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Today, for my blog, I'm linking to a piece I just published on HBR.org, taking lessons from President Obama's State of the Union address last Tuesday for chief executives and how they can improve on the President's approach: http://bit.ly/gCLMPn. Enjoy!
The origins of Power Point were solidly grounded in good intentions. Remember slides? People put pictures on them, or graphs -- visual aids. They were intended to act as accompaniments to lectures and presentations.
The whole idea was that the speaker would talk for a while, and then occasionally show a slide that illustrated a point with a picture or a striking image, or made a set of numbers clear with a bar graph or a pie chart.
Slides were time-consuming to create, and difficult to change. So most people used them sparingly. I once saw a speech by a National Geographic photographer that included a hundred slides, but each one was a uniquely wonderful picture he had culled from thousands, literally. He was entitled.
Then came Power Point. People soon got the hang of creating slides; they were easy to make using this software, and easy to change.
And somewhere along the line, Power Point ‘decks’ ceased being illustrative information to accompany talks. They became speaker outlines.
Now we watch in horrified fascination as a speaker plods through every word on slide after slide with 20 lines or more of text on them. We wonder, as our consciousness slowly ebbs, ‘will he read every word, or will he occasionally vary the words slightly?’
And we have the Power Point Triangle of Death, where the speaker moves to the screen to point out some illegible word, drifts back to his computer, while mumbling something about the next slide, only to come to the third point of the triangle floating somewhere uneasily in between his screen position and his computer position.
None of these moves has anything to do with the audience, communicating with whom is after all the purpose of the talk, isn’t it?
Thus, Power Point, in the hands of most business speakers, commits the fatal sin of at once making the speaker and his talk irrelevant to the audience.
If you’re a Power Point abuser – and more than one slide every 5 minutes qualifies you – then don’t bother to gather the audience together. Just email them your ‘deck’ and save everyone a lot of trouble.
The other day Harvard asked me to boil down the creation of a great speech into 5 quick steps for busy executives. Here's the result in a short video. Enjoy!
How to Create a Great Presentation from Harvard Business Publishing on Vimeo.
What should POTUS say during his SOTU? Washington is a city of acronyms, so that sentence actually makes sense inside the DC beltway. And that hits at the heart of the problem of every State of the Union (SOTU) address since George Washington first reported to Congress on January 8, 1790: they’re insider laundry lists.
Washington’s report was precisely such a list of America’s accomplishments in the year just finished, as well items done and not done by the Senate and the House, addressed specifically to them. For example, Washington was pleased to see that North Carolina had approved the Constitution, but concerned that Congress get to work on several items, including military pay, a proper diplomatic corps, and this: “the terms on which foreigners may be admitted to the rights of citizens should be speedily ascertained by a uniform rule of naturalization.”
Come to think of it, Washington’s still waiting for that one.
Presidents since television was invented have continued with the laundry list even though television as a medium is singularly unreceptive to long lists – and the nation-wide audience mostly uninterested.
It’s a huge waste of an enormous opportunity. Unfortunately, all signs are that POTUS will once again delivery a laundry-list SOTU, leaving the larger TV audience alternately bored and mystified.
Here’s what he should do instead. President Obama created an enormously successful narrative for his election campaign – remember hope and change? Yes, we can? -- suggesting to the American people that it was time to renew their essential optimism and begin to go in a new direction from the Bush years.
What’s happened since then has been dissected differently by partisans in both parties, but few would disagree with the idea that the optimistic story has gotten lost in the reality of governing during a very difficult couple of years in American – and world – history.
So President Obama should begin a new, optimistic narrative line that allows Americans to hope once again. He can’t literally do hope and change; that option was forever killed by Governor Palin’s mocking “how’s that hopey-changey thing working for ya?” He needs a new story, one that will show us the way out of the thicket of despair we’re in and help us find our way to happier terrain. He needs to address the issues that everyone is worried about – jobs, the deficit, taxes, the economy – without resorting to a laundry list of proposed programs that will be forgotten soon after the Republicans' response. And he needs to show us how he can lead us through those issues to re-establish our confidence and America’s greatness.
It’s a leader’s job to hold out a vision to unite people and create enthusiastic followers. This is a difficult time for many Americans, and we need a leader to point America in a new direction, one that renews us, strengthens us for the journey, and gives us hope. But I’m afraid President Obama will do what every president has done since Washington and give us a laundry-list SOTU instead. Too bad – it’s a waste of a fantastic TV audience.
It was fifty years ago today that President John F. Kennedy delivered one of the shortest and most memorable inaugural addresses by a U.S. president. As most people know, the speech was the product of a collaboration between Kennedy and Ted Sorensen, Special Counsel to the President, and his speechwriter. But what you don’t know is that Kennedy changed the speech on the fly as he delivered it, departing from the agreed-upon and much revised text in the moment – even making a small but essential change to the most famous sentence in the speech, and one of the most famous sentences in American history.
Work began on the speech in November, and intensified around Christmas 1960. Sorensen sent a telegram on December 23rd to 10 leading thinkers of the day – including Adlai Stevenson, Dean Rusk, and J. K. Galbraith – asking for ideas. Responses varied, but the most voluminous was a 2-and-a-half page single-spaced letter from Stevenson with over a dozen suggestions for things Kennedy could talk about. Many of them made it into the speech, including “a frank acknowledgement of the changing equilibrium in the world and the grave dangers and difficulties which the West faces for the first time.”
The speech began to take something like its final shape on January 10th, 10 days out, when President Kennedy flew to Palm Beach and dictated a draft to his secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, based on an earlier written draft by Sorensen. On the flight back, a week later, 3 days out, Kennedy wrote a draft in his own hand so that there would be a holographic version for history. I’m looking at a facsimile of that handwritten draft now, and it follows the final closely in general, with many minor emendations to phrases here and there. When you get to the end, and the famous phrases “asking not,” you see the following in Kennedy’s difficult scrawl:
My fellow Americans, ask not what your country is going to do for you – ask what you can do for your country.
Then, in the final, large-print reading copy that Kennedy took to the podium, the sentence had become this:
And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country will do for you – ask what you can do for your country.
What’s astounding about that phrase is precisely that it’s not memorable, because of the lack of repetition. And what’s even more amazing is that when Kennedy actually delivered the speech, he changed that sentence on the fly to:
And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.
A small change, yes, but one that turned a good line into an unforgettable one. And it was ad-libbed. (Kennedy made a number of other small changes as well, simplifying the diction and eliminating words as he went, but none as vital as this one.)
In speaking, you have to sweat the details. Tiny changes in phrasing make huge differences in impact.
David McCloud, the Chief of Staff of the Governor of Virginia, taught me how to write a great speech:
• Great speeches are primarily emotional, not logical
• Small shifts in tone make an enormous difference to the audience, so sweat the details
• A great speech has a clear voice speaking throughout
• A great speech conveys one idea only, though it can have lots of supporting points
• A great speech answers a great need
The lesson nearly killed me. I had a PhD in literature and rhetoric, and I was teaching at the University of Virginia, when the Governor, Chuck Robb, plucked me from academic obscurity to write speeches for him. The previous speechwriter had cracked under the strain, and had taken to shouting Nazi war slogans and charging around the office barefoot using his hatrack as a battering ram. So of course he had to go; he alarmed the Governor’s State Police detail too much.
I don’t know why that didn’t worry me too much at the time. I suppose I was blinded by the opportunity to put my academic ideals into practice. I was installed in the same office, and I spent most of the first day or two looking at the hatrack and wondering how bad it would have to get before I was tempted to pick it up and go horizontal with it too.
David called me into his office on Day Three for my first assignment. Four death-row inmates had escaped from Mecklenburg State Prison and were wandering around loose in the Virginia countryside alarming everyone. The Governor had to give a speech to show that he was in control of the situation.
“The truth is,” said David, “that no one pays any attention to prisons until someone escapes. Then everyone wants to know why we don’t spend more money, hire more guards, do whatever it takes to keep scary people from getting out. Write a speech which says that we care about voters’ security but won’t waste their money either.”
I made a face. “But those two things are logically contradictory.”
“Your first lesson in real speechwriting,” said David. “Logic has nothing to do with it. Figure it out.”
Clutching my logic and my expensive education in rhetoric, I went back to my office to figure it out. For about half a day I stared at the computer screen with no idea how to begin. At some point, David popped into my office to see how I was getting on. He took in my lack of progress at a glance.
“Think John Wayne,” he said. “Make the Governor tough.”
So I thought about what John Wayne would have said if he’d been the governor, and shortly a script began to form on the screen. I wrote, re-wrote, and finally had a draft that I thought was pure gubernatorial magic. I handed it in to David.
A few hours later, an email arrived. “My office. Now.”
David scowled at me when I walked in. “This is the worst first draft I’ve ever seen,” he said. “It’s ridiculous. It’s too much John Wayne, not enough Governor. Go back and try again.”
So I did. I took John Wayne out and let in the sweet light of reason instead. I handed in what I thought was a much more measured draft to David the next morning.
This time he came to me. “This is the second worst draft I’ve ever seen,” he said. “The governor sounds like a Sesame Street character. Give him his cojones back.”
He left. I bowed my head over the screen. This was not the enlightened political discourse I had been expecting. I looked at the hatrack. Then I wrote another draft.
Before I got that speech right – and David satisfied with it – I wrote twelve drafts. John Wayne and Sesame Street came and went. I added sections on prison spending and took them out. I put in an update on the search for the escapees and revised it over and over again. I researched Thomas Jefferson’s attitude toward prisons and put in a section quoting him. It wasn’t until Draft 11 that David thought it was even worth sending it to the Governor for him to look at.
“OK,” he said. “It’s not great, but it’s OK for a first try.”
David was not my favorite person in the world that week, or for a number of weeks after. But in the end I realized that in being tough on me he had given me an enormous gift: he had taught me how to push myself to do better than I thought I possibly could. And he taught me how to write a speech. In the real world. Great speeches are primarily emotional, not logical. Small shifts in tone and phrasing make an enormous difference to the audience, so sweat the details. A great speech has a clear voice speaking throughout. A great speech conveys one idea only, though it can have lots of supporting points. And most of all: a great speech answers a great need.
Thanks, David.
Justly celebrated as one of the greatest speeches of the 20th century, Martin Luther King, Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech becomes even more remarkable when you know that the last 6 minutes of the 16-minute speech were ad-libbed. King felt that he was not reaching the audience the way he wanted to with his prepared text, and so he called up a metaphor he had been thinking about for some months, and uttered the unforgettable plea for racial justice, “I have a dream.”
The first 10 minutes of the speech would have been brilliant enough for most speakers to retire on. King began by echoing the Biblical language of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, saying, “Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. . . . But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free.”
King then goes on to talk about the “promissory note” owed to Black Americans – the bad check – the freedom that was still due. He says, “But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.” The response was a roar, and King moved on to talk about “the fierce urgency of now,” repeating the line again and again that “now is the time” for America to make good on that bad check.
For an average speaker, that call and response would have been good enough. But King was inspired by the occasion, the locale, and the enormous crowd, and he made an on-the-spot decision to reach deeper.
At the ten-minute mark, King wraps up the section by saying, “No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” This stock Biblical phrase from the Baptist preaching tradition is the signal that King is going off-text, and he next does something truly dramatic: he reaches out to the audience directly, saying, “I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations.”
“Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina,” he continues, and then comes the famous metaphor: “I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment I still have a dream.”
As King works up to the mighty peroration of the greatest American speech of the 20th century, his cadences continue to rise and fall, going higher each time to signal his passion for the subject. The top of the rhetorical arc comes with the closing lines, when King stands on tiptoe, and raises his right hand, and says:
When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”
The roar from the crowd is unmistakable: King has connected with them, he has given an unforgettable speech, and by digging down deep into his soul, he has forever changed the world.
Two nights ago, President Obama did something extraordinary. He gave the best speech of his presidency to date. He rose above the politics of the day and asked us all to do the same. And he gave a healing sermon-like talk that was truly dedicated to the victims of the Tucson massacre, that celebrated their lives and uniqueness, and that reminded us all of the best that is in us even as we were contemplating the worst.
Commentators from the left and the right have praised the speech with near-unanimity, so what the President asked for – a healing of the political discourse – he actually got, at least in the immediate response. Let’s hope the trend continues.
It prompts me to ask the question – could we in fact transform our public discourse to make it more civil? What would that look like? Would it be any less effective? Would it trample on our free speech?
I think the mistake that we have made in the United States is to confuse free speech with license. In order not to constrict the former, we have settled on the latter. But that’s a simplistic and literal way to think about free speech. The Founding Fathers were bent on preserving the right to debate politically charged issues when they enshrined “the freedom of speech, or of the press,” in the First Amendment, not the license to utter obscene rants or to call elected officials liars without proof.
I think what we need is not to lower our standards for what passes for discourse but rather to raise them. The Internet gives everyone a voice, and that is a good thing – up to a point. I certainly don’t think we should go back to the days when three TV networks, Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, and a handful of other media outlets controlled the political discourse. But if political leaders, bloggers, and pundits on left and right began insisting on elevating the national conversation, it would happen – and no one’s right to free speech would be affected.
We can all do our bit. Don’t read, promulgate, or write pieces that promote unmitigated hate. Avoid the obscene rants and the lunatic fringe. Have a working assumption that just because someone disagrees with you doesn’t mean they’re immoral or insane. And take the time to listen -- as honestly and respectfully as you want to be listened to in turn -- to all the other voices that make up our unruly, difficult democracy.
And I believe that for all our imperfections, we are full of decency and goodness, and that the forces that divide us are not as strong as those that unite us.
That’s what I believe, in part because that’s what a child like Christina Taylor Green believed.
Imagine -- imagine for a moment, here was a young girl who was just becoming aware of our democracy; just beginning to understand the obligations of citizenship; just starting to glimpse the fact that some day she, too, might play a part in shaping her nation’s future. She had been elected to her student council. She saw public service as something exciting and hopeful. She was off to meet her congresswoman, someone she was sure was good and important and might be a role model. She saw all this through the eyes of a child, undimmed by the cynicism or vitriol that we adults all too often just take for granted.
I want to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as Christina imagined it. I want America to be as good as she imagined it. All of us -– we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children’s expectations.
Does the size of an audience matter to you, the speaker? Should you do something different if your audience is large or small? What about if you’re prepped for a big turnout and you only get six people? Or you’re prepared for 100 and 250 people show up for an SRO event? What then?
OK, size does matter, but not in the way you’re probably thinking. Let’s get the misconceptions out of the way first.
You can – and should – still be interactive with an audience even if it’s large. I often work with speakers who are used to audiences of, say, 35 – 100, and are just facing the prospect of 300+ audiences. They tend to assume that the interactivity they’ve gotten used to in the smaller audience won’t work with the larger one. So, they want to know, what do I do instead?
The answer is that you continue to be interactive. Virtually everything that works in an audience of 35 will work with an audience of 350 or even one of 1000 – you just have to work much harder to put more energy out, to ensure that the directions are much clearer, and that you allow much more time. It’s a larger ship and it takes longer to turn it.
To be sure, you may have to simplify some exercises a bit, but surprisingly little. The main idea to keep in mind is that you have to still think of yourself as speaking with a few people. You’re still having a conversation.
I once gave a speech on teaching to graduate students who were going to be teaching for the first time. We expected maybe 50 students to show up. 500 arrived. I decided on the spot to keep to my plan, which was heavily interactive. I waded into the audience and had one-on-one conversations. It worked beautifully, because I kept the 2 rules of interactivity in mind:
You must have no doubt that the audience will respond. When I waded into that audience, I was not going to allow the audience to sit on their hands. I demanded (and got) a response. That’s the mindset you have to have.
Whatever the audience does give you is wonderful. This second rule is of course true of audiences large and small. The things people think of to say or ask on the spot are not always earth-shattering. No matter. Treat them with the respect due the courage that it took to speak up.
OK, so what about an audience that is different in size from the one you’re expecting? What do you do?
If the audience is smaller than expected, be prepared to throw out your prepared remarks. Audiences can get uncomfortable if they think they’ve decided to attend a presentation where few other people show up. They fear that the speech is going to be a disaster for some reason, and they didn’t get the word. So acknowledge the ‘elephant in the room’ and make a virtue of it. “I love that there are 7 really dedicated people here! You must really care deeply about (the topic)! Let’s just have a conversation and make sure that we answer all your questions!”
If the audience is larger than expected, be prepared to adjust your technique. It sounds like a nice problem to have, right? But in fact an audience that is bulging at the seams can cause real problems. The folks in the back might not be able to hear you, the standees are going to feel put upon because they have to stand, some people may not be able to see your visual aids, and so on. Here, you need to be sensitive about what’s going on in the room and make a huge effort to accommodate everyone. Repeat what you’re saying for people in the back. Offer to stop and let some people go half-way through if they want to so that they’re not exhausted by the chore of standing for an hour. Explain your visuals, or find some way to distribute them -- after the fact, perhaps. Whatever the difficulties are, be sensitive to them and offer your audience help to the extent possible. Attendees will deeply appreciate the courtesy and will reward you with their devotion.
Overall, a large audience is different from a small one. Large audiences move more slowly, take in your wonderful insights more slowly, and respond more slowly than small ones. You have to wait for them. Large audiences want to laugh and have a good time. You shouldn’t pander, but you should be prepared to relax and have a laugh – at your expense, if necessary.
You need to put out more energy for a larger audience. You need to work the room even more vigorously, and make sure that you’re talking to everyone, including the back row, not just the first few rows of seats. And finally, you need to focus your passion even more clearly so that your message travels the larger distance to the wonderfully big audience.
What are your experiences with audience size? Share your insights and stories in the comments.
A generation ago it was easy: public figures didn’t cry in front of the cameras, or in any sort of public setting. When Ed Muskie cried on the 1972 campaign trail, his candidacy more or less collapsed afterward. He was widely deemed too emotional to be president. Fast forward to 2008, and candidate Hilary Clinton’s near-crying moment in January in New Hampshire. That episode was said by some to be a calculated effort to make her appear more human, whereas others said it was a genuine moment that made her appear more human. Finally, in the present day, we have the new Speaker of the House – in the line of succession – blubbering at every opportunity whenever free enterprise is mentioned.
What’s the right emotional tenor for a leader to strike? Why do we make such a fuss about tears and other emotional outbursts? What does an emotional outburst say about the public figure in question? The following are a few rules for emotional behavior in public.
(1) What’s appropriate changes constantly; part of the test of a modern public figure is how well he or she ‘reads’ the situation. The reason the public reacted so strongly to Muskie’s possible tears was that they were out of the normal range of behavior for politicians of the day. The issue is not really one of emotion per se, but how well the public figure reads the situation and reacts. It’s a test, in this sense, of emotional intelligence. If you push the envelope too far, you’ll get a strong public reaction, either good or bad – or more likely both at once.
(2) Emotional outbursts are ‘hot’ TV; they will get covered. There’s no hiding if the cameras are rolling at the same time as the tears. TV is a cool medium, and it craves ‘hot’ emotions. In other words, we love to watch people get angry, sad, happy, or whatever. As long as it’s emotional and extreme it will play well on TV and get lots of coverage.
(3) When the emotion runs counter to the dominant story about you, it will make news. Hilary’s slight choking up on the campaign trail was big news because the dominant story about her was that she was a controlled, unemotional campaigner. There was a gender-based narrative about her as well: was she being ‘tough’ in order to put questions to rest about her ability to dominate on the world stage because she is a woman? The tears might have been calculated, or they might have been real, but either way they were news because of the perception of Hilary’s character. Did the tears support or undercut the narrative? That was the argument.
(4) An established public figure can push the boundaries of currently acceptable behavior. John Boehner’s teary speeches have become commonplace; he has pushed the boundaries of what is acceptable in a public emotional outburst. After a little ridicule and a few stories, the press will move on to other things, because it absorbs this story into the main Boehner narrative. The main story on Boehner is that he is a cigarette-smoking, golf-playing, orange-faced member of the classic (male) Republican country club set. Tears therefore are a surprise, but they don’t really interrupt the basic flow of the Boehner saga. In other words, because Boehner is already well-known on the national stage, and his story well-established, that his crying jags only add a plot point; they don’t really undercut the main story.
(5) Even as the emotional boundaries change, what stays the same is the importance of tact. We expect some emotional intelligence from our leaders, and some strength. Thus restrained emotions will always play better than full-bore outbursts. Boehner is ridiculed not because he cries, but because he cries in big, slobbery gasps of tears. The issue is that emotions are charismatic; we pay attention to, and ultimately respect leaders who show anger, compassion, excitement, and the rest of the range of human emotions at the appropriate moment and at the appropriate pitch. The world has become far more accepting of public emotions in general, but we still expect our leaders to be tactful about them.
What are your favorite public emotional moments? What, in your view, are the current rules of the road? If President Obama cried, for example, would that – and should that – make news?
10. I will NOT run over my allotted time.
9. I will NOT use Power Point word slides as my speaker notes.
8. I will NOT dump information on my audience.
7. I will NOT read my slides to the audience.
6. I will NOT use clip art on my slides.
5. I WILL use photography and imagery that tell a story on my slides.
4. I WILL come out from behind the podium to connect with the audience.
3. I WILL make my speech about the audience, not about me.
2. I WILL tell a story about a subject that I’m passionate about.
1. I WILL remember that both the audience’s time and mine is precious, and I will give a speech that changes the world.
One last item to tick off the list for last year before I get fully up to speed in 2011: who were the best communicators in 2010 – and why? I’m inspired by a list of the best and worst put out by Decker Communications. Their list includes many that I agree with, but because it also includes some partisan political choices (really, there were no good Democratic communicators in 2010? Not one?), I’m not going to address it specifically. Instead, I’m going to talk about what makes a great public communicator and what lessons we can learn from those 2010 examples. So here goes: my top 5 communications lessons from 2010.
(1) Anger is a powerful, attractive emotion – but use it with caution.
The political season brought many good and bad communicators to the fore, but a consistent winner was the Angry Anti-Washington politician. It worked as long as the candidate was smart, focused, and not simply about anger (Scott Brown). When the candidate was dumb, unfocused, or crazy, it didn’t work (Christine O’Donnell). Voters are not stupid, and elections are both won and lost, something that the winners usually forget. For example, Scott Brown won the by-election in Massachusetts not only because he was an effective communicator, but also because his opponent, Martha Coakley, was ineffective, and managed to insult not only Massachusetts voters, but also Red Sox fans, something you don’t do in the Bay State.
(2) To manage a tricky situation, you need to show you care by showing how you feel.
The BP oil spill in the Gulf provided a wonderful object lesson in how to do it, and how not to do it. The infamous Tony Hayward, who wanted his life back, got it, but not in the way he wanted, because he appeared to be responding (ineptly) moment to moment with indifference or distance. By contrast, Admiral Thad Allen provided a no-nonsense, steady persona that seemed real and recognizable. We could understand his emotions, and we respected them, where Hayward’s seemed disengaged and more than a little baffling.
(3) To hold the public’s interest for long, you need a strong narrative.
By far the best story in 2010 was the rescue of the Chilean miners. The President of Chile, Sebastian Pinera, put together an extraordinary communications experience for the rest of the world. We collectively held our breaths for the 35 days, uncertain of the outcome, and then celebrated with the entire country when the rescue finally came. Pinera made it all happen, and he committed to a full media presence before he knew that the result would be a happy one.
(4) When you’re in the hot seat, nothing less than complete transparency will do.
It’s astonishing to me that organizations and individuals still try to hoodwink the public in this era of full disclosure. For every company trying to get away with something, there is a whistle blower. For every individual trying to hide something, there is a chauffeur, or maid, or ex-love that will dish the dirt. For every organization trying to conceal a sordid deal, there’s YouTube. Tiger Woods found this out, as did countless companies trying to hide mistreatment, malfeasance, or misadventure.
(5) If you’re not ready for prime time, get out of the way and let someone else do the job.
It might have been possible once for hardy amateurs to withstand public scrutiny, but the scrum is simply too vicious today for people who aren’t ready or who don’t have the ability to think fast enough on their feet to survive a press grilling. Most of us aren’t as good as we think we are, but some of us are just not up to the 21st century game, and we should have the sense to let someone else do it. Of course, Tony Hayward is the poster child for PR incompetence at the highest level, but so is Harry Reid and (to hand out equal treatment to both parties) Bobby Jindal.
A calendar year is an arbitrary deadline and communication is never-ending; nevertheless it’s helpful to take stock of the kind of year in communications we’ve just had and look ahead to what we can expect in 2011. I see five trends that will each undergo shifts in 2011.
In 2011, we’ll rediscover hope
The economic black swan of 2008 both created and crystallized a current of anger in the public discourse that politicians were very quick to seize upon, reducing the level of communications, especially in the United States, to a new low of invective, recrimination, and sheer hostility. The President was called a liar as he delivered the State of the Union address in January, and things went downhill from there.
Just as quickly as this bubble of anger has blown up, it will pop as the economy improves. It’s the nature of humans – and especially Americans – to be optimistic, and we will re-discover our optimism as our bank balances and job prospects improve. In sum: Anger will lose its currency, and a little frothy optimism will replace it.
In 2011, we’ll stop reading and start watching
Of course this trend is as old as video games and – yes – television – but several trends had to converge before we could decisively predict the ascendance of the visual over the verbal. And let’s put one myth to bed right now: there is no evidence that there are three kinds of learners, visual, oral, and kinesthetic. We’re all primarily visual learners. And we all use all three kinds of learning. But it has been too hard for most of us to make movies and send video love notes hitherto. Now, with the widespread use of flip cams, phone cams, and cams everywhere else, there’s nothing stopping us from all becoming the visual learners we were meant to be.
In 2011, we’ll fall in love again -- with a politician
Along with our increasing hope, we’re going to find a new political figure that will show us the positive path we all crave, and we’ll make him or her our new media darling. This will of course only become possible with the rise of the stock market, and retirees’ – and near-retirees’ – portfolios, but that’s coming in early Spring.
What this suggests is that politicians who can get something done – and communicate what they have done effectively – will be the new media stars.
In 2011, business will finally reject Mr. Spock and embrace Captain Kirk
Business people have struggled with the Mr. Spock theory of emotions for years – that emotions are messy and logic is a superior way of reasoning and communicating. In 2011, finally, businesses will embrace the message in recent brain research – that emotion is actually what makes decision-making and memory possible, and begin to emote like Captain Kirk of Star Trek – who never found himself in a situation he couldn’t emote his way out of. We’re going to see a tide of weeping and exultations engulf boardrooms and corporate spokespeople – and that’s a good thing, on the whole.
In 2011, we’ll replace the long-winded with the nano-communication
So information-saturated and attention-deprived are we as a culture that Twitter will begin to seem endless in 2011. The pressure will be on to reduce corporate communications – and indeed communications of all kinds – to haiku-like proportions. Increasingly, the short form will triumph, whether it’s in corporate reports, tombstones, or even legal briefs. Newspapers will become shorter than the web pages that have replaced them. The Supreme Court will begin to curtail its opinions. If you can’t say it fast, no one will listen in 2011. I’d better stop there.
