I’m fascinated by politicians like Herman Cain and Rick Perry who hang in there – along with their most loyal staff and supporters – long after everyone in the outside world can see that they’re dead in the water.  Why the difference in perspective?  Of course, a huge piece of it is simply the momentum that a candidacy has, and the desire of the candidate and the people close to him, having gone this far, to hang in there and not give up. 

But there’s something deeper going here.  We’re experiencing different realities because our perception of public figures like Cain and Perry largely come from television and the Internet, whereas the insiders get their impressions from having seen him in person or having worked with him. 

We’re hard-wired to ‘read’ – unconsciously – a person who comes within our personal orbit.  We develop a sense of what that person is like.  We trust them, or not, depending on the unconscious cues we get.  And so a relationship that is formed in person has some strength, and may well survive a disappointment or two.  If someone we know and love behaves like an idiot, we say to ourselves, “he was having a bad day,” or “she was off her game.”  We attribute the screw up to circumstances, and not character.

Online, it’s different.  Trust is much more fragile, because it hasn’t been reinforced by those unconscious face-to-face cues.  So when someone that we know virtually misbehaves or does something apparently stupid, we’re far more ready to write them off as a lost cause.  We attribute the screw up to character, not circumstances. 

So when you’re thinking about the relationships you form online, with your suppliers, your customers, your fan base, and so on, think about how fragile they are.  If you screw something up, expect a much more brutal, instant reaction from all those online people than you get from your face-to-face colleagues.  They’re deciding that your character is flawed.  Your mother will give you the benefit of a bad day. 

BTW, if Cain quits tonight, it will be another triumph of the virtual over the real.  Because more and more, it's the virtual that matters.

Can a speaker inspire an audience with a negative message?  The short answer is ‘no’, but of course you’re thinking about politicians – just to take a particularly blatant example – who appear to inspire their followers with all sorts of negative messages, so you’re thinking, ‘certainly a speaker can!’  But you would be wrong.   

Why?  The answer is important, because it tells us something about how to construct a good speech.  If you give us a problem, we want to solve it.  That’s the way our minds work.  Problem-solution.  Our minds easily follow the logic of that structure, which is why it makes such a good one for many speeches. 

Now, there are two kinds of problems audiences can respond to – new problems, or problems they already know they have.  If we know we have a problem already, we want to hear that you (as a speaker-leader) understand it.  If you do that much, we’ll grant you our credibility – we’ll decide you know what you’re talking about.  If you show us how to solve the problem, we’ll trust you.  Think of the doctor that successfully diagnoses a condition – that earns our credibility.  But when that same doctor leads us to health, we trust him or her.  That’s the deeper connection. 

If it’s a new problem – one we don’t fully understand, or haven’t articulated well, then we grant huge respect to the speaker who can do that for us.  A real expert, we think. 

But if the speaker can’t offer a solution, we eventually turn off.  And that’s why you can’t inspire with a (solely) negative message.  All those politicians offer solutions with their trenchant analysis of current woes.  You may not like the solutions.  In that case, you won’t trust the candidate, even if you grant, grudgingly, credibility because you at least partially buy into the analysis of the problem.  But most of those politicians find a group for whom their solutions make sense.  Hence the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, and so on.  For some, it’s tax breaks.  For others, it’s revenue enhancements. 

The same holds true for business speakers, and speakers in other walks of life.  A clear, compelling analysis of a problem will get you credibility.  But unless you have an equally compelling solution, you won’t inspire trust, and you won’t galvanize your followers. 

10.  Toastmasters.  The volunteer organization that will give you the chance to learn the craft of public speaking in a relatively safe space, at little or no cost. 

9.  William Safire’s Lend Me Your Ears.   Still the best collection of great speeches, and a must-have resource for any serious public speaker. 

8.  TED.com.  It’s getting hard to remember, but before TED it was actually difficult to see a new speaker in action easily online.  Now they’re out there – almost all of them, all the time. 

7.  Flipcams.  Buy 2, record yourself speaking with one, and record the audience with the other.  You’ll get deep insight into how you’re coming across.

6.  Phil Davison, Internet sensation.  Technically, Phil delivered his speech just over a year ago, but I’m still really, really thankful. 

5.  The iPad.   You can show videos, slides, and even use your iPad as a white board with a growing array of apps.  So much less to carry on the road!

4.  Garr Reynolds and Nancy Duarte.   The best designers and thinkers about great slide presentations out there.  Presentation Zen and Slide:ology (and their other books) should be on your bookshelf, dogeared. 

3.  Herman Caine.   Did we need another perfect example of how not to handle a media firestorm?  And yet, companies and campaigns still don’t get it right.   Apparently, we needed this guy.  Transparency, people!

2.  Mirror neurons.  These nifty little brain cells make us an empathetic species.  Without them, we would not be able to share a laugh, get excited together about an opportunity – or change the world with a speech. 

1.  Rick Perry’s “Oops.”  A 52-second flub that gives hope to the rest of us, imperfect speakers always trying to improve our craft. 

It’s Friday and almost Thanksgiving here in the US, and so it seems like a good time to put my storyteller-speaker coach’s hat on, kick back, and take on a few of the current issues in the news. 

Great stories, like great speeches, present compelling problems to the audience.  The catch is that in the end the audience always wants a solution.  Stories that continue to grab audiences’ attentions generation after generation – like Romeo and Juliet – do both brilliantly.   (SPOILER ALERT) Will the star-crossed lovers find a way to happiness?  That’s the problem.  The answer is a tragic one – in attempting to work out their problem, they kill themselves, dying in each other’s arms.  So the answer to the question is no, and the solution to the problem is an unhappy one – but no less compelling because of that. 

Audiences demand a solution that matches the problem from the speaker – and news audiences ultimately demand the same from their stories.  The Libyan conflict was over for everyone except the Libyans once Gaddafi was caught and killed.  Now it’s on to a new story and a new problem – can the former rebels establish a working government?  That’s much less dramatic and compelling a story (for the rest of the world) so Libya has dropped way down on the global news meter. 

To finish the Penn State abuse scandal, the University or the Governor or somebody needs to conduct a highly visible, rigorous investigation, hang everyone involved out to dry, and clean house.  Otherwise, it will haunt State College for years, in the same way that the Catholic Church has been unable to shake its sex abuse scandal because it has never really come clean about it in a way that matches the problem. 

Occupy Wall Street has presented a compelling problem to the world – economic inequality – but it has gone on long enough that people are asking for a solution.  As long as none is forthcoming, we can’t move through the story.  And because we have limited capacity for juggling news stories in our heads, OWS is risking losing the public’s attention altogether.  Stories that are further down on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs will take over.   At the base of Maslow’s hierarchy are physiological needs and safety issues, and so sex, disasters and wars always trump people camping out in urban parks.  Unless the OWS folks give us some solutions to debate, we’re going to move on. 

A different kind of issue bedevils the Mitt Romney campaign.  He can’t compete right now with the personal sagas of Caine and Perry self-destructing.  Newt will of course be next – he has self-destruction written all over him – and so Mitt is going to stay out of the news for a while.  Of course, he’s hoping to be the last Republican standing, the only sensible one in the bunch, but as a story and a problem, that’s not very compelling. 

He’ll have better luck once he’s through the primaries, because the story of America’s economic suffering is compelling, especially to voting Americans, and he can ride it a long way.  Nonetheless, ultimately people are going to demand a solution to that one, and if it were an easy one to solve, we would have done it already.  If Romney presents the usual Republican shibboleths – less government regulation, lower taxes, cutting the budget – thoughtful voters are going to realize that those solutions, while fine in themselves, don’t match the problem.  Sure government regulation is irritating, but a recent study found that only a tiny percentage of businesses actually cite it as a real problem.  We’d all like lower taxes, but somehow those Republican plans always end up cutting taxes for the rich, not the middle class and the poor – like 9-9-9.  And cutting the budget, while essential in the long run, is only going to hurt the economy in the short run.  Doesn’t anyone remember that Herbert Hoover tried that at the beginning of the Great Depression and made it worse as a result?  Voters are inattentive, but not stupid.  Politicians should take heed. 

To be evenhanded politically, here’s a few words on President Obama’s rhetorical problems:  no story at all.     

Finally, there’s the NBA.  I personally am a basketball fanatic, and a huge fan of my hometown Celtics, but the problem here – a 50% or a 51% percent split? – is so far from compelling that this story is never going to be more than an afterthought.  At the end of the news day, Penn State sex scandals, economic woes, and mayhem around the world are going to crowd out the woes of “billionaires trying to stick it to millionaires” as someone so aptly put it.  The NBA needs a much better story to tell, and a much more compelling problem. 

Hope you enjoyed the rant.  Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. 

Readers of this blog will recognize the name David Meerman Scott – he’s a bestselling author and successful speaker and a client – and will be interested to know that he’s done it again.  He’s pointed the way forward in the publishing industry by putting out an e-book, on Amazon and iTunes, and published by Wiley.  Here’s the news flash:  there is no paper form of this book.  It’s electronic only, yet published by a major publisher. 

The book is Newsjacking:  How to Inject your Ideas into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage.  David introduces the idea of “the second paragraph” in a news story, and the opportunity to generate free media for yourself, or your company, or your idea by injecting yourself into that second paragraph.

How do you do it?  The first paragraph is the who-what-why-where-when facts of the story, and those are easy to get (for journalists) and involve the basics of the breaking news, whatever it is.  The second paragraph then goes deeper into the background of the story, and that’s where your opportunity comes in, according to David.  That’s where you add your expertise, your products, your insight, your take. 

For example, when the Chilean miners were finally rescued, they were widely photographed the instant they emerged from the ground wearing Oakley sunglasses.  Journalists noticed, and commented on the brilliant, simple bit of product placement around the world.  Oakley sunglasses thus newsjacked the biggest news story of the week, probably the month, and maybe the year.  By one estimate, the company generated $41 million worth of free publicity for the price of 33 pairs of their sunglasses. 

David’s point is that anyone can do this if they move fast enough, catch the right news item, and have something interesting to offer for paragraph two.  As he notes, there’s nothing wrong with paid advertising, but free marketing is a whole lot less expensive, and often more far-reaching. 

The concept is worth studying for anyone who runs a business, or seeks promotion of their products, ideas, or services.  And David’s embrace of the e-book format is a gamble on one possible future of the book business.  Stay tuned. 

 

Like many Americans, I was riveted by debater Rick Perry’s apparent brain freeze, as he attempted to talk about the three cabinet departments he would kill if elected president.  As a speech coach, I sympathize, having seen clients do the same thing many times – and done it myself. 

What I recommend is having a minimal set of notes as a safety net so that if your mind does go blank, you’ve got something to fall back on.  Knowing that the safety net is there will usually help the brain relax and therefore avoid the problem in the first place.  The presidential debaters get paper and pens; Rick should scribble down a few key ideas to help him relax and get through those endless Republican debates with no more flubs.    

What really happened to Perry?  We’ve all been there, when a combination of stress, fatigue, and lack of focus makes us forget that name, that date, or that trivia question.  Adrenaline plays havoc with our normal waking mind, and in an effort to keep us alive, shuts down many of our ordinary cranial activities.  We’re focused on getting ready to escape danger, not calmly detailing lists of 3 items. 

That fight-or-flight response is something we’ve evolved to help us in crises; unfortunately the modern era is full of moments that invoke the adrenaline response but aren’t really suited to actual fighting or fleeing.  (Neither of those two options was available to Rick on TV.)  The result can be embarrassing – but usually not as embarrassing as Perry’s because the stakes are not as high. 

Perry and his handlers came back gamely with an appearance on Letterman designed to push us all to laugh the whole thing off.  Unfortunately, the net result will be to laugh the whole Rick Perry campaign off in the long run. 

Here’s the truth.  Perry’s campaign is over.  He just doesn’t know it yet.  

Why?  Two reasons.  First, this whole episode feeds the developing Perry narrative, that he’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer.  That will kill his campaign no matter how much we are willing to laugh at a specific mistake, or how amusing the comeback attempt. 

Second, most people’s perception of the presidency is that it’s serious business.  You can’t self-deprecate your way to the White House.  When it comes to pulling the voting lever, Americans opt for someone they think can actually handle the job. 

But the Perry kerfuffle does raise a larger question:  are debates a good way to test the mettle of a presidential candidate?  After all, once you’re in the White House, it’s not about remembering stuff moment to moment – you’ve got aides for that. 

I think the short answer is that, as Winston Churchill said of democracies, they’re the worst possible system – except for all the others.  Highly imperfect, debates are nonetheless the only glimpse most of us get of presidential candidates in something approaching a real, unscripted moment.  Hence their fascination – and the importance of moments like Rick Perry’s. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Corporate America needs a new story – badly.  The old story was that loyalty was rewarded.  You worked for the company for years, sacrificed family time, put in long hours, and subordinated your dreams to the company’s.  In exchange, the company gave you lifetime employment, and a decent retirement. 

Well, as you all know, that story went away a long time ago.  Layoffs, company implosions, and economic dire straits put paid to all that.  No lifetime employment, no retirement, not even many jobs – they're all gone.

Corporate America needs a new story.   Stories like this work in the background; they influence employee and customer attitudes, and they shape personal and corporate histories over the long term.  You ignore them at your personal and corporate peril. 

What are the current raw data for the new story?  Not good.  On the one hand,  we read that corporate fat cats get huge payoffs, no matter if the company is suffering.  On the other hand, layoffs abound, and if you’re lucky enough not to get laid off, then you’re working ridiculous hours with less and less support from the company.  “Give me 20 percent more next year with 20 percent less budget,” is the cry from the boss as he heads to the golf links.  Stories are emotional, and the current emotions are angry and bitter.   

The reality underlying these data points is that the middle class American lifestyle has been taking a huge hit over the past decade (and longer), while the very rich have been getting richer – much richer.   If you believe the media today, there are only two career paths left – flipping burgers at minimum wage, or becoming a billionaire by starting up a new Internet company whose products go viral. 

That’s not a good story, and we all need good stories to live by.  A huge part of America’s malaise at the moment – the anger from the left and the right – has to do with that sense that our hold on the middle class is slipping.  The one side blames government and the other side blames Wall Street – but they’re reacting to the same sense that the opportunity that American once promised is vanishing like bipartisanship in DC. 

Corporate America had better come up with a new story, one that gives us back our hope, and one that changes the view of Wall Street that it’s all about greed and self-interest.  Why should we care about working for a big business today?  What’s the quest that we’re on?  Where is the purpose, the excitement, the adventure, and where, oh where is the reward? 

Until corporate America can find a new story to tell, one that is as compelling as the old one was, trust is going to be fragile, loyalty is going to be flimsy, and attitudes are going to be grumpy.  And if you don’t think all of that goes directly to the bottom line, then you need to wake up to the reality of an economy of choice, fickle customers, and marketplaces that come and go in a matter of months. 

Corporate America needs a new story to tell. 

I’ve recently been reminded that one of the universal constants in the public speaking world is fear.  Most speakers have it, a few manage to avoid it, and some are crushed by it.  A recent article about a survey of UK CEOs found that they, too, experience fear.  Recent work with a client involved helping him with his fear of opening a speech.  He’s fine once he gets going, but those first few minutes are debilitating.  And I recently gave a speech after taking about a month off to work on a book proposal, and I found myself rusty and nervous just like everyone else. 

What can you do about it?  Here are 5 ideas to help you with that universal annoyance. 

1.  Redefine the fear as adrenaline, and therefore a good thing.  This is my personal favorite, and it works pretty well if you stick to it over a long period of time.  When we’re faced with having to speak in front of a crowd – or the prospect of one – the adrenaline starts flowing.  It’s the well-known flight-or-fight syndrome that helps you get ready to do battle with ancient enemies.  In addition to the annoying symptoms like dry mouth, or shaky knees, or clammy palms, your brain works faster, you have more energy, and you look a little larger than life.  And that’s all good.  So focus on the good things that those symptoms are bringing you, and you’ll start to think differently about those clammy palms. 

2.  Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse.  Rehearse a lot.  Rehearsal is the best way to deal with nerves, objectively speaking, because what you do a lot you get comfortable with and thus are less likely to get frightened about.  Rehearsal has the added benefit of most likely making you better at the presentation – certainly better than if you wing it.  And you’ll look more polished because your body will signal to the audience, “I’ve done this before; I’m cool.”

3.  Breathe deeply, from the belly.  Breathe slowly, and often.  Breathing is good for you, your voice, and your composure.  A slow, deep belly breath supported from the diaphragmatic muscles will start an autonomic relaxation response that nicely counteracts those feelings of terror, so start at the first sign of symptoms.  Because those belly breaths will ground you, make sure you do them just before you get up to speak – while you’re being introduced, for example. 

4.  Focus on the audience, not on yourself.  The real insight at the core of successful public speaking is that it isn’t about you, it’s about the audience getting it (or you were never there, in some sense).  So focus on the audience, let go of yourself, and have a great time.  I think of this as the Zen insight into public speaking, and it is truly liberating if you can convince yourself of it.

5.  Focus on an emotion that you want to convey to the audience.  If you’re the sort of speaker who starts riffing on all the things that might go wrong when you get nervous about speaking, then you’re like most of us.  The idea is to replace that doom loop with something more productive.  For a host of reasons, replacing nervous mental chatter with a strong emotion is a great substitute.  Here’s how you do it.  First, figure out what emotion is appropriate to the beginning of your speech.  It might be anger, joy, excitement, whatever.  Then, recall a time when you felt that emotion naturally and strongly.  But don’t just remember it – relive it.  Recall what it smelled, tasted, looked, sounded and felt like.  Shut your eyes and put yourself there.  With practice, this can become a powerful and quick way to focus before speaking.  And if you do this sense memory thoroughly enough, you’ll chase the nervous thoughts out of your head. 

We all get nervous, but there are ways to minimize nerves, and to use the mental state to your advantage, to make you a better speaker.  Try them all, and pick the one or ones that works best for you.  

I’ve blogged about Malcolm Gladwell before, and given him mixed reviews as a good storyteller, but a speaker with some quirks that got in the way of maximum effectiveness.

Well, it’s time to give Gladwell a second look. His TED talk from July 2011, posted in October, is a masterpiece of the storytelling art, and it is delivered well. This is a talk that any speaker can learn from. If you’re a polished performer, learn from Gladwell’s pacing and tonal variety – and his storytelling. If you’re a novice, then focus on Gladwell’s storytelling, because it is so good that it makes me wish that more speakers would up the ante on themselves and weave a tale as well as he does.

OK, what is it that Gladwell does so brilliantly? Five lessons of the storyteller’s art come from this TED video and the “Strange Tale of the Norden Bombsight.”

First, Gladwell grabs our interest with the high stakes of the story. The best stories are matters of life and death. Of course, a story about a bombsight is exactly that. Our interest is piqued because we’re talking about war, death, and destruction. It’s the storyteller’s equivalent of shouting “fire!” in a crowded theatre – it gets our attention.

Second, Gladwell structures the story in three parts or acts, with the right kind of conclusion. In the first part, or act, Gladwell tells us about Norden and his bombsight and what it was supposed to do. In this way he builds up the interest in the device. Instead of telling us the story retrospectively, he puts us in the time period, in the search for an accurate way to aim bombs, and he tells us why that’s important.

In the second part, Gladwell tells us what actually happened with the Norden bombsight, and why it didn’t deliver on its promise for pinpoint accuracy. This unexpected turn keeps our interest in the story high, because he’s made us care about the device and we want to know why it fails.

And in the third part of his tale, Gladwell draws the larger moral of the story.  The point of his tale, again surprising, is that the search for pinpoint accuracy is not the right quest. Instead, we need to be thinking about things like the bombsight in a different and more profound way, with their inherent limitations. The complexity of human issues, we learn, defies solution by the simplicity of things.

And stay tuned for the postscript with which Gladwell closes his tale. It’s brilliant.

Third, Gladwell peppers his story with precise, relevant details – but not too many. Details bring stories to life. And they kill stories when there are too many of them. Gladwell knows exactly when to give us a telling detail, and when to ease up and keep us at the 20,000-foot view. We know exactly how many SCUD missile launchers the US successfully took out during the Iraq war -- zero – but we never get a precise description of the bombsight itself. Why? Because only an engineer would care. The bombsight is too complicated. The average listener only care about its effects.

Fourth, Gladwell has (mostly) conquered his ‘happy feet’ problem. In his earlier talks, Malcolm’s nervous energy showed up in relentless pacing up and down the stage. Now, he’s relaxed enough (or practiced enough) to come to a halt and plant his feet occasionally, and that simple shift makes an enormous difference in his effectiveness.  A storyteller's job is to stand and deliver, so that motion doesn't get in the way of comprehension, but rather reinforces it.  

Fifth, Gladwell varies his pacing and pitch with the ebb and flow of the story. Advanced speakers should watch and listen to the video focusing on Gladwell’s voice. It’s resonant and strong, and he varies it expertly, speeding up and raising the volume at times, and slowing down and lowering both pitch and volume when he needs a dramatic emphasis. This TED talk shows Gladwell at the peak of his game. Now, if we can just get him to tuck in his shirt….