The National Speakers Association of Northern California March Meeting

Saturday’s meeting of the Northern California Chapter of the National Speakers Association was one of the most valuable and informative meetings I have attended in the last five years. There were three of my Cisco communications colleagues in the room, all furiously taking notes. If we collectively implement just 10% of the tips and tricks shared by the two speakers, executive communications at our company might never be the same again.

Sticky Content – How to use Extreme Platform, Interactive, and Visual Techniques to be Massively Memorable, with Brian Walter, CSP

Brian is a “corporate humorist” with a unique blend of communications expertise. Over a 25+ year career, he’s been an advertising director, marketing & sales director, radio & TV commercial producer, copywriter, communications manager, presentation coach, video producer, management trainer, consultant and professional speaker. He’s even a Guinness Book of World Records holder for producing the world’s shortest TV commercial. Brian has earned the elite Certified Speaking Professional (CSP) from the National Speakers Association, and is a member of Meeting Professionals International.

Brian’s business is called Extreme Meetings. He provides customized “infotainment” to make meetings memorable. Brian has presented to audiences ranging from 7 to 7,000. His clients have included Starbucks, Microsoft, Costco, Pepsico, AAA, Payless, Verizon Wireless, several banks that are no longer in existence, the Social Security Administration, a regional office of the IRS…and a dairy company best known for awesome chocolate milk.

Brian shared a humongous list of tips tricks and tested techniques for engaging audiences and taking your speech from ordinary to extraordinary.

E-Ticket Ride Moments

Back in the day, Disneyland famously offered top-priced E-ticket rides.

These were the Matterhorn, the Pirates of the Caribbean – the best in the Park, the ones you told your friends about the next day. They were the exciting rides, the ones where something happened. For your speech to have impact, it must either be perfect (difficult to achieve time in and time out), or it must have built-in production values which guarantee the audience will remember what you said. In other words, it must have a few E-Ticket moments (but not too many to be overwhelming). These are the moments when the presentation goes beyond the facts and figures, the basic information, the data that make up most corporate content. Instead look for interaction; movement; unique visuals; music; costumes; video; sound effects; SFX; risk; props; volume; placement; and spectacle.

Carefully craft those memorable moments that would be included in a movie trailer about your presentation. Ask yourself, would a trailer advertising your speech feature your talking head all the time (nah!), or would it feature the moments when things happen – when you bring the guy on stage; throw something into the audience; show a video or even risk wheeling in a pallet of dollar bills to illustrate a sales goal that has been achieved?

People want content, but they want sizzle too. Brian suggests there’s a false dichotomy between the two. He offers a blend he calls “contizzle”.

How to give your speech impact

Make it:

Gettable: Most presentations are larded with too much information. Give them the data but make sure they also get the point in a memorable way. You want that “Scooby Doo” moment, when the audience tilt their heads and think “Woo-Hoo”.

Emotional: Hook into their feelings. People’s decisions are based on emotion. Understand they are not looking for two more bullet points before they will be convinced about your argument. You need your idea to go “verbally viral”, to be an idea that can be shared. Imagine what they might say to their significant other when they return home from your meeting. They’re not going to mention the fifth bullet point on the fourth slide, are they, Mr. or Ms. Exec-Comms Manager? No, they’ll summarize it in one to two sentences, sentences about what hit them at an emotional level. So why not sweat the detail on that, with as much energy and attention as you do on making sure every speed and feed is included.

Actionable: offer them a realistic next step to take after the talk ends.

Bottom line: Brian offered two ways to make a talk stick. Firstly through engaging in extreme interaction with the audience; secondly by creating mini brands for the content (as he does with the following branded techniques).

Extreme Audience Interaction

In the richest and most expansive part of his presentation, Brian offered a range of ways in which you can ask for volunteers from a live audience to participate in your talk. All avoid the whining, begging, pleading tone, that some presenters are forced to adopt with a reluctant audience, as their credibility leaks from the soles of their shoes into the floor of the podium.

My one regret is that few of these techniques are applicable to the increasingly popular world of virtual meetings. It’s a shame that some companies have lost sight of the value of that aspect of the rich tapestry of human experience that allows for these opportunities for emotional connection between the presenter and the audience; tolerating meetings where every presenter is reduced to the two-dimensional window in the remote viewer’s computer screen. What price flesh and blood and human emotion in a virtual world?

Asking for Volunteers – the Brian Walter Way

The first rule is do not ever, ever, ever embarrass people. Protect their dignity. But this doesn’t mean being boringly politically correct. It’s interesting to your audience the extent you allow your volunteers to seem to be at risk.

So how do you put people in a risky situation in front of their peers, and have their permission to embarrass them in a way that will allow everyone else in the audience to feel that vicarious thrill that comes with watching a colleague twist in the wind, out on a limb, wondering if they will make it or fake it?

Here’s how.

• Bribe them. Offer $20 for someone to come up on stage (or $50 for senior management) and you’ve got instant permission to ask them to do or say anything that might make them look the fool, because they want you to show them the money. Believe Brian when he says that this works every time. Can’t afford the money if you want a lot of interaction? Simple. Offer Starbucks gift cards for a “mystery amount” (they won’t know they’re only worth $5 until long after you’ve left the auditorium).
• Set them up. Acknowledge that this will be an embarrassing situation on stage and ask for everyone’s permission to play along. Again, this works.
• Volunteer ball. Toss a small ball into the audience. Whoever catches it can either be the volunteer, or more likely gets to choose the person to their left or right. Brian spent time explaining how this simple act engages the whole audience on both sides of the aisle emotionally – from those who are immediately relieved the ball is not coming over to their side of the room; to those in the rows immediately before and behind the person who catches it and have that moment of anxiety that it might hit them; to the delight on the face of the guy or gal who gets to point the finger at their colleague who will now go up on stage.
• Choose the pointer. Whoever you point to in the audience to volunteer is given a reprieve. They get to choose the person who must step up. This is especially effective when you have chosen somebody who emphatically shakes their head that they will not volunteer. Congratulations! You now tell me who should come up on stage. Watch the emotion on their face change instantly.

Putting more action in interaction

Each one of these interaction techniques was worth the price of admission for the day. Each showcased Brian’s real expertise at creating extreme meetings. While he freely admits he does not own these techniques, and we can borrow them for our own events, it’s a rare presenter who would have the skill to successfully implement them the first time they were tried with an audience. But, hey, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

• Be a poser. Ask questions. So, what is this? Who said that? No matter what the response your answer is You are right. For example, rather than playing it the way the boring SME would, show the audience this graphic:

  

  and simply ask So what is that?

  Someone in the audience will probably venture that it’s Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, or perhaps Pavlov’s hierarchy of needs. No matter what, congratulate them, affirm that it is Maslow’s, and move on. You’ve just rewarded somebody in the audience emotionally, making them a partner in the transfer of information in a far more effective way than the typical engineering product manager would. Use the same technique to ask people to guess percentages or numbers. Encourage the audience to shout out numbers and correct them as they over- or under-shoot.

• Be a big poser. Don’t be afraid to ask hard or obscure questions. If you want someone to guess where Starbucks got its name from, begin by asking are there any English majors in the room? Someone might guess that the name comes from Moby Dick. If not, you can start giving hints until the audience realizes what you’re asking for.
• One-on-ones. Here’s an opportunity to move into the audience to create dramatic energy. Don’t just randomly wander into an audience like some are known to do. Be intentional. Approach someone to ask a question, elicit a response, engage them in a conversation. This breaks the rules most presenters adhere to. Make that one person your new BFF. They become the go-to person for the rest of your presentation. Everyone will be rooting for you as you shine the glow of attention on them in front of the audience.
• Shout outs. Have a group shout out responses to questions you pose. Don’t be afraid of a little chaos and more noise in the auditorium that most presenters tolerate. It’s all good emotional connection.
• Two truths and a lie. This was the golden nugget of the whole day. Rather than trying to explain the technique take a look at this YouTube video from last summer’s National Speakers Association convention where Brian used it on stage in front of an audience of 2000 to get extreme meeting interaction. It’s an 8 minute video, filmed on a Flip camera, but stay with it, it’s worth every moment:

• Fluffy, fluffy, deep. Here’s how to humanize a senior executive with three questions. The trick is to give the executive a long list of potential questions beforehand and have them choose the three they would like to answer (give them the chance to fill in the blank, none will). Two of the three questions will be “fluffy” (warm, fuzzy ones) and one will be “deep”. For example: What is your secret guilty pleasure? What actor would you like to play you in real life? What species is your family pet? These allow the audience to see the warm fuzzy side of the executive. Follow with a single deep question: What does it take for someone to get recognition and promotion in the company today? If you could change one sales goal this quarter, what would that be? Realize that it’s easier to segue into the profound emotion from the warm fuzzy feeling that it is to land on it cold.
• Speed Interviewing. Ask people to form groups of three and give them just 45 seconds to come up with the answer to a question or suggestion. It’s a ridiculously short amount of time in which to accomplish the task. Yet it creates instant energy as people rush to get the group to hear what they have to say. It will send the energy of the room through the roof.
• Instant Actors. Here’s your chance to bring people on stage from the audience for a cameo appearance. Print out dialogue for them to read in large font ahead of time on cards, highlighting the text for each person. You now have permission to use humor and go way over the top, since people are playing characters from their world, rather than speaking their own beliefs. If you don’t want to use real people, Brian has had success with sock puppets. I’m currently a big fan of creating cartoons that convey content which would otherwise be difficult for the audience to handle.
• Point-Counterpoint. A time-tested of speaking truth to power since the glory days of the 1970s:

  Get your corporate actors to man up to this and you’ll be surprised how far even the most conservative audience will let you go with your content. Memorable won’t even begin to describe what they’ll be talking about around the water cooler the next morning.

Mini Brands

The key to a memorable talk is, as Brian has demonstrated with the mini branded interaction techniques above, to have snappy titles for all of the key concepts in your talk. This boosts retention and connects with people emotionally. Name your key points with phrases like “verbal ping-pong” instead of “the elevator pitch”. Take the time to develop a logo or icon for each and your talk will be more memorable. Brian has had success with:

• Fact or crap. Senior leaders quickly pick up on the keyword and have no problem calling something crap during the rest of the meeting. Okay, so it’s politically incorrect, but a proven and more memorable brand name than “fact or fiction”. No one will be standing up on the podium saying something is fiction, fiction, fiction the way they will use the four letter alternative. This is the power of a memorable brand versus the inanely bland.
• Do you pass the smile test? Are people in your team more likely to smile when you are coming into the room or when you are going out of it?

Introduce mini brands like this in your talk and listen as other presenters and the audience latch onto them during the rest of the conference.

To net it out, the goal of a good presentation is not to end up with a bleedingly obvious “Bad Dragon” story. That’s where the executive, engineer or subject matter expert stands up and tells people what the problem is; how their solution will make it better and help slay the Dragon; and how the organization will live happily ever after. The unfortunate reality is, that describes the vast majority of what passes for corporate communications in the Fortune 500 these days.

Build in some of Brian’s “contizzle” tricks; tell a good story with real obstacles to overcome; make sure there’s at least four or five memorable moments, and the audience will remember your message the next day and perhaps even the day after that.

What I Learned From Winning 29 Emmys That Speakers Need to Know, with Bill Stainton

Planning an event isn’t rocket science. It’s harder. You have to be the master of 1,001 details—everything from negotiating the hotel room block to deciding on the typeface for the program. After so much planning and effort, the last thing you need is a speaker who makes your attendees yawn, shrug their shoulders, and think, “Hmmm—I guess it’s going to be another one of those meetings.” A speaker like that can kill your event before it even gets off the ground.

What if, instead, you could get the attendees to think, “This is fantastic! This is hilarious! I’m so glad I’m here!” That’s certainly the reaction from the NSA/NC crowd to Bill’s afternoon presentation. Bill is a true showman who lived up to the name of his company: Ovation Speaking.

Bill paid his show biz dues. He spent fifteen years in front of the cameras of the top-rated local comedy TV show in the country—Seattle’s legendary Almost Live!—so he knows how to entertain an audience.

Unlike Brian, there was not as much for me to capture for the extreme meeting report. It was as much the way he delivered his material as what he delivered. The most memorable part of the afternoon for me was when he showed a video of his onstage riff at a past NSA Convention satirizing the conference theme. Take a look, it’s priceless:

Bill advises that all talks should be treated as a “show” and in that sense you have to think through three separate approaches: the producer who deals with the structure of the presentation; the writer who creates the content; and the performer who delivers it.

How to produce an effective presentation

Producers are responsible for the event details. They are in charge of driving the bus, the audience are the passengers. You have to have, as Brian indicated, a series of E-ticket moments built into the talk to keep the audience’s attention. Bill called them “bathroom blockers” – the times in a movie when you really have to go pee, but the action on the screen is so compelling you can’t leave the theater. You’ve got to think of what you can bring to the game to make your next presentation so compelling that people are blocked from going to the bathroom.

Bill shared the classic magicians advice: start with your second-best trick, end with your best trick, and put the rest of the content in the middle. Jay Leno, who Bill has worked with, always chose his ending joke first. The reason? Audiences always remember the last thing you say.

Which is one very obvious reason why you should never, ever, end with Q&A.

Find ways to build in an element of predictable unpredictability. You want to keep the audience guessing when something strange will happen next, but don’t do it in a predictable way. Avoid predictability to make sure those lean forward moments catch them by surprise.

A keynote speech should open with a five-minute microcosm of what the entire presentation will cover. This gives the audience an idea of how things are going to be set up. Take the time to decide what elements, themes, and flavors you will include in your first five minutes.

Writing the speech

Speechwriters, according to Bill, need to keep these main intentions front and center:

• Clarity. Make sure there are no unintended questions left hanging in the air by statements that confuse or bewilder the listener. This includes the use of acronyms and industry terms that the audience might not fully understand. Control the audiences focus during the speech. Avoid the error of going from A to C without going through B.
• Use precise words and concise phrases. Jerry Seinfeld, who Bill has worked with, claimed that a good day’s work is taking an eight word phrase down to five words. Go through your speech and making sure that all of your words have energy. For example, Mark Twain liked to illustrate the right choice of words as being the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. As most speechwriters know, there is power in alliteration, rhyming, and cognitive dissonance. NSA member Max Dixon talks about the coaching relationship he has with clients as a ruthless sanctuary, which is a great example of cognitive dissonance.
• Sprinkle smartness in your speech. It’s really okay to have some things that might be ahead of the classic 8th Grade reading level of the average member of the American public. You need just enough smartness to grab their interest, but don’t overdo it. Remember the average American audience really does have an 8th Grade reading level.

When writing, follow the advice of James Thurber, “Don’t get it right, just get it written”. Then edit.

Delivering the speech

Once speakers are on the podium they need to be larger than life. Like the band in Spinal Tap you need to be a 10 in real life but an 11 on the stage. Understand:

• The art of the pause is knowing how to skip a beat and add an infinitesimal pause before the punchline, but then once you’ve delivered the zinger, silently count to three, or if that makes you uncomfortable take a sip of water from a glass on the lectern, and wait for the audience to react. Often it will be a couple of seconds after you deliver the line that the chuckles start. Likewise, when you have delivered an important point in your content, do the same pause. Think for a moment about how we often pause video recordings. Build the same pauses into your live delivery to allow the audience to realize what you’ve just said and to process how it applies to their situation. Subject matter experts and comedians alike succeed or fail by their mastery of the art of the pause.
• Commit to the bit. This is as straightforward as defining, in your own words, what the segment of the presentation means and giving it all your energy. Even for the necessarily rushed material that had to be created under deadline.
• Four quick specific techniques. These were masterful suggestions.
  1. Don’t move on the punchline.
  2. Things that happen in the past should be indicated to the audience’s left. Those that happened today center stage, and those that happen tomorrow to the right.
  3. Play to the cheap seats first which means address the back of the room and the balconies at the opening of your talk.
  4. When you start to bomb, slow down. This is the only way to rescue a disaster.
• The performer’s secret weapon: Rehearsal. Very few speakers do this right. It’s not just do a quick run through or repetition of your content. Deliberately practice and look for ways to improve. Review the speech for material you need to add or delete, for where you need to add pauses. Tip: Make an audio recording of a speech and send it to people of equivalent background to the audience to see if they get the message.

Bill concluded with the quote of the day:

Improve, to the extent that yesterday’s audience is cheated by today’s performance.

Thanks to the fascinating website Sociological Images for a pointer to this interactive map at The Chronicle of Higher Education website that presents data on the proportion of U.S. adults with a bachelor’s degree over time. In 1940, in the vast majority of counties no more than 10% of the population had graduated from college (the national average was 4.6%):

Now the national average is 27.5%:

By comparing the maps over time, you can easily track a number of changes: the increase in college degrees overall, of course, but also changes in education such as the dramatic gains women have made in earning college degrees in the past few decades — the gender gap in college degrees was over 7 percentage points in 1980 but only about 1.5 points today.

This is a wonderful example of the visual display of quantitative information that would be very effective in a presentation, similar to that used by statistician Hans Rosling.

Alan Stephens’ Presentation Tip of the Week

Alan Stevens is the current President of the Global Speakers Federation. He is a PR Professional and expert on media and communications. His company ,The Media Coach, covers both traditional and social media. He’s also a member of the British Computer Society, and broadcasts regularly on technology and consumer issues. This posting appeared in his weekly newsletter.

Opening Up

The first line of your speech is crucially important. It may be the only line that every member of your audience hears, so it needs to be good. The more engaging it is, the more people will listen to the rest of your speech. If you’ve done your homework well, you will know what interests them. It won’t be the same for every audience, so don’t just have one option.

Firstly, here’s what not to do:

• Tell them your name. They know that already.
• Say how glad you are to be there. That’s a given.
• Start with a joke. You don’t need me to tell you why not.
• List your credentials. They will already have seen your bio.
• Tell them how funny your speech is. If you do, it won’t be.
• Make fun of them. It’s OK to make fun of yourself, not your audience.

Now we’ve got that out the way, what are some positive openers? Here are a few ideas, with examples:

• An intriguing promise “You will improve your memory by 10% in the next hour”
• Something contrary to popular wisdom “The Internet is finished…”
• A puzzle “How could you find the secret of success?”
• A simple piece of value “Three simple steps to double your business this year”

Of course, you have to deliver what you promised. Remember you have give something of value every time you speak. Tell people right at the start what it will be, and you will grab their attention.

This information was written by Alan Stevens, and originally appeared in “The MediaCoach”, his free weekly ezine, available at www.mediacoach.co.uk

The topic Speaking to Inform was the top request in my recent poll asking what people would like to hear about in my blog.

If you are delivering a public speech the goal should be to communicate as clearly as possible. In business settings, the more succinctly you communicate information, the better. This might not be true of an after-dinner or humorous speech. A speech can be entertaining even though it contains little or no new information. However, when you are speaking to inform, your audience will appreciate hearing information that is relevant to their concerns delivered in a manner they can absorb.

I believe there are four main ways of speaking to inform. More or less information can be delivered in an unclear or clear manner.

1. The foreign policeman

The least-useful form of communication is to deliver little or no information in an unclear manner. A classic example would be a tourist in France, who does not speak the language, hearing a command from a gendarme. The amount of information is minimal, but failure to understand could be fatal.

Acronyms convey information in an abbreviated form. But if members of the audience do not understand them, they are left in the dark. As brief as they are, always spell them out.

Few speakers would risk going in front an audience with little to say and no ability to be understood. However, were Dudley Moore to take to the podium when he was as drunk as he was in the movie Arthur, the result would be a complete disaster. So stay sober when you speak in public!

2. Road Signs

Even very long speeches can be broken down into concise nuggets of information, delivered in a manner that is quickly and easily understood. Road signs are designed to communicate important information instantaneously. When you are whizzing by at 60 mph, universally recognized icons are easily understood.

Intonation, cadence and gestures are your road signs to an audience. They improve people’s ability to follow what you are saying. Done right, they reinforce your message. Done wrong, like an overly verbose sign on the highway, they slow things down or even confuse people.

Presentations that use PowerPoint or Prezi convey information that supplements the spoken word. But the slides must be crisp and clear. The fewer words you display the better. Garr Reynolds and Nancy Duarte demonstrate the best way to display information visually. Done right, slides can help inform the audience. Done wrong, too much information on the screen will distract people from hearing your message. What you are saying will be ignored while they read the slide. If you have a wordy slide, stay silent while the audience reads it.

3. The subject matter expert

Subject experts often present too much information. They think that speaking to inform is merely creating lists of dry facts, in bullet form, and reading them aloud. Rather than loading the speech with facts, give the audience a white paper or printed report with the data. The fundamental error many corporations make is to put subject experts front of customers to explain their products.

If you need to present complex information, follow these simple rules.

An extreme example of information being presented in a rapid, incomprehensible manner are the legal disclaimers read out at the end of some radio ads. There are a surprising number of presentations given in the corporate world which sound like this. Remember, the answer to having too much information is to simplify the content, not to speak faster.

4. The storyteller

What subject experts fail to understand is the limited ability of the audience to absorb facts. People can only remember two or three main points in a speech. A few days after a talk, most of the information that is presented will have been forgotten.

What will be remembered are the stories you tell.

The most powerful way of speaking to inform is to use stories. These can be as simple as parables or nursery rhymes. By evoking an emotional response they implant information in a more memorable way than merely reciting facts. If you are speaking to inform, tell stories.

As voice coach Kate Peters says:

…creating stories out of raw information can help you see a problem or situation better in order to understand the solution better. Sometimes the data is overwhelming, but the story behind the spreadsheet can be illuminating.

A version of this article was first published by ragan.com.

Legendary speechwriter Ted Sorensen passed away on Sunday.

I was fortunate to see Sorensen present at the 2009 Ragan Speechwriters Conference. I enjoyed his book, Counselor.

The world of speechwriting has lost a stellar figure.

Of the many obituaries none is more insightful than this appreciation by American University speechwriting teacher Bob Lehrman who has given me permission to reprint this as a guest posting in my blog.

Former chief speechwriter for Vice President Al Gore in the White House, novelist and speechwriter Bob Lehrman has written speeches for dozens of political figures, teaches public speaking and speechwriting at American University, and is author of the much-praised new book, “The Political Speechwriter’s Companion: A Guide for Speakers and Writers” (CQPress 2009).

Ted Sorensen’s ‘signature’ marks the aspirations of every speechwriter

By Bob Lehrman

JFK’s ‘voice’ is stilled for a moment, but not for the ages.

In Teddy White’s pioneering The Making of a President 1960, he refers in diplomatic terms to what Ted Sorensen actually did. “His introspection, his reading, his elegant writing, had stimulated many of Kennedy’s finest thoughts and expressions.”

Today, 50 years later, the Washington Post is blunter about Sorensen, who died on Sunday, and who was due to speak at American University in March for the 2011 Speechwriters conference jointly sponsored by Ragan Communications and American University.

“JFK’s speechwriter,” the headline begins over the Post obituary, saying that Sorensen “provided his chief with many of the words and thoughts that still resonate through American life.”

He didn’t just stimulate them, the Post says. He provided them. Which is, of course, true, though Sorensen himself was always circumspect about saying that. The change is a mark of how much he influenced people like me, who never met him. Those were the days when politicians usually didn’t want to admit that others wrote the words they uttered.

Sorensen changed that, not just because his boss was so important, but because his language was so exquisite. This went far beyond the lines everyone quotes—like the “Ask not,” antithesis of the JFK Inaugural. I remember as a grad student, teaching speech from my Monroe and Ehninger text—yes, the Monroe of Monroe’s Motivated Sequence—and noticing a JFK commencement speech from his Senate days. How concrete, witty, and researched it was.

That speech took place at Syracuse University. Kennedy was still a senator. The writer—I don’t think I knew who it was, then—had found a story about Elihu Root that he could have told in two sentences. Instead, he’d taken a hundred words to build up the drama, infuse it with detail and give the punchline impact.

And the rest of the speech! Full of witty quotes, wry comments about political life and funny examples of ridiculous things politicians had done before a final, passionate litany of what politics can accomplish. It wasn’t a politically influential speech—but it influenced me.

You can see things to imitate in the most routine speeches. JFK gives John Glenn a medal for orbiting the Earth. His remarks only take up five paragraphs, but Sorensen notices that it is the anniversary of the day the Marines raised the flag on Mount Suribachi—and draws the parallel to a day when some “Marine or a Naval man or an Air Force man will put the American Flag on the moon.”

In the famous speeches, look for the things that aren’t famous—like the 1962 speech at Rice University about that effort to send a man to the moon, remembered for the phrase, “not because it is easy, but because it is hard.” The best part of that speech? JFK’s attention-getting opener with an imaginative analogy comparing the history of human beings to a 24-hour day. Not original. But great.

It doesn’t demean JFK’s memory to acknowledge that Sorensen did more than produce “words.” It enhances it. It says something about JFK that he could attract someone so talented, see the worth of material he dredged up, and be willing to use it.

Kennedy appreciated him, too. As modest as Sorensen is in “Counselor,” his memoir, written with the help of now-Obama speechwriter Adam Frankel, he clearly relishes recounting the time he was so late meeting Kennedy at an Air Force One landing strip that photographers got pictures of an “impatient” president, “checking his watch and walking restlessly outside the plane, until I finally arrived.”

If the things Sorensen did weren’t unique, they were new in the way that all art blends what artists have seen with what we’ve never seen. He studied Lincoln’s inaugurals and drew from them before writing Kennedy’s. He never hesitated to draw from the language others had used well—for example, the Woodrow Wilson line (“Our goal is not the victory of might, but the vindication of right.”) that he used in the Cuban Missile Crisis speech.

Though other presidents did these things occasionally—in the first 100 years of the country, they usually spoke fewer than 10 times a year—Sorensen made them routine.

Today, they form the staples of national political rhetoric, whether the litanies that end convention speeches, or the many things Barack Obama loves: the short, colloquial sentences, the historical analogies, and the antithesis that combines wordplay with insight.

The image of what Sorensen did with JFK—the long trips they took together, the accounts of them huddling over drafts—give people an inaccurate sense of how most speechwriters go about their business, in these days where speechwriters are often held at arm’s length by their bosses.

But in the accounts of the days leading up to the Cuban missile crises, don’t they demonstrate the usefulness of that kind of relationship? Of having a speechwriter not just at the keyboard but in the meeting? It’s chilling to see Curtis LeMay call a blockade “almost as bad as … Munich,” and the Joint Chiefs confidently predicting a mission-accomplished airdrop that would “mop up Cuba in 72 hours with a loss of only 10,000 Americans, more or less.”

I especially like that “more or less.” Luckily, Sorensen was there, able to supply other words.

Words can’t be produced independent of thoughts. When some speechwriter makes a graceful line out of some piece of hamburger, the thought, too, changes. If someone hands you, “We travel to outer space, because it is so difficult it challenges the very limits of our potential,” and you turn it into, “We go not because it is easy, but because it is hard,” that’s not the same thought.

Sorensen’s contribution was that during that crisis, he didn’t just contribute words. He contributed thoughts. We’re lucky he did.

And speechwriters are lucky for being able to appreciate both.

So maybe he would forgive me for looking up Oct. 30, and seeing that Ted Sorensen died on the 259th birthday of Richard Sheridan, the playwright who once reportedly told a woman: “Come into my garden. I’d like my roses to see you.”

Those of us who wanted to see him speak at American University in March would no doubt have approached him timidly, with books to sign. We won’t get that chance. But any time we think we’ve written a line that looks a little bit like a rose, the chances are that if we look closer, and think harder, we’ll realize where we learned to do it.

He won’t sign our books. But lots of our speeches already bear his signature.

This article was first published on ragan.com.

Nancy Duarte has done it again.

Her new book, resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences, is a prequel to the best-selling slide:ology, which set a new standard for excellence in PowerPoint design. Resonate is the book to read before you read slide:ology, because it explains how to understand audiences, create persuasive content and structure a talk before firing up PowerPoint.

The book equals slide:ology’s beauty, sharing the same high production standards and stunning graphics. But don’t be seduced by its design or the misled by the subtitle. My one complaint with resonate is that the subtitle is too limiting. It’s far more than a book on how to “present visual stories”; rather, it’s an extensive listing of the secrets and essential truths of the best storytellers and public speakers, whether they use visuals or not.

Whereas Duarte’s first book explored the intricacies of design and the contrasts of the color wheel, resonate explores the intricacies of storytelling and effective ways to build emotional contrasts into the core of the speakers’ message.

The book not only opposes the cultural norm that presentations are nothing more than written reports, filled with mind-numbing detail; it also stands firmly on the side of the speaker who tells a story, crafted to produce an emotional response and deliver a memorable experience. Stories, Duarte explains, have conveyed meaning to audiences through the ages. They’ve been a tool of persuasion since the earliest myths were told around campfires.

Hearts and minds

The fundamental secret of changing the audience’s minds, Duarte tells us, is to tell a story that resonates with them:

The audience does not need to tune themselves to you—you need to tune your message to them. Skilled presenting requires you understand their hearts and minds and create a message to resonate with what’s already there.

The strength of the book is the clarity with which Duarte explains, step by step, how to change the minds of an audience. From the screenwriter who opens a movie with an inciting incident to an understanding of the stages of the hero’s journey in a novel, Duarte explains how to deliver presentations where something magical happens. Of course, that means her suggestions can be used for good or evil; for example, she explains how Enron executives used presentations as a propaganda device to spread lies and defraud thousands. Fortunately, her other case studies describe presentations which change the world for the better, with inspirational messages that convey feeling, emotion and meaning.

‘Sparklines’

Duarte has invented a powerful analytical tool she calls a “sparkline” to map the structure of any speech. A sparkline is a graphical representation of a presentation that shows the points at which it moves between describing “what is” to describing “what could be.” Color-coding and text-positioning on the sparkline reveal the “shape” of a particular presentation and map the audience response by noting laughter and applause. No two sparklines are alike, because no two presentations are alike.

Sparklines offer communications professionals a way to make an impact in the C-Suite. Anyone with the time (and courage) to create a sparkline analyzing executive speeches in your own organization will now be able to deliver a report on the strengths and weaknesses of the presentation that can be grasped at a glance.

Turning information into stories

If you are responsible for executive communications in the corporate world, you’ll appreciate the practical steps Duarte shares that turn abstract information into emotionally appealing stories. Her case study on how her company—Duarte Design—transformed a single high-tech product slide into a story with a “hero” who faces conflicts and challenges that the product then solves, shows what can be achieved with a little creative effort.

The creative process that Duarte Design uses with clients such as Cisco Systems, Google, Adobe and Microsoft is outlined for all of us to learn and apply as we grow in our careers. As Dan Post, the President of Duarte Design, says in the foreword:

If great presentations were easy to build and deliver, they wouldn’t be such an extraordinary form of communication. Resonate is intended for people with ambition, purpose, and an uncommon work ethic. Applied with passion and purpose, the concepts in this book will accelerate your career trajectory or propel your social cause …. Few pursuits in professional self-improvement have as much professional leverage.

Changing the world

Duarte’s real heroes are those people who give speeches that change the world, none more so than Dr. Martin Luther King. Her sparkline analysis of his I Have a Dream speech is worth the price of the book. She analyses the “shape” of King’s speech as it moves from what is to what could be, highlighting the use of repetition, dramatic pauses and metaphor to change the minds of his audience and ultimately change the world.

This review was originally published in ragan.com.

Thursday evening at the Silicon Valley Computer History Museum saw the launch of Nancy Duarte’s new book Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences.

A couple of hundred guests celebrated a book that author Garr Reynolds says “takes you on a beautiful journey illustrating how to construct and deliver the kind of presentations that are truly remarkable, memorable … and may even change the world.”

Hear what some of the guests had to say by clicking on the podcast icon below.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:29 — 1.3MB)

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For more than 20 years, David Meuel has been an independent consultant specializing in executive speech development and corporate writing. He has worked with more than 80 business executives and public leaders, including the CEOs of eight Fortune 1000 companies, the CEOs of Visa International and Visa USA, and a State of California cabinet secretary. You can visit his website at www.davidmeuel.com or contact him at david@davidmeuel.com or at 650-804-2543.

I met David at a recent Silicon Valley IABC meeting. He’s a fellow speechwriter and executive communications specialist based in Northern California who graciously agreed to write a guest posting for Professionally Speaking.

Before They Say Anything: Preparing Executives for Speeches and Presentations
by David Meuel

It takes three weeks
to prepare a good ad-lib speech.
— Mark Twain

Several years ago, I read a survey finding that stopped me in my tracks. When asked which they feared most, the respondents’ number one choice – over snakes, spiders, or even death – was public speaking.

But the more I thought about it, the more understandable this finding became. Few things are more embarrassing than making a major mistake before a large audience. It’s no wonder that, for most people, speaking is extremely stressful.

Business executives who speak as part of their job have an added pressure: high stakes. A great performance can mean positive press, greater prestige, and even new business. A poor one can mean the opposite to all of the above. And, every once in a while, a very poor showing can even mean the loss of a job.

It’s no wonder then that executives, even those renowned for their nerves of steel, can get nerves of Jello when they think about an upcoming speech. And it’s no wonder that they often “rope in” their in-house communications people to help them prepare. Yet, while many business communicators are old pros at developing a PR plan or rolling out a new marcom program, they don’t have comparable expertise when it comes to “prepping” an executive for a speech or presentation. The solution is often “to just get through it” as best they can. But, depending on all the variables, this can be just as nerve-racking for the communicator as it is for the executive giving the speech.

Helping the Nervous Exec

What are some things you can do to make the three or four weeks before a major speech or presentation go by more smoothly? Here are some ideas that have worked for me:

1. Think through what you want to do.

The screenwriter Syd Field once made a statement I like very much. “The hardest thing about writing,” he said, “is knowing what to write.” This applies, of course, to any form of communication, including public speaking.

When I participate in the preparation process, I take executives through several steps that aim to build a strong content foundation. These include:

• Listing and prioritizing objectives;
• Learning as much as possible about the audience and what various people in it expect from the speaker;
• Determining the strongest possible central thought, or theme, for the speech;
• Organizing the central thought for maximum effect.

This is not easy stuff, and each step demands serious thought. But, perhaps the most difficult step is determining the central thought, or, as Syd Field would put it, “knowing what to write.”

I define the central thought as the synthesis of the speaker’s subject and objectives – the message. You can also view it as the engine that pulls the rest of the speech forward. Every point that’s made must serve to give this one thought clarity and dimension. And every point must be positioned in a way that people in the audience can easily understand and relate to.

For example, an executive from a major credit card organization is asked to speak to an audience of top college business majors about an intriguing subject: the future of money. Her main goal is to encourage students to consider joining her organization after graduation. But she also knows that she needs to explain the industry to students who probably aren’t experts on the subject.

Considering all of this, I would recommend as her central thought: Paper-based payment systems such as checks and cash – long the dominant forms of financial transaction – are rapidly giving way to far more convenient, versatile, and cost-effective electronic payment systems. This allows the speaker to meet both personal objectives and the needs of audience members by:

• Addressing the subject in a way that may intrigue listeners;
• Providing the audience with the appropriate amount of industry background or context;
• Suggesting that her industry is a place where many future opportunities will exist for enterprising young people;
• Depicting her organization as an excellent example of a group committed to fully capitalizing on the electronic payments opportunity (a nice way to make her organization look good without belittling the competition);
• Appearing as someone who is informed, engaged, authoritative, and visionary – someone a bright young person would love to work for.

After you decide upon your central thought, here’s another challenge – try boiling it down into one simple declarative sentence short enough to write on the back of a business card. That can be a very painful exercise. But once you’ve reached this point, you’ve done the most important work in the preparation process. The rest is development and refinement. That’s not easy, either. But it’s much less difficult when the basic direction has been thought through and spelled out. You know where you are going.

Briefly, here are some other recommendations:

2. Build in time to think.

Good ideas and clear thoughts take time to develop. I know this is hard, but make the presentation a priority and build time into the exec’s and your schedule to think about it. Jot down ideas and put them in writing immediately. One helpful hint is to post the central thought on the wall in front of you or on the side of your computer. As you gather material for the talk, constantly test it against the central thought.

3. Be merciless about eliminating information.

A piece of information might be fascinating in its own right. But, if it doesn’t relate directly to the central thought, then it isn’t right for this presentation. (Save it for a time when it will be appropriate.)

4. Don’t force humor or cleverness.

People often feel great pressure to begin or end a presentation with an attention-getter such as a joke, funny anecdote, clever quote, or startling fact. But no one is ever obligated to. The moral here is: do what is right for the exec. Beginning with a good attention getter is fine, but don’t try to do something that’s not natural for the exec or irrelevant to the central thought.

5. When using PowerPoint, keep it simple and graphically interesting.

Rather than being an effective speaking aid, PowerPoint is often a major distraction. To make matters worse, many speakers design their graphics the same way engineers design microchips – cramming everything they can into every nanometer of available real estate. The result, of course, is that the people in the audience often don’t understand what they’re looking at and stop listening to the speaker so they can figure out the perplexing visual puzzle in front of them.

First, ask if the exec really needs to use PowerPoint. You’ll be amazed how often execs really don’t, especially if they are CEOs who fancy themselves “big picture” people. In fact, I’ve often encouraged executives not to use it, and they’ve said that this has made them look more “statesmanlike” and helped to differentiate them at conferences.

Second, if you use PowerPoint, keep it as simple as possible – no more than one image per minute, no more than one thought per image, as few bullets and words as possible, and, whenever possible, an easy-to-understand graphic that illustrates or complements what the exec is talking about. If you aren’t a wizard at PowerPoint, you might want to “rope in” someone who is to help make the presentation as professional looking as possible.

6. Plan to be short.

People are rarely criticized for not speaking long enough. If the exec is asked to speak for 20 minutes, plan for 15. Also, consider that many things—resounding applause, uproarious laughter, uncooperative technology, etc.—slow a speaker down. Plan on them. The difference between ending five minutes early and going five minutes over can seem like an eternity.

7. Prepare for questions.

Write up a list of tough questions and answers so the exec is prepared for anything the audience might throw out after the presentation.

8. Rehearse the exec at least twice.

If possible, set up the final rehearsal at the conference the day before the exec is scheduled to speak. You’ll be amazed how much this will help the exec during the actual presentation.

Staying Out of Panic Mode

One way to avoid much of this last-minute stress and strain is to take a more pre-emptive, strategic approach to the speaking opportunity. In these days of tight budgets and stretched resources, I know this is much more easily said than done. But, if there is any way you can do it, you should.

This approach requires that those involved think less in terms of specific speeches and more in terms of an overall speaking program. It also requires significant upfront planning. What’s involved in this planning? Some of the most important tasks include:

• Developing speaking topics that are clearly aligned with your company’s key business and/or marketing objectives;
• Seeking out appropriate forums where these speeches can be delivered – places where executives can have the biggest impact on the industry press, peers, etc. – and then pitching these topics to the forums;
• Selecting the right executive for each speaking opportunity;
• Cultivating a core group of “go-to” executives, the men and women who can best represent the company at various forums (Ideally, your number one “go-to” guy or gal should be your CEO. But this doesn’t always have to be the case.);
• Cultivating a group of “go-to” consultants, people familiar with your company you can count on to help out with speech development, graphics development, and presentation skills. (Once again, budgets are often the constraining factor. But, if you can get help from a handful of good people, use them. It will make your life much easier.);
• Getting extra mileage from speeches by reprinting edited versions of them as executive articles, etc.

All that sounds like a lot of work, and it usually is. But the difference between reacting to each speaking invitation and running a more strategically oriented program can be mind-boggling. The company gets the right messages out on a regular, systematic way. Audiences enjoy the speakers more and leave conferences both with the message you wanted to give them and with a positive impression of your company. Then, all this feeds on itself – more invitations to conferences, more press attention, and greater visibility in the industry.

In Conclusion…

Preparing executives for speeches and presentations is often difficult, frustrating work. But the payoff can also be big both for your company and for you. The challenge, of course, is to do the right things. So, when a nervous exec ropes you in, sweat the big stuff first. Work closely with the exec to define the message, considering the exec’s goals, the needs of the audience, the development of a clear, compelling, relevant central thought, and the organization of the speech around that thought. After you do all that, then think about a great joke to open with, PowerPoint, Q&A, and time to rehearse.

As you prepare, you might also want to pitch the exec on the idea of taking a more pre-emptive, strategic approach to the public speaking opportunity. Not only would an ongoing speaking program help the company in countless ways, it would also help make the weeks before a major presentation much less anxious for all involved.

“How do I get a job as a speechwriter?”

That’s the question Robert Lehrman’s students in his American University speechwriting class have on their minds.

The answer, and an extensive catalog of the elements of speechwriting, are contained in the textbook for his course: The Political Speechwriter’s Companion: A Guide for Writers and Speakers (CQPress 2009). It is an invaluable resource for writers and speakers in both the political and corporate worlds. The book is by far the most comprehensive and well-written guide to speechwriting I have read.

Lehrman has more than three decades of experience writing speeches. He has written for politicians, celebrities, nonprofits and corporate CEOs. He worked as chief speechwriter in the White House to Vice President Al Gore.

His writing career began as a novelist who studied with Kurt Vonnegut at the Iowa Writers Workshop. He still enjoys the balance between writing under his own name and putting words into the mouths of the powerful.

Real-world lessons

Lehrman is the author of four novels and numerous op-ed’s. But it’s the experience gained as a speechwriter in both houses of Congress, as well as the White House, that is the source of the lessons he shares in the classroom and his book.

Together with political humorist Eric Schnure, he teaches two semesters a year at the American University in Washington, D.C. Many of their students have wanted to be speechwriters since middle school, when they became hooked on episodes of “The West Wing.” Graduates of the AU course have found work for politicians in Congress and even for ambassadors.

It’s obvious from his background that Lehrman is a staunch Democrat. But he teaches the techniques of persuasion to supporters of any political party. In fact, his willingness to draw lessons from speeches delivered by both sides is a refreshing surprise in our increasingly polarized world. Testimonials inside the front cover of his book come from both republicans and democrats.

His book—The Political Speechwriter’s Companion: A Guide for Writers and Speakers—took him two years to write. However, some of the lessons it contains were those he first shared with interns in the Clinton White House in the 1990s. Don’t be misled by the title. Lehrman claims that 90 percent of the content is useful for speechwriters outside politics, including those of us who write for the corporate world.

Lessons include:

• Realizing that the beliefs and values of the secondary audience might be more important than the people who are actually in the room when the speech is delivered;
• Why it’s important not only to research facts and figures, but also spend time researching the stories and poetry that makes a speech sing;
• Why Monroe’s Motivated Sequence is the best way to structure a political speech;
• Ways to make a speech memorable and move the audience to action, including checklists for everything from speech structure and supporting arguments to problems that are relevant to the audience and plausible solutions.

The challenge, he reminds us, is mastering the nuts and bolts while keeping the text of many political speeches at a seventh grade reading level so the majority of the audience can follow along.

Lehrman’s book illustrates, with links to dozens of speeches, how some of the best writers practice their craft. He takes us behind the scenes with colleagues such as Clinton speechwriters’ David Kusnet and Lissa Muscatine and George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum.

Social media and the Internet

Lehrman embraces change. He encourages speechwriters to take advantage of the Internet, especially the ease of access to speech archives at www.americanrhetoric.com and doing research with a search engine. But he’s also aware that YouTube means politicians today have nowhere to hide an unguarded remark, such as Senator George Allen’s “Macaca moment” on the 2006 campaign trail.

As for getting hired, Lehrman tells his students not to worry:

“With 200,000 candidates running for 60,000 elected positions in America every two years there’s no shortage of work for anyone who can stand the long hours and low pay,” he says. “Ten hour days, six days a week, are common. While corporate speechwriters make three times the salary and can go home to their family, those who want to influence public policy are, and will always be, drawn to politics.”

This review was originally published in ragan.com.

Vital Speeches of the Day has a great list of reasons why speechwriters blog, by Cynthia Starks.