What Roy said

A sports reporter asks Roy Williams if he'd like to see Tyler Hansbrough and Blake Griffin play one-on-one. Williams is the basketball coach of the North Carolina Tarheels, Hansbrough is his star player, and Griffin is the star player for the Oklahoma Sooners. You can go to school on the way Williams answers.

He says he'd rather eat a peanut butter cookie than watch the two big men go one-on-one, but then adds this:

Blake is perhaps more gifted, more explosive. And Tyler is just so focused in what he's tried to do to make himself the best player he can be. During the course of the game, when they were matched up, I would love to watch that, but only in a team situation. Who would read the defense better? Who would throw it back out better? Who would post up better? Who would get to the offensive boards better? I think that part would really be a lot of fun.

What he did:

1. Restated the question on his own terms (not one-on-one, but matched up in a team context)

2. Turned it into a story (the gifted player against the self-made player)

3. Communicated his personal passion (he "would love to watch that")

4. Told us what to look for in a beautifully concise sequence of identically constructed interrogative sentences that display his insider knowledge in ways the average basketball fan can absorb

With those four principles, you can write a difference-making speech. 

One sentence

"Specifically, I would suggest that the effective organization is garrulous, clumsy, superstitious, hypocritical, monstrous, octopoid, wandering, and grouchy." -- Karl E. Weick

Those are certainly eight adjectives you don't usually see in the same sentence with "organization." By the time you got to "grouchy," did you remember that he's talking about an effective organization?

Governing words

From a piece on presidential speechwriter Jon Favreau in today's Chicago Tribune, three points worth noting:

The value of words...

"I've never worked for a politician who values words as much as the president does," Obama senior advisor David Axelrod said. "The speechwriter is an unusually important person in the operation."

The cadence of words...

Favreau and Obama alike "think in terms of the cadence of the words," Axelrod added. "Not just the meaning of the words but the cadence of the words, how they work together, how they sound together."

Storytelling...

Storytelling is at the core of Obama's public speaking, overriding the modern obsession with the sound bite. Favreau has explalined their joint approach to friends simply: "Tell a story. That's the most important part of every speech, more than any given line. Does it tell a story from beginning to end?"

The first-person voice of authorial self-confidence

Fred Kaplan, in Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer, takes us to a 28-year-old Lincoln's "first memorable speech" and tells us:

The audience was small, the occasion obscure, the speaker irrelevant to the national debate. But Lincoln gives no sense that he thinks of himself or his ideas as peripheral, let alone irrelevant. The language positions itself in the first-person voice of authorial self-confidence: he speaks from himself, for himself, with the voice of someone whose literary style creates the impression that he has earned the right to speak. What he says is credible because he has thought deeply, carefully, impartially, and with noble intentions; because he believes he has something important to contribute to the national discussion; and because his argument is based on a combination of evidence, reason, and analysis.

First let me say that Mr. Kaplan writes exquisite sentences (if you don't count the kludgy handful of words in the middle of the passage). We welcome them here for their beauty and for their power. His message to the speechwriter is a twin to Mr. Sorensen's contribution in our March 2nd piece: help your speaker speak as if he or she had something important to contribute to the national discussion.    

A wise leveraging...

The first annual Theodore C. Sorensen Speechwriting Award was presented last month to my long-time colleague Laurie Vincent for her work with a MasterCard Worldwide executive. My eyes popped out of my head when I read Mr. Sorensen's critique of her entry, where he said:

The content of the speech is a wise leveraging of the core competencies of the speaker's company; in particular, MasterCard Worldwide is uniquely positioned to identify global payment trends in micro- and macroscopic terms.

I've been saying for some time now that every speaker knows something that no one else knows, and every speaker has data that can help make a point that others are trying to make but can only quote anecdotal evidence. So in writing a keynote address, you should ask yourself (1) What does my speaker know that no one else knows, and (2) what data do we have that will substantiate a point that is struggling to take shape in a larger conversation? The idea is to present your speaker not as a knowledgeable quoter of other people's data, but as the owner of data that knowledgeable people will soon be quoting as a primary source.

In the MasterCard speech, Laurie provides this jumping-off point for her speaker:

MasterCard Worldwide has a special vantage point, at the heart of global commerce. We are able to monitor global payment trends, and individual economies and markets. What we're seeing now is... 

She's got us. We can see in our mind all those credit cards being swiped, generating data that her speaker is now going to make meaningful for us. That makes this a speech worth listening to.