Nailing a keynote

Just back from California and the first CEO keynote address of the year. Ten years ago it would have been 35 minutes long, but this one was 11 minutes, which felt just right.  In those 11 minutes, the word "you" was heard 25 times -- a good number. The final draft checked out on the Flesch-Kincaid readability calculator at the 9th grade level, a little higher than I would like. The first draft was just about right at the 6th grade level, and the numbers got higher with each of the four revisions. 

The speech was scheduled for Feb. 4. At the end of a read-through in the CEO's office on Jan. 30, he said, "What a great speech. It makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck." We canceled our Feb. 2 read-through. On the plane Feb. 3 somewhere over Oklahoma, he came down the aisle with edits on a stick--nothing structural, just getting the words right for the way he talks. That night, in a read-through in front of three or four people who were hearing it for the first time, we took some changes and lost a bit of our enthusiasm. 

In a private read-through the next morning, we started feeling good about it again, and just when we thought the speech was in its final form, our CEO said, "Do you think we're missing an opportunity somewhere?" We know, by now, that a question like that is code for "I think we can still make this speech better." Back to work we went. I pointed out that three times since we'd landed I'd heard him tell a story about several people he had bumped into on the plane who were coming to the meeting for specific reasons. I thought that story belonged in the speech. He asked me to work it in. It turned out to be the cherry on top of a speech that hit all the right buttons. 

We thought we had one more rehearsal in us without starting to sound too slick, so we broke for lunch and did the final read-through on stage in the arena about two hours before the meeting started. That's where content and performance came together. And then he nailed it when it counted.