If you don’t want to talk about it, don’t put it on the slide.

Knowledgeable people in the audience notice small details and ask penetrating questions. Less knowledgeable people lob random questions to probe for weaknesses in your argument and character.

If it complicates your point, and there’s no ethical reason why the audience should know it, leave it out.

We are often asked to kick-off meetings.  What’s the best way to get everyone focused on the task at hand, and demonstrate our own capacity for effective leadership?

1. Start on time.  Or, if you must delay, acknowledge those who are present and inform them you would like to wait for a few minutes.
2. Begin your opening remarks by looking at the big picture.  Reframe what has happened in the recent past, or will happen in the immediate future, that makes this meeting necessary.
3. Define the particular challenges, problems, issues, or questions that the group needs to address.
4. Speak about the consequences of the unsolved problems, or the opportunities that exist if the group succeeds.
5. Then do your house-keeping and your laying of the ground-rules.  Typical items include time to end, objectives, items on the agenda, times for each item, and methods to be used to accomplish the goals.
6. Be brief, energetic, and connected eye-to-eye with those seated at the table with you.

The tone is set by the leader.  This is true of companies, football teams, schools and meetings.  You can do it well, and the more you do it with mindful attention to the above, the better you will be.

Sims Wyeth is a speech coach in Montclair, NJ specializing in presentation skills and public speaking training in order to give accomplished people the knowledge and skill they need to become accomplished speakers. Learn more public speaking tips at www.SimsWyeth.com.

“Every word uttered evokes the idea of its opposite. “  –Goethe

In other words, when you assert your opinion, your listeners will reflexively search their own minds for a thought that could prove your idea flawed.  

To take the wind out of their sails, and to demonstrate that you have considered other perspectives, speak their thoughts for them, and explain why your idea is superior.

In this way, your talk takes the form of a dialogue between your proposal and reasonable objections to it.

You will be seen as credible and balanced, and your listeners will be more likely to agree.

Meghan called.  She was a high school senior, my daughter’s friend and highschool classmate.  She had a summer job selling for the CutCo Knife Company, and wanted to make a presentation to us in our home. 

I said, “Yes,” although my wife was uncomfortable that she might have to say, “No,” to Meghan.  So she arranged to be out of the house when Meghan arrived.

On the appointed evening, Meghan carried her hefty sales case through the front door and set up on the dining room table.   While she was unpacking her wares, she asked me if I would please get her a glass of water.  I did, and when I returned to the dining room and sat down, she asked me to get the knives we currently used and bring them in.

I went back to the kitchen and returned with the knives.  When she was all set up, she asked me, “How would you describe your current knives?”

“Old, dull and inadequate,” I said.

“Why do you say that?” she asked.  I described how hard it was to keep them sharp, how some of the blades were so old they were worn thin, and how some of the blades wobbled in their handles.

 She pulled a length of rope from her case, and asked me to cut it with my sharpest knife.

“My sharpest?  That’s not saying much,” I said, taking my grandfathers old carving knife that was probably a good 70 years old.  It had a hardwood handle.

Meghan held the rope down on a cutting board that she pulled from her bag.  “Count the movements back and forth,” she said. 

 I began to saw.  It took fourteen saws.

“Now hold it down for me,” she said.  She picked up one of her new knives from a wooden block.  I grabbed one of the lengths and held it down.  “You’re stronger than I am, but count the saws it takes me with this knife,” she said.

 It took her four.

“Let me try that,” I teased her, as if she had done something slick.  I took the knife from her while she held the rope down on the cutting board.  Expecting it to be difficult, I pressed hard with the new knife and sawed through the rope in two strokes.

 I was impressed.

Meghan asked me to bring my best pair of kitchen scissors to the table.  They were also old, and could not make a dent on the rope.  She got out her CutCo scissors, and not only cut through the rope with ease, she also cut a penny in half.

I was pretty much sold.  She gave me information about the steel and the handles.  She showed me the different sets I could buy.  My wife came home and I called her in to the dining room.  She sat down reluctantly, and I asked Meghan to do the rope trick.  She had my wife count the strokes, etc. etc. and I saw my wife change from skeptic to true believer in a matter of seconds.

“Do the scissor trick,” I said.  Meghan cut the rope and the penny.  I saw Sharon’s eyes wander over to the full set of kitchen knives displayed on the table in a butcher block case.

We ended up buying all the kitchen knives and a set of 12 steak knives.  They remain in their butcher block on the kitchen counter seven years later.
                                                         ______

Selling by telling is what most of us do.  But selling by doing is more powerful because it’s active and experiential.  You could say that conversation is also experiential (in that we experience it) but words are more likely to get caught in the filters of the mind and not reach the muscles.  

I know of one law firm that goes to major corporations who are shopping for a new legal advisor, and begins by saying, “We can do the March of a Thousand Slides, or we can have a discussion about your issues so you can get a feel for what it’s like to work with us.” 

More often than not, the clients look at each other and choose to have the discussion.   

An active audience is more likely to be moved than a passive.  Hitler knew this, unfortunately, and had his followers do their “Sieg heils,” throughout his speeches. 

Meghan was trained by a very successful company.  She got me to do things—bring water, bring knives.  She got me to say things, “Old, dull and inadequate.”  She had me cut rope, and compare the old with the new.  It was sensational—literally sensational—in that it gave me a sensation, like driving a new car after you’ve been driving your old one for 10 years.

Plus, she was Meghan, my daughter’s friend, and the daughter of my friend Merrill.  She was in a strong position to win my business. 

According to Robert Cialdini and others, there are at least 25 proven Principles of Persuasion.  Meghan may have invoked 7 in her brief visit to our dining room. 

What can we as business speakers, and as sales professionals, learn from this exchange?  Stay tuned for more. 

You are a visual. Every move you make, every step you take…they’ll be watching you.

This is good news because once you know this, you can take control of the message you send by aligning your gestures, movements, and facial expressions with your words.

Who you are speaks more loudly than what you say. Actions speak louder than words. You are a visual message. Master your body language.

A report to a senior executive group is not a conversation, although it should sound conversational.  It is a communication designed to facilitate a prediction or a decision.

In order to sound conversational you need to be relaxed.  Ironically, relaxation comes from the tension of hard rehearsal.

Get to your recommendations as soon as possible. Don’t make them wait to find out why you are there.

Describe the benefits of your recommendations, preferably in quantitative terms—such as gross margin, time to ROI, or % of market share. Best case, base case, and worse case scenarios also add clarity and credibility.

Describe the costs, positioning them as reasonable compared to other similar projects that you can identify.

Include the downside if they decide not to follow your recommendation.  A favorable statistical confidence interval on your estimates of upside and downside will help.

As usual, occasionally get out of the abstract and into the concrete.  Illustrate the benefits of your recommendation with stories about other companies.  Likewise, dramatize the cost of not accepting your recommendations.

Senior executives tend to be big picture people.  Keep your remarks as short as possible.  They probably have to listen to a number of presentations at one sitting.  If you tell them everything they’ll remember nothing.

Don’t read bullet point slides. It’s the #1 thing people hate.  After all, why go to the trouble of a meeting if all the speaker does is read.  The senior people need to see you bring your idea to life, and demonstrate the character traits necessary to make it happen.

In terms of delivery, this is not the time to display your wild passion.  Just be extremely clear about what you want to do, why it’s a good idea, and how you plan to get it done.

Take away:  help them make a decision or a prediction.  In the fewest words possible.

Needle in a haystack

The audience will be drinking data from a firehose.  The savvy presenter recognizes this peril as an opportunity.

To capture attention—do something that stands out from the environment.  The opposite of getting attention is camouflage. Being attention-getting is not a quality; it is a contrast.

Trying too hard

Lots of people will be trying to stand out, and they’ll make the mistake of telling jokes, displaying cartoons on the screen, or trying to connect with the audience by telling stories about themselves.

Don’t do it.  The audience is content driven, results oriented, and time pressed.  They have limited space in short term memory.  Eliminate all extraneous information.

Not setting the scene

In an effort to get to the point, many speakers will forget to remind the audience of the back story—the space in which their molecule competes, and what the unmet medical needs are.

Your drug is the hero of a story.  It is stepping onto a stage to overcome important obstacles and bring health to sick people.  Set the scene so your drug looks like it has an important job to do.

Offending the experts

Analysts and other savvy investors may curl their toes in agony if you spend too much time on the big picture.

Set the scene quickly, then summarize in a fair and balanced way the achievements of your compound before you walk them through the data.

Using the word, “Robust”

The term “robust” has become a meaningless buzzword, especially in a scientific context.  Be the first presenter to dispense with using it.

Instead, make a statement that is meaningful, such as, “The data are promising,” or, “The data suggest…”

Going down rabbit holes

If you leave information on your slides that you don’t plan to talk about, you are inviting savvy listeners to drag you down into the weeds, which will choke your message with irrelevancies.

Unless there is an ethical reason that the audience needs to know it, keep it off the slide if it does not support your argument.

Not making an argument

There are some presenters who believe their job is to deliver information.  This approach leaves too much room for the audience to draw their own conclusions.

A good scientific presenter should make an argument for the quality of the study, the validity of the data, and the implications of his conclusions.

Blowing Q&A

It’s easier to make a slick presentation than it is to handle a room full of skeptical and insightful questions.

Brainstorm with colleagues to come up with all possible lines of inquiry, and practice responding to the most penetrating and damaging assaults.

Lack of conviction

Finally, your delivery stands guard over the material.  Great data poorly delivered at a high stakes venue is a huge waste of resources.

Rehearse, and where you falter, alter.

That’s the Golden Mean, or the Golden Ratio It’s the method by which the ancient Greeks would determine how to build something in order to make it beautiful.

I like it because it suggests there is science to beauty, and that proportion is important in all endeavors, including speaking.

For instance, what is the appropriate mix between data and interpretation? Between entertainment and substance? Between self-revelation and listener-centric content?

All these elements–and others– need to be balanced in a highly effective presentation.

In fact, in any important business conversation, we need guidance to balance the myriad views that need to be heard…and spoken.

And there’s another ratio for highly effective meetings: the Listening to Talking Ratio.

Somewhere in the fog of being there’s an optimal mix.

Sims Wyeth is a private speech coach in Montclair, NJ specializing in executive speech coaching and public speaking training in order to give accomplished people the knowledge and skill they need to become accomplished speakers. Learn more public speaking tips at www.SimsWyeth.com.

Things come in threes.  

First Representative Williams of South Carolina yelled, “You lie!” at the President during his speech on health care reform.

Then Serena Williams went off on a line judge at the U.S. Open.

Then Kanye West lost it at the Grammy Awards Ceremony.

The Serena thing is understandable—she’s out there fighting for her life and is all pumped up.  John McEnroe did much worse and is now a distinguished elder statesman of tennis.  Let’s give Serena a break.

But the other two guys stepped way over the line.  Screaming at the President and hijacking a microphone at a public ceremony are disruptive and rude behaviors.

It’s interesting that it got them both a lot of attention. I suspect that was Kanye’s motive.  I think Representative Williams is just a guy who is used to speaking his mind and lost the gyroscope on his social skills.

And that’s what can happen to us as presenters. 

I know one guy who was questioned about his marketing plan by an executive committee.  They wanted to know how he came up with his forecast number.  He told them and they said it didn’t seem right.

After a lot of going back and forth on his methodologies for determining the forecast, he got impatient and said, with his hands on his hips, “Well, if you don’t like the number, what do you want the number to be?”

You can imagine the silence in the room.  The President of the company took a breath and said, “Randy, why don’t we figure that out later.  Thank you for your time.”

Randy did not get sent to Siberia, but almost.  It took him years to earn his way back into the good graces of the executive committee.

Think two or three times before you let your temper get the best of you when you’re in the public eye.  Staying calm under pressure demonstrates maturity and leadership. 

More than communicating information and ideas, presenting is also a demonstration of character. 

Sims Wyeth is a private speech coach in Montclair, NJ specializing in executive speech coaching and public speaking training in order to give accomplished people the knowledge and skill they need to become accomplished speakers. Learn more public speaking tips at www.SimsWyeth.com.

I was looking for my childhood home on Google Earth, and caught a glimpse of it from 30,000 ft., then zoomed in and saw my mother’s herb garden at the bottom of the back lawn.

My Mom and Dad still live there, but I saw cars I didn’t recognize parked in the driveway.  The image was of late fall or winter because part of the lawn was brown, where my father had planted Zoisa grass in the early 1960s because he was at war with crabgrass and dandelions.

I saw the weeping willow given to them by my mother’s colleagues in Real Estate when my sister died in 2001.  It was leafless, more evidence of a cold month.

I saw no Jack Russell terriers leaping after tennis balls on the lawn.  It was a still image, one moment at the house I grew up in, viewed from the sky at a great distance, and then, as I zoomed in, from the point of view of a crow, perched on the limb of a nearby maple.

It reminded me that film-makers use wide angles and close-ups to tell their stories.  Wide angles create the setting, and close-ups bring us face to face with brutal reality.

Abraham Lincoln did this in the Gettysburg Address.  With his first sentence, he invites us to gaze at the continent and 90 years of history.

“Four score and seven years ago,” he begins, “Our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation….”

In one sentence he summarizes the historical setting for the audience—both time and place.  And then comes the close up.  “Now we are engaged in a great Civil War…”  With that sentence he locates his audience in time.

“We are met on a great battlefield of that war.”  Now we know where we are on that continent we saw in our mind at the beginning.  We are located in space—in Gettysburg, PA.

The President then went on to ask what we as Americans could do to honor the fallen, and his answer suggests that we rededicate ourselves to the principles of representative democracy.

Like me looking for my childhood home on Google Earth, Lincoln first fixed his listeners eyes on the big picture—the wide angle.  He drew them to consider the continent and the history relevant to the present. 

And then he brought to their attention the current conflict, and the bloody field where the bodies lay—zooming in on the problem, on the question that needed to be answered.

This is a powerful model for presentations.  Starting with the big picture, the setting in which the story takes place.  Then zooming in on the problem or opportunity that draws our attention.  Raising the questions that need to be asked and answered.  And then finally supplying an actionable and evidence-based answer.

I zoomed out from my view of my old home so I could see the woods my friends and I used to play in.  Still there, now owned by the Nature Conservancy, I imagined the woods held the ruins of our forts made of sticks and leaves, where we fought battles with imaginary Indians and went home for supper when it got dark. 

Sims Wyeth is a private speech coach in Montclair, NJ specializing in executive speech coaching and public speaking training in order to give accomplished people the knowledge and skill they need to become accomplished speakers. Learn more public speaking tips at www.SimsWyeth.com.