Saturday, April 11, 2009

A codification of what I have learned

I have summoned everything I know about writing speeches and put it in one diagram. To explain:

1. We start with something the speaker knows that no one else knows. What we are going to get from this speech, we could only get from you. 

2. But knowing something is not good enough reason for you to be speaking. Because of what you know, you are expected to have a vision of what could be, a vision that's news to the rest of us. It needs to be a vision of the future that makes sense in the present. It might appear to us as well-nigh impossible to reach, but it makes sense to us that we would want to get there. With these two steps, you have created a gap that the whole of the speech will try to bridge.

3. To cross the gap, we look first to your leadership. We will follow if you can do two things: (1) tell a story in which we can see ourselves as players, and (2) be clear about "what's in it for me." Earlier this year, I wrote a speech that a CEO would deliver at a product launch for several thousand sales reps. He would be speaking last, following the entire product team, the vice president-marketing and the vice president-sales. Everything that could possibly be said about the product would have already been said. But there would be no end to the stories that could be told. And we found one that only he could tell, which went like this: 
I was there when we were debating whether to develop this product at all. The pluses and the minuses were evenly matched. And then one day a guest sat in my office and said one thing, in a single sentence, that opened my eyes to the huge potential of this product, and from that moment, I pushed for us to develop it. Now, as you take it to market, you are probably thinking only in terms of what it means to your customers, and maybe what it means to our U.S. operations. But let me assure you, the eyes of our global corporation are on you. They're watching in Europe. They're watching in Asia. The chairman of the board is watching. This product that you are taking to market is nothing less than the beginning of the next generation of our corporation throughout the world. 
That was a story that began with something we could only get from the speaker; it ended with his vision of a future that made sense in the present; and every member of the audience could see themselves as players in that story. 

The "what's-in-it-for-me" should be explicit. Tell them straight-up why they should care about what you have to say. In another recent speech, I summarized the wiifm in the close:
We're stepping up into a new sales archetype. Let's run through its qualities one more time: Bringing in more business at a lower cost with greater predictability. Closing more deals. Generating more value with each sale. A higher degree of customer satisfaction and loyalty at every touchpoint. New technologies, new sales models, and new processes. Leveraging people, infrastructure, knowledge, communication and collaboration between sellers and buyers. You can't pull one lever and get that. You can't innovate in a single system, process, value chain, market segment or geography and make it happen. You have to innovate everywhere, at once. It's not that hard if you know what to do. 
4. If you've made it this far, you have a very good speech -- if you were planning to mail a copy to everyone in your audience. But because they're all gathering in one place to hear you speak it, you still have work to do. Your audience will respond to the passion you display for the words you are delivering. Your passion will come across in how you look, how you move and how you sound. Which means you have to rehearse. One of the biggest mistakes we see in business meetings today is that the last rehearsals are treated as extensions of the composition process. People are still peppering the speaker with, "Why are you saying that? This word still hits me wrong. Shouldn't we be mentioning such-and-such?" As if getting all the words exactly right will guarantee success. There comes a point at which I'll trade a 5 percent improvement in content for a 200 percent improvement in delivery. 

5. For 20 years I've been following Professor John P. Kotter's thoughts on business leadership. In 1996 he published his seminal "Eight Steps for Successful Large-Scale Change," in which Step #1 is "Increase Urgency." Six years later, after rigorous study of how leaders were dealing with his eight steps, he reported that "rarely" does successful change follow the path of "analysis-think-change." Rather, "almost always" it follows the path of "see-feel-change." Therefore, if you believe the purpose of a speech is to get people to change what they think, feel, believe and/or do, then you have to convey a sense of urgency when you speak. And if you're keeping up with Kotter, you don't try to create urgency on the strength of your business case; you do things that enable people to "see" and "feel" the urgent conditions. A couple of years ago, I was working on a product launch in which the marketing director started a session by sharing the stage with an easel that held a copy of the marketing plan. The marketing director didn't say anything for a few minutes. He just stared at the marketing plan as if expecting it to talk. Finally he said, "Ladies and gentlemen, there stands the marketing plan. It hasn't made a single sale." He then began a rousing pitch for a committed effort from every sales rep. From time to time, he would stop and wait for the marketing plan on the easel to do something, then shrug and put the onus back on the reps. You could see the futility of depending on the plan to carry the day. You could feel the individual responsibility to launch the product successfully.

The "Knowledge" and "Vision" blocks of this diagram speak to the left brain of the listener. The "story" component of the "leadership" arrow speaks to the right brain. The "passion" and "urgency" arrows prompt the preverbal reptile brains -- where the "fight or flight" response is housed and where short-term memory is converted to long-term.

As I have begun to use this diagram, I have noticed its effectiveness as:
-- A speech development tool
-- A speech-coaching tool
-- A speaker evaluation tool
-- A closed-loop feedback tool 

Ten years ago a chief strategy officer asked me what my speech development process was. I told him I had no process. He snorted and went off to write his own speech. I'm ready for him now.           

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