I’m honored to have my blog listed among the 101 Public Speaking websites published by the Guide to Online Communication Master Programs.
This is a comprehensive, annotated list of websites and blogs dealing with
These include many of the sites I refer to on a regular basis as well as ones I was not aware of. This is a resource well worth bookmarking.
David Lavenda’s August 8 “Leadership Now” column in Fast Company online lists 10 Storytelling Tips from Israeli-based Susan Fisher.
Fisher acknowledges the fear some executives have about telling stories since they might be seen as manipulative and emotional. These are presenters who like to stick to facts. However, she points out:
…the truth is that real emotions always work better, because that is the way to reach hearts and minds, and also people get to see the real you. It’s authentic.
Here’s her 10 tips for becoming an authentic and effective storyteller–with my comments in parens:
Nancy Duarte was the guest speaker at Monday’s meeting of the Silicon Valley Speechwriters Roundtable. Duarte is the well-known author of slide:ology and Resonate and the founder and CEO of Duarte, Inc.
Nancy acknowledged the important role writing her books has had on the growth of her business. A few years ago, while searching for presentation blogs, she came across Garr Reynolds Presentation Zen blog. Garr encouraged her to write a book that covered “everything he left on the table” with his own draft of Presentation Zen. The result was slide:ology. She is grateful that Garr encouraged her to write her first book, since it was instrumental in helping refocus her agency on presentation-specific work.
Garr and Nancy are still good friends and she hosted him at a recent lunchtime talk about presentations at the Silicon Valley headquarters of her company.
Nancy’s second book, Resonate, was in many ways the prequel to her first. She acknowledges that writing slide:ology made the phone ring for slides, while Resonate made the phone ring for content. She sees a trend with some of her clients where she is being asked to help develop creative content and conversations that don’t need slides. She sometimes arms clients with graphics they can draw on a whiteboard while presenting.
The concepts in Resonate are one model among many her company uses. When they engage with clients they first host an interactive discovery workshop. They probe for the “one big idea” that the client wishes to communicate. This can be a painful process for some clients, who might not have given their big idea any thought and might, in fact, discover they lack the focus they need to have before they present. The next step for the Duarte team is to break down and rebuild the clients’ idea, wrap it in a story and concepts and then re-propose back to the client what they think they should say. At this stage they use slide maps which match the stages of the presentation to the best supporting images, data or pictures. Once this is approved, the presentation is story-boarded.
Nancy’s advice for speechwriters who have “difficult” clients–who are not be fully invested in the need to prepare for a presentation–is to pick a high stakes presentation to request complete client involvement. Avoid getting caught up in small skirmishes. The higher the stakes, the more involvement an executive should see they need to have. That is the time to pitch the ideas on why it needs to be done right. Speechwriters need to understand most clients are not masters of the spoken word. We are the experts in storytelling who live and breathe this world. It’s advisable to give clients time to acclimate to our ways of thinking.
A Sparkline is an analysis tool Nancy introduced in Resonate that represents a presentation. She jokes that, no, Martin Luther King did not use a Sparkline to plan his “I Have a Dream” speech since she was only two-years old at the time! Indeed, a Sparkline is not something to use in preparing a speech, but in analyzing why a successful speech works.
“If you were to align on the left everything that is what is, and align on the right everything what could be, and you’ve crafted it and you know it’s right, it ends up following the form on its own. It’s a pattern that is persuasive.”
she gives some compelling examples OF Sparklines in her TED talk that has been seen over a million people:
Such eloquence does not come easily. Nancy mentioned that she put over 30 hours rehearsal time into her 18-minute TED talk. The TED format forces people to be concise and has, she believes, changed the presentation industry. It’s the new gold standard and audiences now know what a good presentation looks like. Audiences have low tolerance for lack of presentation and TED has played a part in that.
Among the women speakers Nancy admires are:
Nancy revealed she has a new book coming in October. She also plans to release a free multimedia version of Resonate. Her team are also developing tools that allow audiences will tap into a second screen for detailed information on a presentation.
If you are interested in attending future virtual meetings of the Silicon Valley Speechwriters Roundtable, open to anyone, regardless of location, please sign up on our Meetup page and you’ll be notified.
Carmine Gallo was the featured speaker at today’s meeting of the Silicon Valley Speechwriters Roundtable. Gallo is the author of The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience
Gallo is a communications coach for the world’s most admired brands. A former anchor and correspondent for CNN and CBS, he works directly with the world’s top business leaders to help them craft compelling messages, tell inspiring stories and share their innovative ideas with a global audience. Gallo has addressed executives at Intel, Cisco, Google, Medtronic, Disney, The Four Seasons, SAP, Pfizer, Linked In, Chevron, SanDisk, Univision, Edmunds.com, and many others.
Gallo encouraged us to watch the many Steve Jobs videos available on YouTube. The overriding theme of every presentation is the simplicity of the message. This is conveyed in one-word slides, supported by demos, props and the very theatrical nature of the way Jobs presents.
Gallo shared that in his own work as a communications coach he often challenges the executives he works with to use no more than 40 words on PowerPoint slides in total (not per slide). This forces people to tell stories, which makes the presentation more memorable. He is a believer in the “rule of three” and noted that no matter how complex and comprehensive the Apple products he launched, Jobs would usually tell the audience three things about the device. Indeed, this carried over into his famous 2005 Stanford University Commencement Address where he starts by saying that “Today, I want to tell you three stories from my life, that’s it, no big deal, just three stories.”
Gallo then followed his own advice and shared information from each of the three sections of his book.
Back in the dark ages of 2010 when he wrote the book, Gallo recognized the importance of creating Twitter-like headlines in a speech. Of limiting the message to a single 140-character sentence. If a speaker is unable to convey their message in one sentence, speechwriters need to work with them until they can. This is what Daniel Pink did when he wrote speeches based on one sentence for Vice-President Al Gore.
Apple products often have a one-sentence, memorable headline that Jobs used in his speeches and would be repeated in Press releases and advertisements:
The MacBook Air: The world’s thinnest notebook:
Gallo asks his clients if they want to move beyond the level of simply delivering information to really inspiring audiences. Those who want to get better, to deliver the best presentation they can, give a window through which he can work aggressively with that person. The worst are those who claim to already be good presenters. Gallo finds it’s very difficult to get through to them. In this case he’ll go into the financial reasons why great presentation move the needle.
The founder of SanDisk, Dr. Eli Harari once told Gallo:
“Carmine, I know that every $1 change in our stock price is equivalent to $90m and that’s why I bring you in to help tell the best story I can to the investment community.”
Speechwriters should avoid making their clients into clones of Steve Jobs. People need to find their own voice. But there are techniques that Apple uses, that TED Talks use, that we should adopt for our clients’ presentations.
One key to delivering an insanely great speeches is to reveal what Gallo calls a “Holy Shit” moment. This is an emotionally charged point in the speech which is a different or surprising way of delivering the content. It takes time, creativity and effort to craft the delivery in a way that touches people emotionally. Very often this can be by telling a story. Audiences need to hear a great story. Most Silicon Valley executives don’t tell stories, they deliver information. Speechwriters should ask clients what is the one thing they want the audience to remember and then discover a way that this be packaged to create an emotionally charged event that is stamped on the brain.
The famous speech Bill Gates gave at TED on malaria is remembered for the “Holy Shit” moment when he released mosquitoes in the auditorium saying “There’s no reason only poor people should have the experience…”
Gallo reinforced the well-known fact that Steve Jobs worked harder on every keynote he gave than most executives ever do. The ones who “wing it” by looking over note cards in the back of the town car on the way to the venue can never appear as “natural” onstage as Jobs did. He would spend hours preparing and rehearsing. He brought the same intensity to his public presentations as he did to the design and manufacture of the iconic technology of our age.
Gallo warned, however, that speechwriters should guard against executives obsessing over the stock photo chosen for their opening slide to the detriment of real rehearsal.
Gallo closed by recommending that, for ideas on how to design presentations planned for audiences of Millennials, speechwriters look at the archives on Slideshare of past winners of the “Best Presentation” contest he helps judge, such as this winner from 2010.
If you are interested in attending future virtual meetings of the Silicon Valley Speechwriters Roundtable, open to anyone, regardless of location, please sign up on our Meetup page and you’ll be notified.
Here’s an incredibly comprehensive listing of 150 resources for writers compiled by Claire Morgan and published on the Open Education Database website. It includes everything writers need, from proper citation and grammar guides to organizational tools, legal help, news digests, media resources, and much more.
Columnist Andrew Hill, writing in today’s Financial Times, warns executives in Silicon Valley that they could become the next public enemies, facing a PR backlash similar to that suffered by bankers.
He sees warning signs in the recent attacks on Apple, Google and Amazon for their tax strategies; for questions about the growing economic and income inequality in northern California; and activist worries about ill-protected privacy, dirt-cheap labour and the energy efficiency of data centers.
He quotes a recent article by Silicon Valley native George Parker, who grew up in the area in the late 1970’s when a home in Palo Alto cost $125,000, in contrast to the scene today when:
There are fifty or so billionaires and tens of thousands of millionaires in Silicon Valley; last year’s Facebook public stock offering alone created half a dozen more of the former and more than a thousand of the latter. There are also record numbers of poor people, and the past two years have seen a twenty-per-cent rise in homelessness, largely because of the soaring cost of housing. After decades in which the country has become less and less equal, Silicon Valley is one of the most unequal places in America.
Nevertheless, Hill notes, the public trust in, and love of, technology is much higher than that of banks. If executives can resist the temptation to take the users for granted, share some of the wealth, and “stay clean” in terms of communications they will be able to placate public opinion.
The advice to those who write the speeches of tech execs is to
…adopt a new slogan, borrowed from Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer’s declaration to fans of Tumblr, the blogging platform her company has just bought: “We promise not to screw it up.”
The annual Ragan Speechwriters Conference was held March 20 – 22, 2013 at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington DC.
I was not able to attend this year, but, like anyone who has access to Twitter, I enjoyed following the conference virtually via the hashtag #raganspeech.
If you’d like to read more speechwriter tweets, check out these 138 tweets from the 2012 Ragan Speechwriters Conference.
All of these tweets are a great source of information to anyone who wants to know about the things speechwriters are interested in. We owe a special debt of gratitude to anyone who tweeted, and especially to the three most active people:
Here’s a fun picture that shows at a glance the topics and presenters that attracted the most comments.
Click to enlarge – Image by Wordle.
The list, like Twitter, is in reverse chronological order, with the most recent tweets at the top.
Seven years ago this month, I added this Professionally Speaking blog to my Executive Communications website. Now, on New Year’s Day 2013, which happens to be my father’s 92nd Birthday — Happy Birthday Dad! — I’ve reached the milestone of 700 blog postings. This seems like a suitable moment to reflect some of the key lessons I’ve learned from my experience in providing executive communications support to my clients in Silicon Valley and around the world. You know you’ve hired a world-class speechwriter and communications consultant when they embrace these seven qualities.
Sitting in meetings at major Silicon Valley companies such as Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard and Cisco, I’m often the only person in the room without a few thousand people reporting to them or a multi-billion dollar target to meet. This can be an incredibly useful role that a CEO will come to value. As the speechwriter, I’m the one person in the room the CEO can turn to without an agenda of my own to advance. A CEO once told me “Ian, it’s lonely at the top. I’ve seen every scam that managers can pull to cover their rear ends. I need someone like you who can tell it like it is.”
Key Lesson: Speechwriters with the confidence to speak up become the confidant and trusted adviser of a senior executive.
I was once brought in to edit an Annual Report for a European client with four separate divisions. My role was to resolve the different viewpoints of each group. The VP of Communications needed an outside consultant with the independence required to be able to write a cohesive document. Executive communications professionals are in a unique position to be an impartial observer in large organizations with multiple departments and competing interests.
Key Lesson: Take the initiative and tell the truth, no matter what certain executives want to hear. But don’t take sides within a company. We need to keep lines of communication open to all parties.
Companies are filled with subject matter experts (SMEs) in engineering, finance, marketing, and sales. A speechwriter is a jack-of-all-trades, master of none. But that’s our hidden value to a company. It’s my job to know a little bit about everything the company does, and who to talk to when I need details. But lack of detail is rarely an issue. Time and again, I’ve asked SMEs for the background information needed for five to 10 minutes of a speech only to be given enough data for a two-day seminar. My job is to absorb enormous volumes of data and take the complexity out–to find a way to communicate the message without putting the audience to sleep.
Key Lesson: Learn to simplify. Only include what is necessary to convey what is essential. As Einstein said “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
As others have noted, people may not remember what you did or said, but they will always remember how you made them feel. Audiences forget facts, but they remember stories. Once you get past the jargon, the corporate world is an endless source of fascinating stories. I’ve found the best source of great stories for speeches come from informal chats when you are sitting down over coffee or, as I did one memorable afternoon, sharing a beer and pizza with the CEO in Boston’s North End. We talked about our time there as students. He shared a story about the lessons he’d learned outside the Harvard classroom that I used in a future speech.
Key Lesson: Always listen for stories executives tell about their childhood, family life, hobbies, early career and more. Dig for specifics. As speech coach Patricia Fripp says: “Specificity builds credibility.”
The one-hour keynote is an endangered species. Conference organizers know audiences have short attention spans. Given travel budget restrictions, many organizations are turning to virtual meetings. Executives now need to feel comfortable on camera as well as on the podium.
My three years as a communications consultant at Cisco introduced me to the exciting possibilities of TelePresence meetings. I also enjoyed access to fully-equipped TV studios to produce All Hands meetings. But it was just as exciting working with the limitations of a simple Flip camera to capture video that I edited with Windows Movie Maker. These days it’s not enough to write clever speeches, you need to keep current with the latest in multimedia technology.
Key Lesson: Digital media expands the boundaries of executive communications. Suggest it as an alternative to travel; use it to time-shift; create content that includes outdoor shots, audience testimonials and impromptu out-takes; record staff interviews; livestream events; experiment with transmedia storytelling.
The audience is no longer silent. They might look like they are sitting quietly, but a raging debate on what Cliff Atkinson called The Backchannel can occur within and beyond the confines of the presentation venue.
I’m amazed at the resistance some speakers have to this. My experience curating Twitter hashtags for specific events shows that there’s a rapidly emerging opportunity to magnify the impact of a speech and increase the reach beyond the walls of the auditorium.
Key Lesson: Learn about and embrace the backchannel. Make sure your executive has a Twitter account and use it for shameless self-promotion and to stimulate a lively debate before, during and after each presentation they make.
As a communications professional, it’s not your role to out-gun the SMEs, VPs and assorted executives in the C-Suite when it comes to content. Our role is to ask what headline the CEO wants the speech to produce, to find out the audience’s hot buttons, and to uncover the unique point of view the speaker brings to the issue.
If there’s one lesson I’ve taken away from the work I’ve done for clients, it’s to always be ready to ask “Why is that?” when they suggest points they want to make in a speech. When they give an answer, have the courage to ask the same question again. It’s often only after they answer for the third time that the core of the speech is revealed.
Key Lesson: Don’t hurry to get to a final draft. Be professional and respect deadlines, but keep asking questions until you reach an answer that will make the audience sit up and take notice.
What executive communications lessons have YOU learned? Share them by leaving a comment below.
A decade ago, the tools of communications belonged to a chosen few. Editorial control over newspapers, television and radio was in the hands of those professionals tasked with selecting content deemed worthy of the front page, the headline, the news bulletin. National newspapers and mass media channels were scarce resources. The stories they carried were linear and sequential. The 10 o’clock news was broadcast for an hour each evening at the same time. Important news was on the front page, above the fold.
That was then, this is now.
Today’s world is nonlinear, filled with always-on devices giving anywhere, any time access to media generated by those of us with a WordPress blog and a point of view. Storytelling has come full circle from the logical inevitability of the printed page to the random, emotionally binding, infinitely looping immersive stories of this fragmented age where anyone can create and re-purpose content, as did the bards of pre-literate eras.
The implications of the transition from top-down to user-generated content is explored in detail by Frank Rose in his book The Art of Immersion.
Rose identifies the roots of non-linear storytelling in the popular serials Charles Dickens published in the 1830’s. But it was the creation of the hyper-links of the World Wide Web that blew the lid off linear narrative:
Links change our relationship to information. They empower individuals and destroy hierarchies.
Cinema directors such as Quentin Tarantino, Jean-Luc Goddard and David Lynch create immersive, non-linear forms of film.
The unexpected juxtapositions, the startling elisions, the scenes out of sequence–asleep or awake, this is how we think, in a fast-dissipating vapor.
The implication is that we live in a multiverse, where events occur simultaneously. As the Western-born Spiritual Adept Adi Da Samraj has written about photography:
The human individual in the midst of Reality is like a camera in a room—perceiving everything from a fixed “point of view”. But what does the room Really look like? The room can be viewed from every possible “point of view” in space-time—not merely from any particular “point of view”, or even a finite collection of “points of view”. Therefore, no “point of view” can reveal the room, or Reality Itself, because every “point of view” is limited and essentially self-referring.
Frank Rose explores the art of immersive storytelling and the emerging transmedia methods that the best practitioners are developing in video games, advertising, movies, social media, television and more.
In August 2012 I met Frank at a Churchill Club event in Silicon Valley and took the opportunity to ask him about the implications of immersive storytelling for professional speakers and corporate communications professionals. To hear what he told me, click on the podcast icon below.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 3:39 — 866.8KB)
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Authenticity is one the hallmarks of a successful presentation. Audiences can sense when a presenter is not delivering a message that is congruent with their beliefs. This is an emotional as much as an intellectual challenge, and one that many CEO’s are destined to fail. The reason, according to Anthony Goodman, writing in Monday’s Financial Times, is that many chief executives are prisoners of their environment. Quoting Professor Roger Martin who writes in Fixing The Game:
“Institutional investors, equity analysts, investment bankers, hedge funds and the financial press have emerged as central figures in the CEO’s community … a community rife with transactional relationships, exploitation and distrust.”
Martin believes that executives pander to these constituencies, leading them to make decisions that often do not deliver long-term value to the organizations they lead and deliver communications that lack authenticity.
When you hear a CEO present at a conference, you see one person. What you don’t see is the phalanx of communications staff, from the heads of Public Relations to the speechwriter, PowerPoint design team and event staff who had a hand in creating and revising the content that they deliver.
It’s a rare chief executive who has the time and attention on the speech to ensure that, as well as being an accurate communication about the institutional programs and objectives, it is also something that sounds totally authentic when they deliver it.
Audience’s remember those CEO’s who do take the time to embody their speeches as authentic communications of who they are. The rest, they forget.
