A speech very much worth giving

Last week, Garr Reynolds, in his Presentation Zen blog, singled out Shai Agassi's presentation as his personal favorite of the TED '09 Conference. This week he came back to defend his choice against a reader who questioned how he could recommend "such an imperfect, 'awful' talk as a sample model to follow." 

The presentation in question is a story of how one man started asking himself how you could run a whole country without oil. That was four years ago, and now he has the country (Israel), he has raised the $200 million he needs to build a nationwide infrastructure for an all-electric car fleet, and he has a car company (Renault-Nissan) committed to building 100,000 battery-powered cars in the first year of the program. His TED presentation is the story of how all this came to pass, and what is at stake. 

Let's see how the Agassi presentation stacks up against our Speech Worth Giving architecture that we introduced in our April 11 post. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the best: 

Knowledge (something you know that no one else knows): 10  

How to obsolete the internal combustion engine within the bounds of today's science and today's economics, riding the power of consumer-up and not edict-down? Yeah, that's a 10.   

Vision (a picture of the future that makes sense in the present): 10

Converting an entire country to an automotive fleet with zero carbon footprint? A 10 hardly seems high enough. 

Leadership (tell a story and provide "what's in it for me"): 10

The story is clear and compelling; the storytelling is direct and intense. And is there something for me in a more convenient, more affordable, emission-free car, scalable to 99 percent of the population? Yes there is -- for me, and for my grandchildren. 

Passion (voice and body language): 10

His voice is authoritative and authentic, his body language crisp and confident -- by themselves probably not quite worthy of a 10, but he did walk away from the executive suite at SAP because Shimon Peres asked him what could be more important than saving a country and saving the world.  

Urgency (see it, feel it): 10 

I can see the urgency in his controlled use of facts and figures. And then, in the stunning last minute and 12 seconds, you feel the urgency down to your toes when he says, "We have to do it within this presidential term, because if we don't, we'll lose our economy, right after we've lost our morality." 

So his slides weren't that many and weren't that great -- his knowledge, his vision and his story carry the day. I stand with Garr.