Nick Morgan - Public Speaking Advice and Commentary

Three Big Myths of Executive Public Speaking

For my blog today, I'm linking to an article I just wrote for Forbes.com on the 3 big myths of executive public speaking:  I should start with a joke, too much rehearsal is bad for me, and I want to go right to Q n A.  Here's the full article:  http://tinyurl.com/y9q4lkh

How much emotion is too much in public speaking?

How much emotion is too much in public speaking?  That’s the question the following video raised for me.  It’s Daniel Beaty, poet and actor, delivering the powerful story he calls, “Knock, Knock”:  http://tinyurl.com/ykul7c7. 

Beaty’s emotional pitch is exactly right for his subject, but what about more conventional settings and business-oriented topics?  How much is too much? 

Over my two decades of coaching I have developed two answers for this conundrum.  But first an observation.  In the vast majority of business speeches, there’s too little passion, not too much.  Far too many business audiences have been lulled to sleep by the droning messages of executives, professional speakers, and former sports stars brought in to tell the employees something about reaching for the gold. 

Here’s the first answer.  If you understand the audience and the occasion, there’s always a right emotional pitch to be found.  It’s called tact, and it’s focused on the audience and the occasion, not on your – the speaker’s – feelings.  When in doubt, go for restraint rather than shock value, but you really shouldn’t be in doubt if you have done your homework and understand the people in the room, their hopes and fears, and what’s at stake for them.  And seeing a speaker break down in tears unexpectedly can have great shock value, but seeing someone hold back the tears is almost always profoundly moving. 

And the second answer?  On those rare occasions when the speaker can combine a deep understanding of the situation with real passion for a subject, giving vent to strong emotion can be electrifying and can change the world.  Watch the ending of Reverend Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech to see what I mean:  http://tinyurl.com/y4acg5.  There are times when profound anger, sorrow, joy, or delight can lift us up as one and point us to a better world.  Those are the moments – as a lifetime student of public speaking – that I live for. 

 

 

 

 

How good a speaker is Eric Schmidt?

As CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt needs little introduction.  And before his current world-shaking job, he was CTO of Sun Microsystems, where he led Java development, and CEO of Novell.  He was also on the Board of Apple before he resigned to avoid conflicts of interest between Apple and Google.  Clearly, he’s a big deal in the rarified world of high-tech giants. 

But how good a speaker is he?

You can see him delivering a commencement speech to Carnegie Mellon here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiYwUde3wNo.  And you can see him talking to CIOs courtesy of Gartner here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHxub_yQfig. 

Eric’s a highly self-assured and competent speaker.  He projects a sense of ease, which is the single most important thing you can do to improve your overall connection with the audience – it’s just not easy to accomplish.  To be sure, he commits all the mistakes of someone who has not made public speaking proficiency a high priority – he looks down at his speaking notes before he finishes the previous sentence, he uses fake gestures, and his gestures happen too late in the intent-gesture-think-speak sequence that people employ when they’re being natural.  To name a few.  But overall, he’s quite comfortable with his speaking, and that’s unusual for a business speaker. 

Of course, his commencement speech at Carnegie Mellon was a collection of the usual clichés, but they were delivered with geniality and aplomb, and who remembers those commencement speeches anyway?  Overall, Eric is good enough to get by, and better than many. 

 

How good a speaker is Jack Welch?

Jack Welch is probably the most famous CEO in the world – still, despite having been retired from GE since 2001.  His reign there was controversial – some called him Neutron Jack for reducing GE’s head count from over 400,00 to less than 300,000 in his first five years as CEO.  In 2000, he was named ‘manager of the century’ by Fortune.  His first book, Jack: Straight from the Gut, was a NYTimes #1 bestseller, and he continues to advise and offer opinions on the business issues of the day, including displaying skepticism about global warming and other environmental issues while saying that companies have to embrace ‘green’ business because the customers want it. 

But how good a speaker is he?

You can see him here talking about how people are his products:  http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/260/.  Also here, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaXO9Uab6K0, at the 2009 Global Business Forum. 

Jack is an energetic, intelligent speaker.  He’s at his best responding to questions, and he does so with real thoughtfulness and candor.  That said, he comes across as a bit of a bully with a nasal, harsh voice that grates on the ear and a tendency to think his answers are more startling and original than they are.  He’s a real Yankee – the kind that says ‘chaaaage’, not ‘charge’ and  ‘staaaat’, not ‘start’. 

Jack is fine in small doses, and when he’s well focused.  But he would pall over the longer haul of an hour-long speech.  Catch him on the Q n A. 

 

How to connect with your audience by moving closer

For my blog today, I'm connecting to a guest blog I posted on 6 Minutes (http://sixminutes.dlugan.com/), a great public speaking blog run by Andrew Dlugan:  How to connect with your audience by moving closer.  You can find the blog here:  http://tinyurl.com/yhqycdm

Enjoy!

Ten Reasons for Public Speakers to be Thankful

10.  2010 already looks to be a better year for conferences than 2009. 

9.  Pico Pocket Projectors are here. 

8.  We have a gifted orator in the White House. 

7.  Flip camcorders are here.

6.  Audiences want you to succeed, studies show.  Really.

5.  800ceoread is still here.

4.  Studies show audiences only remember 10-30 percent of what they hear. 

3.  Marshall Goldsmith has promised to take all of 2010 off to meditate in an ashram.

2.  The Powermat portable wireless recharging mat is here.

1.  Tony Robbins has promised to take 2010-11 off to build an ashram out of native woods and natural fabrics and meditate in it on the impermanence of personal achievement. 

 

 

 

How good a speaker is Ram Charan?

Ram Charan once was the best-kept secret in the business world.  Only the CEOs of companies like GE, Verizon, Novartis, Dupont, Honeywell, KLM, and Bank of America had heard of him.  Today, thanks to his speaking, his books, and his articles in BusinessWeek, Harvard Business Review, and Fortune, which described him as the “most influential consultant alive,” he’s widely known as one of the world’s top management gurus and advisors to CEOs.  Forbes pegs him at #13 on its list of the world’s 50 most essential management gurus.  His recent book, Leadership in the Era of Economic Uncertainty: Managing in a Downturn, came out in December 2008, so we have to credit him with a good sense of timing at least. 

But how good a speaker is he?

You can see him speaking here to a Fortune writer on what to do in a downturn:  http://tinyurl.com/y8vla5g; and here, talking about the 6 building blocks for business success:  http://tinyurl.com/yjwkmka (the video quality is poor, but it will give you an idea).  Charan speaks with a good deal of authority, but he has the bad habits that all too often seem to come with that authority:  he’s not as clear as he thinks he is, he’s unselfconscious to a fault, and he paces through the audience with a disconcerting lack of direction.  The non-verbal confusion mirrors the verbal confusion. 

Despite all that, he is a very smart man giving solid, commonsense insights into successful business practices.  He makes the listener work harder than one should have to, however, because of his lack of discipline as a speaker. 

What many speakers frequently forget is that paying attention is both hard work and a great gift.  Just ask your teenage children.  Speakers owe their attention-paying audiences the discipline to be as clear and as thoughtful about their messages as humanly possible.  Not many measure up to this simple, yet essential standard. 

 

How good a speaker is Marshall Goldsmith?

Marshall Goldsmith is a professor, consultant, and coach, who talks and writes about leadership.  He’s the author of some 24 books, including The Leader of the Future (Jossey-Bass, 1997), perhaps the most popular book on leadership ever written, as well as more recent books like What Got You Here Won’t Get You There (Hyperion, 2007) – ranked the #1 business book by the Wall Street Journal  -- and Succession:  Are You Ready (Harvard Business Press, 2009).  He pioneered the idea of 360-degree feedback, and Fast Company has named him America’s pre-eminent executive coach. 

But how good a speaker is he?

It’s a surprisingly difficult question.  Goldsmith is a mixture of good and bad habits, and he gets good and bad effects as a result.  You can see him speaking here at Google: http://tinyurl.com/yka4hua in 2007.

His good points?  He’s funny, direct, articulate, fast-paced and he delivers home truths in rapid-fire succession. 

His bad habits?  He’s arrogant, dismissive of the audience, laughs at his own jokes, and constantly points his finger at the audience like an admonishing parent while he paces relentless back and forth – scolding the audience for doing things wrong, when he should be including the audience in his circle instead. 

In the end, you know he’s right about a lot of things, but you’re cross at him for being right, because he’s delivered his message in such an arrogant way.  A curious performance from a self-described Buddhist who gives all his information away for free and donates a lot of his fees to charity.  I’m a fan, but you have to be prepared to take a lot of grief to be a Marshall Goldsmith fan.  

 

How good a speaker is Michael Porter?

Michael Porter is a University Professor at Harvard, one of the founders of the Monitor Group, the author of several of the most significant books on competition and competitive advantage, including On Competition, Competitive Strategy and Competitive Advantage – and the guy who taught the world how to optimize a supply chain. 

He’s on anyone’s list as one of the more important business thinkers of the last couple of decades. 

But how good a speaker is he?

You can see him speaking here, http://tinyurl.com/67p94g, on his famous five competitive forces that shape strategy.  Here, he’s talking with Charlie Rose on America’s competitive strategy: http://tinyurl.com/yfw8q5l.  And here’s his speaker page: http://tinyurl.com/yecm4sr. 

Porter appears quite relaxed and conversational in his manner on first blush.  But his hands give him away.  They’re all over the place, waving, clutching themselves, coming together under his chin in a prayerful position as he decries America’s crumbling competitive advantage.  Altogether, there’s too much motion from Porter; his gestures become distracting after a few minutes.  It’s too bad, because he’s smart and articulate, and there’s no reason why he couldn’t learn to simplify his gestural conversation just a little.  Taking that step would give him much more authority and gravitas -- and he'd be easier to watch. 

Then you notice his voice.  It’s nasal, and that becomes tiresome after five or ten minutes.  The research suggests that nasal voices do not wear well on listeners, and Michael Porter, with all his erudition, is a case in point.  Again, it’s simply too bad, because nasal voices are easily rendered more resonant with a little discipline and practice.  Porter needs to get to work. 

How good a speaker is Gary Hamel?

The management guru Gary Hamel has had more Harvard Business Review articles reprinted more often than anyone else - 15 and counting.  He’s a visiting professor at the London Business School, the founder of a new venture called MLab, which seeks to “accelerate the evolution of management knowledge and practice,” the author of several seminal books on management, including The Future of Management, Competing for the Future, and Leading the Revolution (which unfortunately recommended Enron) -- and the inventor of the idea of core competencies.  The Wall Street Journal recently said he was the world’s most influential business thinker. 

In short, he’s one of the top biz gurus.  But how good a speaker is Gary Hamel?

You can see him here, http://tinyurl.com/2vypya, speaking to Fortune management innovation, and here, at something called the leadership summit 2009:  http://tinyurl.com/y9kgwbj.

Gary is all energy.  He’s probably the best ranter in the top ten business speakers.  But he lacks polish.  The effect is of a rather over-earnest high school social studies teacher shouting to keep students’ attention and afraid that he’s about to lose them.  The performance is initially arresting, but it grows wearisome after a bit.  Hamel has two levels, loud and not loud.  That soon becomes annoying.  And his diction is so mushy as to be inarticulate at times when he throws the end of a sentence away.

He leaps around the stage, pacing back and forth, in his desire to get the message across.  But he’d be much better served by developing some nuances, some variety in his delivery, and some purpose to his wanderings. 

And yet, when he says, for companies today, it’s “not about efficiency, it’s about irrelevancy” he’s so right that it’s scary.  Hamel is hard to watch for long periods of time, but ignore him at your peril.  He may have been wrong abut Enron, but he’s right about the need for businesses to innovate or die.