aspects? (I would add – does the speech turn your audience on?)

The solar plexus and diaphragm associated with the color yellow signifies ethics, integrity and personal will. For speechwriters: what are the ethical dimensions of this topic?

The heart, chest, lungs associated with the color green signfies love, compassion and kindness. For speechwriters: to what extent is there an emotional dimension to your topic? To what extent is compassion called for? (I would add, unless your audience are automatons you must appeal to their hearts – since they can only comprehend with their head what their hearts have responded to on some level).

The throat, ears, nose, teeth associated with the color blue signifies personal expression and communication. For speechwriters: what are the communication challenges in your topic? What is essential for the speaker to communicate? (I would add a big DUH! You better communicate throughout the speech.)

I was intrigued by Bill’s groundbreaking work here. I’ve not heard of the chakra system being applied to business communications. And I assume that if Bill had more time he would have included the all important final two chakras:

The brow chakra or third eye center, associated with the color indigo signifies the act of seeing, both physically and intuitively. As such it opens our psychic faculties and our understanding of archetypal levels. When healthy it allows us to see clearly, in effect, letting us “see the big picture.” For speechwriters: to what extent does your speech deal with the big picture?

The crown chakra sitting on or above the physical top of the head. Associated the color violet. It relates to consciousness as pure awareness. It is our connection to the greater world beyond, to a timeless, spaceless place of all-knowing. When developed, this chakra brings us knowledge, wisdom, understanding, spiritual connection, and bliss. For speechwriters: to what extent does anything in your speech really mean a damn in the big scheme of things?

Thanks Bill, you’ve given me a whole raft of ideas: Feng Shui for Speechwriters; Speechwriting Zen (the companion to Presentation Zen); The Inner Game of Speechwriting, and more.

Leslie gives us a fascinating glimpse under the hood at Burson-Marsteller, the mainstream PR Agency where she works.

The Burson Asia-Pacific CEO gathered his Tokyo staff together for a hour-long slide show about his latest family vacation in Africa. Apart from sharing more than we needed to know about the status of his son’s private parts, the incident struck Leslie as a wonderful moment where:

Quite.

However, when sharing private family moments with fellow workers, all managers, not just CEO’s should ask themselves a few questions:

Better might be to post family snapshots to one of the many photo-sharing websites, such as this best of breed site, now part of HP. Colleagues have the opportunity to vicariously share your travel experiences when, and if, they chose to do so. While it denies the executive an opportunity for puffery, it can still reveal their human side.

I read somewhere that people who emigrate forever think of their homeland as it was in the year when they left. This means that my views on England will be frozen in a perpetual 1974, before Britpop, Tony Blair and CCTV cameras haunted the land.

So it’s always useful for me to update my knowledge about England and the English. The Guardian has a list of what it means to be English. Symbolic items on the list include the cuppa, the Spitfire and Stonehenge (my computer background is the Windows stock photo of this stone circle). I’m familiar with nearly all these icons. However, I had never heard of The Angel of the North – a gigantic statue (which looks more like a hang-glider than an angel) looming over the motorway near Gateshead in northern England. The sculptor who created this edifice goes by the very English name of Arthur Gormley and is quoted as saying:

A quote like this unites God and Mammon and is worthy of a long line of practical Englishmen going back to the Industrial Revolution. My favorite example, from my A-level English Literature studies, is Mr. Grandgrind of Charles Dickens’s ‘Hard Times’, where the town of Coketown is described as:

Celebrated in song by Ewan McColl:

This dark Satanic mills aspect of Northern England contrasts with the White Cliffs of Dover and genteel aspects of the South. The visitor to any country needs to be aware of strong regional differences which exist within the borders of the nation. There’s a North / South divide in England, the USA, Japan, Italy and many other places.

Country music isn’t the only global brand to come out of Nashville.

The Nashville Business Journal reports that Snappy Solutions, an eBay drop-off store, is planning to expand internationally. They have spotted a business opportunity to re-sell overseas the obsolete equipment no longer needed by US companies – where it would be put to good use.

Indeed, as American’s keep their economic engine turning over by throwing away more and more stuff each year, there’s a huge potential for our junk to become someone else’s treasure. This theme was explored in depth in Pietra Rivoli’s fascinating book, which notes there is a market

“…for almost all of the textile articles thrown away by Americans. The high-end items with quirky appeal will be sold to vintage clothing shops all over Europe and North America, and the Japanese will get most of the Levi’s. Winter coats will go to Eastern Europe, and old cotton sweaters will go to Pakistan to be turned into new sweaters…The heart of the business, though, is the trade with Africa, where the exploding supply of castoffs from the rich meets the incessant demand for clothing from the poor.”

However, as Snappy Auctions plans it’s assault on the world auction market, experts warn that franchising American businesses globally is not without problems:

As businesses go global it is sound advice to always check the nuances of your business model with partners who know the local culture. Start with your company name. The well known disasters of Chevrolet trying to sell the ‘No-Va’ in Mexico and Rolls Royce’s plans to introduce the ‘Silver Mist’ in Germany (let alone the eyebrows that Canadian-based Roots still raises among Australians) shows that names that are legit in the USA can cause embarrassment or worse overseas (as more than one eager American must have found when introducing himself to young ladies in England by looking them in the eye and saying “Hi, I’m Randy!”)

So here’s wishing Snappy Solutions success.

Businesspeople love to use sports analogies. A English or Australian manager may warn that a product defect will mean he is “Batting on a sticky wicket”. In the USA when tempers flare at meetings cooler heads might request “A time out” (on first hearing, this caused me to anticipate a chocolate caramel treat). But what cultural differences are shown by sports, and the sports fan? Can sports be the basis for cultural understanding? What, for instance, can we learn about the English from the behavior of their soccer supporters who travel abroad?

Simon Kuper, the Financial Times Sports Columnist writing in this Weekend’s Edition reports that the English as a nation enjoy foreign travel partly because of their belief that, once abroad, none of the usual inhibitions apply. They feel at liberty to talk to strangers, to order alcohol at 6am. Thinking back to my own decision to emigrate from England 25 years ago, there is a certain truth to that claim. When you grow up in an island nation with, as Bill Bryson so cleverly points out in Notes from a Small Island:

“a totally private sense of distance..most visibly seen in the shared pretense that Britain is a lonely island in the middle of an empty green sea.”

then a wonderful sense of freedom and awe is felt when you first experience the sheer size of continents like North America, which had so many elements (distant horizons, extremes of weather, tasty food and sexually appealing residents) that England lacks. It’s all very seductive and a typical Englishman or woman might well let their hair down while on holiday.

Kuper reveals the dark underbelly of certain Englishmen (dealing as he does with exclusively male gangs of soccer supporters) when abroad:

“Other nationalities are deterred from traveling to games by fear of physical discomfort. Many English people, however, enjoy physical discomfort. I was once jammed among drunken Manchester United supporters who were toppling backwards, urinating and shouting abuse at Portuguese people while queuing for a game in Porto. I realised: this is what they’d come for. Traveling with British fans often involves hangovers, nausea, disgusting toilets, extreme cold or heat, and being tear-gassed by police. To many British fans, it’s all part of “having a laugh”.”

Kuper expresses the opinion that sporting tournaments worldwide are “morping into British cultural festivals” and claims foreigners admire the Brits passion and abandon. At the soccer World Cup in 2002 he saw “nymph-like Japanese schoolgirls [getting] photographed with fat, drunken, shaven-headed England fans.” This leads him to argue that Britain’s image abroad, once shaped by “the English gentleman” is now shaped by “the English party animal” and that these inebriated ambassadors of Albion are exerting a “grip on global youth culture”, attracting foreign students to the UK (“Oh, let’s go where we can study with the drunken, urinating ones, Naomi-san”) and even generating important sources of revenue for the British music and sports businesses.

Well, Man U are a leading global brand. We’ve seen the success the British musical exports from The Beatles and Rolling Stones through Oasis and now Coldplay and Franz Ferdinand. But I find it difficult to attribute this success to the obnoxious behavior of the uninhibited English soccer fan visiting Osaka or Lisbon.

Rather than try and understand the English by extrapolating from their untypical behaviors while on their hols, it’s better by far to look at their sports fans on their home turf. Here you’ll see a passionate identification with the locality (Once an Alex supporter, always an Alex supporter, as they used to say at Gresty Road in Crewe). There’s a phlegmatic ability to support the underdog (as Arthur Fowler did year in and year out on Eastenders, and as they used to demonstrate at Gresty Road). They also cemented the economic domination of the days of Empire with the lasting delight of the games of rugby and cricket in far corners of the globe.

It’s hard to see this behavior outside the British Isles.

Certainly, modern-day America has stimulated some interest in American football via satellite broadcasts into Australian and British living rooms, and the Japanese have an inordinate fondness for baseball. But few nations holds a “World Series” where other countries are not invited to play. And I can’t see the current Empire-building spree in the Middle East leaving a legacy of touch football behind. When football teams regularly migrate from Oakland to Los Angeles and back, and ballparks are named and renamed by ICT companies, there’s little permanence in the American sporting scene (with noticeable exceptions such as the Green Bay Packers and the New York baseball teams).

A real basis for cultural understanding might be the willingness of people who travel abroad to take the time to enjoy local sports. Blend in with the crowd at a bullfight in Barcelona, a sumo match in Saga, an Aussie rules football game in Adelaide or a visit to Gresty Road on a cold gray winter afternoon to watch the Alex lose to Wigan, while the crowd shout good-natured obscenities and sip their hot Bovril.