Jarvis, page 117

I realize now that there's a particular kind of paragraph that makes me happy. It's built on a parade of simple declarative sentences with parallel constructions. Subject-verb-object. Subject-verb-object. Subject-verb-object. Often involving the same subject or the same verb. I found happiness today on page 117 of Jeff Jarvis's book, What would Google Do? Third paragraph down:

Newmark operates by many of the rules in this book. He created a platform and network for his communities. He trusts the wisdom of his crowd. He brings communities elegant organization. He understands that free is a business model. He relies on the gift economy. He dooms middlemen. He runs a disarmingly simple system. But then he adds his own unifying principle of technology, communities, and the internet. Here it is, with classic Craig brevity: "Get out of the way."

The cadence of the paragraph goes like this:

Newmark ta-da ta-da ta-da. 

He da-dum. 

He da-dum. 

He da-dum. 

He da-dum. 

He da-dum. 

He da-dum. 

He da-dum. 

But then! ... he deetle-dee-dee. 

And here it is: babada-boom.  

All my children

My teammate emailed to ask how I felt about the piece I had written for our client. My first thought was: With the changes that were made during the review process, I felt like the copy had become a gondola car for predetermined messages that would not be credible or even interesting. But I didn't say that. Instead, this is what I said in my return email:

A client asked me one time if I felt differently about each speech that I wrote. I told him they were all my children, and I loved them one and all. But for some, I saved to send them to the best schools; and for others, I encouraged them to keep going to baseball practice. For this little piece I just wrote, I hope there's a decent trade school, and maybe somewhere down the line, a job as a draftsman or a teller in a bank. 

My teammate wrote back:

At Version 4, it needs to move out of the house and live somewhere else.

Later we wondered about a project that seemed to have run away from home to join the circus ... and we were pretty much okay with that. 

What Bill Simmons wrote...

Three great paragraphs from Bill Simmons at espn.com: 

I will always appreciate this Bulls team because they did the impossible: They made a fan base that just won a title care even MORE about their own team. Last season barely matters right now. All that matters is winning the most incredible playoff series ever played. I don't even care what happens after Game 7; we can't beat the LeBrons anyway. This is our NBA Finals. Right here. The Celtics fans feel that way, and so do the Bulls fans. I can promise you.

I thought about all of these things during my marathon walk. And this, too: When I was 6, my father took me to the greatest basketball game ever played: Game 5 of the 1976 Finals. I slept through the second half, the first overtime and most of the second overtime before waking up for Havlicek's running banker. I can still see it. Happened right in front of us. The Celtics won that one in three overtimes. Thirty-three years later (ironic number), they played another three-OT classic and lost. I was a little boy for the first one; for the second one, I watched most of it with my little boy. He had no idea what was going on. When he's older, I'm going to tell him that he did.

Sports keeps moving. You get older. You pass the love down to your kids. You think you will care less ... and you don't. The Tony Allen sub killed me. The Pierce foul killed me. The Rose block killed me. Two toe-on-the-line 3-pointers ... I can't stop thinking about them. Add everything up and that's how I ended up 500 blocks from my house fretting about Game 7 and rehashing everything that happened in the other six.

What do I like about this? 

Those compact sentences: This is our NBA Finals. I can still see it. You pass the love down to your kids. 

The repetitive constructions: The Tony Allen sub killed me. The Pierce foul killed me. The Rose block killed me. 

The linkage between three generations of Celtics fans.

The reference to "Havlicek's running banker." (Every now and then, we ought to write for the 10 percent of our audience that needs no explanation. That 10 percent will love it, and the other 90 percent will get it from the context. "Havlicek's running banker" maintains the cadence. And in this run of sentences, cadence is more important than the information that would have been gained from, say, "before waking up with six seconds left and the Celtics down by one when John Havlicek, famous for revolutionizing the sixth-man role, took the ball and drove for a running one-hander in traffic to put the Celtics ahead 111-110 as the horn sounded.")

Take those three paragraphs and run them through your Microsoft Word spell-checker with the "readability" function activated and here's what you get:

Words per sentence: 10.7

Characters per word: 4.1

Passive sentences: 0%

Flesch reading ease: 83.2

Flesch-Kincaid grade level: 4.1

Fourth grade reading level! The speech I wrote yesterday was 11th grade. 

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. 

Looking for the best

Over at duarte.com they're asking for candidates to comprise a "Top 20 Speeches of All Time." You might want to drop by and offer your favorite, and check out what's been submitted so far. There are a lot of nominations from the TED Conference, and a number of diatribes and soliloquies from the movies. 

One contributor has offered not a speech, but a list of "21 skills of great preachers." Scroll down to the first entry on April 16 and follow the link. The first four skills (content, passion, credibility, prepared) would be no surprise on any skills list for great speakers in general. But it gets interesting as the numbers get bigger. For example:  

#9. Self-revealing

#10. Confidence

#19. Movement

#20 Decision (as in, they ask for one)

#21 Landing (as in, they land their message on the first pass)   

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)