Allison M. Shapira

Thursday, December 27, 2007

The Art of the Start

Moving right along down my holiday reading list, I just finished The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki.

It's an excellent read for many different reasons, not the least of which are the wit and wisdom of the author, who writes in such an engaging style that I was able to read the book in just a few days.

But I'd like to focus on one specific chapter that was relevant to public speaking:

The Art of Pitching

While Guy is mainly talking about how to pitch to venture capitalists, his points are transferable to many types of presentations. Some of his main points are:
  • 10/20/30 - Ten slides, Twenty minutes, 30-point font as a rule of thumb for presentations. This makes sure you don't overload your audience with long presentations that have too many slides that are too hard to read.
  • Make your points relevant to your audience by adding real-world examples or stories.
  • Know your audience in advance and cater your presentation to them.
  • Practice your presentation a minimum of 25 times so you become comfortable with it. He says, "There are no shortcuts to achieving familiarity."
Guy included had some great guidelines for using PowerPoint, including "animate your body, not your slides."

There were also a few pages in the book dedicated to public speaking itself. Again, he had some very relevant suggestions beyond the normal "make eye contact, use body language" which are important but not the only points. For instance:
  • Say something interesting
  • Meet the crowd before the speech (so you see familiar faces in the audience)
  • Ask for a small room (instead of a large room that might not fill up)
  • Practice. He rewords something I repeat often during my lectures to highlight the importance of practice. He says, "Ironically, the more you practice, the more you'll sound spontaneous."
An excellent book that has much to offer individuals from all fields. I highly recommend it.

Monday, December 24, 2007

Made to Stick

Since classes have ended for the semester, I've been reading some interesting books related to communication.

I just completed Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath.

It was a fascinating and well-researched look at what makes messages "sticky" - what makes them stick in people's minds long after they have heard them. The book looked at both truisms and urban legends, famous and obscure messages. The authors find a pattern among sticky ideas, that many of them have some combination of the following 6 elements of SUCCESs:

Simple
Unexpected
Concrete
Credible
Emotional
Stories

The book is relevant for anyone who has to convey a message: school teachers, PR professionals, marketers, parents, governments...just about anyone.

As a public speaking professional, I found one section particularly interesting. The authors mentioned that in certain studies they performed, there wasn't "necessarily" a correlation between good speakers and sticky messages. In other words, you could really entertain a crowd for 15 minutes, and they wouldn't remember a word of it.

This is a challenge to those of use who speak publicly on a regular basis and who help others to speak well. It's a reminder that our goal as speakers is not only to entertain a crowd, but to inspire them to think or act in a certain way afterwards. We can't simply focus on presentation without focusing on content as well.

We need to ensure that our delivery is an effective vehicle for delivering a message that our audience will remember afterwards. In other words: have something to say, and say it well.

This was a powerful take-away from the book.

Friday, December 07, 2007

A Day in the Life of a Public Speaking Consultant

This past Monday, I had a day that made me stop and think about how much I enjoy the field of public speaking. It was a day that helped me really delve into the field in several different ways. Here is a description of my activities, starting from 1:00 PM and ending at 9:00 PM.

1. Toastmasters Meeting: At the last moment, I was asked to give a speech to my local Toastmasters club, Crimson Toastmasters at Harvard University. I decided to start a new advanced speaker's manual entitled "Speaking to Inform", and for this first speech I educated my group about the best way to prepare for a "Question and Answer" session that often follows a speech. It's a particular skill set within public speaking that unfortunately you need to experience in order to improve. But there are specific ways to prepare for it.

I had to leave this meeting early in order to attend...

2. Presentation by Professor Rod Kramer of Stanford's Graduate School of Business. He spoke about "Effective Self-Presentation: How Leaders Project Desired Images." I found this fascinating because he discussed such important speaking techniques as making sure your nonverbal communication matches the verbal (show the audience you really believe what you're saying) - and we looked at examples where the opposite happened. He mentioned an idea that I have long espoused when talking about the subject of leadership: no matter what values or ideas you have, you have to be able to effectively convince people at work, in the media, within your constituencies, etc. In other words, it's not enough to have a vision - you have to communicate that vision to others. Communicating that vision to others is in itself a leadership challenge.

At the conclusion of that fascinating presentation, I left to prepare for my next engagement, where I was the featured speaker:

3. Public Speaking Clinic at the Harvard Kennedy School on the subject of "Taking Control of Q+A." You may now realize why I was so quick to speak at my Toastmasters club. I had already prepared a speech for this clinic. During this clinic, I spoke about how to prepare for and handle Q+A sessions. Then I gave the students a chance to write their own short speeches on a controversial topic. They each presented their speech and took tough questions from all of us (myself and the students). After that exercise, I facilitated group feedback for each person. It's a great method for giving everyone experience speaking and taking questions, and also for stimulating the analytical way in which we need to observe and learn from other speakers.

At the end of this session, I had to leave promptly in order to take a cab to Simmons College, where I was giving my final presentation for my Writing class about the reality TV show I was asked to write.

4. Presentation of "The Communicator with Donald Trump." In this show, Donald Trump is searching for a new VP of Communications for his company, so he sponsors an Apprentice-type reality show to find one. Each week, he gives the participants a variety of writing challenges to test their communication skills, and each week they make a variety of outrageous errors. The participants themselves are each stereotypical in their roles: the MBA student, the writing professor, the foreign diplomat, and the communications consultant (guess who wins?).

So for this final event of the day, I gave a Power Point presentation on the concept, rules, and participants of the show, and then read from the Pilot episode that I had written. The class reaction was great - people loved the participants and the exercises. Of course, this was in my business writing class, so I knew my audience.

Public speaking is a skill: the more you practice, the better you will become. The converse is also true: the less you practice, the worse you will become. That's why when opportunities come along to speak at the last moment, I always accept them. And that's why a day like Monday really makes me feel like I have increased my capacity to both speak in public and teach others how to speak.