Here’s a really useful guide to speech structure. A quick start to organising your thinking for 5 common types of business presentations and speeches- Progress report Strategy recommendation Product sales presentation Decision rationale/explanation Teaching session Simple, repeatable and practical- Nick Morgan, Public Words: 5 Quick Ways to Organize a Speech. This is a part of my Fit,…
Jan Schultink makes a valuable point very simply when he shows us how to make an endless listing of our products into a relevant, logical introduction for our customers’ benefit. In short, put the poor customer first in your thinking. Give them some background to help them understand you and your products, then ‘share’ a…
For people like me, who fail to be funny and original at the same time, here’s a set of great quotes from the UK’s ‘Total Politics’ blog. You’ll find political quotes, anecdotes and one-liners from around the Western world that the ethical among you will quote, and the rest of us will simply errr- recycle….
Lee Westwood, world No2 ranked golfer, made a great example of how to bring a dull stat to life yesterday and make it mean something. Speaking at a press-conference, when asked about his fitness regime, lee responded with this- “Coming to this heat I just felt I needed to lose some weight and have been…
I once bought a book by Edward de Bono, called ‘How to be Interesting’. It wasn’t. But it’s a great title isn’t it? Why might someone as fascinating as me buy a book like that? Well, it’s simple, I was seeking an answer to all of the questions I’d been asked around ‘how do you…
Here’s another funny piece to make you think, from Ed Reid, a brilliant independent consultant based in the UK . How Microsoft killed the art of public speaking « EdReidYork’s Blog. I’m not soooo likely to blame Microsoft. I’d rather have Bill Gates’s rampant commercialism that Steve Jobs’ hippy schtick any day. And we punish the guy that…
One of the key skills in developing ‘Flair‘ as a speechwriter and presenter, is learning to use the ‘tricks of the trades’ from all branches of the performing arts. Poetry, drama, creative writing, music and songwriting all offer useful lessons, for even the most experienced of us. Adding flair requires that you do 3 things…
I’ve been working in Barcelona again this week, with a global pharmaceutical company, and here’s a small, but significant lesson I learned from Xavi, an IT Director about finding the right ‘hook’ for a speech to his IT colleagues. We were talking about understanding our audience before we start to create our message,- ‘Fit‘ as…
In the aftermath of the terrible events in Japan of the past 2 weeks, there has been a rush to ‘trash’ the idea of nuclear power as a ‘safe’, carbon-free technology for electricity generation. Germany led the way by closing its power stations for safety checks, the EU then followed up by issuing an unintelligible…