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.           

Maybe the perfect paragraph

As the president stepped up to 10 Downing Street, he leant over, made eye contact, said something courteous, and shook the hand of the police officer standing guard. There's always a police officer there; he is a tourist logo in his ridiculous helmet. He tells you that this is London, and the late 19th century. No one has ever shaken the hand of the policeman before, and like everyone else who has his palm touched by Barack Obama, he was visibly transported and briefly forgot himself. He offered the hand to Gordon Brown, the prime minister, who was scuttling behind.

What is a paragraph, you ask? I give you this, written by A. A. Gill, a contributing writer for Vanity Fair and The Sunday Times of London. 

He starts with a keen observation passed to us in story form. We can see it; we get where this is going. But before we can settle in, right there in the second sentence, the observer intrudes and the story is interrupted. "There's always a police officer there..." A simple statement, and we get that too. Then in the very same sentence, a surprise: the tourist slam and the helmet jab--and we learn that the observer is not merely of the objective kind. 

A follow-on sentence extends the fun, which turns out to be a set-up for: "No one has ever shaken the hand of the policeman before..." With this we have the twin pillars on which the paragraph is built: There is always a police officer there/no one has ever shaken his hand. Always/never. 

Suddenly it's clear that the swipes against the officer's appearance were structural--they provided the proper spacing between the two load-bearing statements. But we're not done yet. We're told something that we can only take on faith: the policeman was transported and briefly forgot himself. Excellent writing has prepared us to believe this assertion that only the policeman himself could have actually experienced. 

We leave the paragraph the same way we entered it--the story rejoined: policeman offers hand to prime minister. And if it's the attitudinal subplot you prefer, you're rewarded again: whereas we came in with the American president "stepping up" to 10 Downing Street, we go out with the British prime minister "scuttling behind" ... at the entrance to his own official residence and headquarters of Her Majesty's Government. 

(whence it came)    

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.