Episodios

  • 318 Be Both Busy and Organised In Japan

    318 Be Both Busy and Organised In Japan
    Jul 7 2024

    Focus is under constant attack. The speed of business makes longer term planning a dubious endeavor. Projecting 5 years forward sounds reasonable. That is until you go back 5 years and look at all the changes that have taken place through technology, societal attitudinal changes, business realities and logistics. The leader is supposed to be defining the way forward for the team. The vision of the future is the guiding light on the hill toward which the troops are pointed. The relevancy of that vision is constantly being challenged by the market and by clients.

    The leader can no longer easily keep up with all of the demands on their time. Social media has become a major source of information and we are all drinking from the firehouse. Meetings are numerous and suck up time at a prodigious rate. Email comes gushing forth in relentless fashion and inboxes become archives. "I will get to that email" is a plaintive cry from the oppressed masses. If we are traveling across time zones, then sleep patterns are shattered and we enter a zombie like twilight zone but still have to function anyway. When we get finally back home we are still trying to assimilate with our usual everyday challenges, but in a jet lag induced vegetative state.

    We are not delegating enough. We know we should do more of it but we don't. We are holding on to too much control and this is ramping up our workload. In tougher times we had to jump in and keep things afloat. After the refloat though, we haven't eased off on the controls and are still doing too much ourselves. Where is the time to work on those things that only we can do?

    Projects are bright shiny objects that fascinate our minds. We already have a big bag of them to carry around, but we keep stuffing more into the same bag. Our intellect and our imagination make us constantly hungry to do more and more interesting things and we do. The hours of the day don't grow to match our hunger, so things start well and then drift. We pull back the edge of the carpet and there they all are - projects started but never finished. Stacked up there out of sight and out of mind because they have been replaced by a newer sexier beau.

    We never get to any perfect harmony with our team. The ones we want to keep, move on to greener fields, the ones we want to move on, we wind up keeping by default. The turnover means time and expertise is lost and we are in a state of constant starting again. This kills progress. The current candidate friendly market in Japan means that we are in a permanent recruit and retain mode. We have to put a higher value on continuity, than in the past, because the lag between losing people and hiring new staff gets longer. Hiring gets harder and more expensive.

    None of this looks like it is going to improve any time soon. The ability to deal with this level of complexity becomes more important. The agile yet focused will win in this game. A good leverage point is heightened self-awareness. Knowing what is important and then giving that time is a differentiator. We need to have a “true north” in mind, against which to align ourselves, or we will find ourselves adrift in a sea of confusion.

    The fog of busyness needs a clear counterpoint. We need to reestablish who we are, what we want and where we are going. This sounds simple. But if I ask you right now, can you pull out your written down game plan for your future? Can you articulate the steps needed to keep moving forward? Have you clearly nominated what success actually looks like.

    “I want 10 million dollars”, is too vague. What do you want it for, how are you going to use it, how does this translate into your personal happiness or satisfaction?

    The manic pace of the everyday can distract us and we forget about working on our personal alignment. Ironically, we need to slow down in order to speed up and get more done. We need to re-establish the point of what we are doing. We need to re-set the starting point and to fix a clear image of the finish line in our minds. We can then swim hard against the pull of busyness with a firm plan in place. The alternative is often being drawn along in the froth and fury of the storm tide.

    So stop what we are doing. Intervene in our busyness. Re-connect with who we really are. Reaffirm our direction. Define true north. Make a new plan and follow it.
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    10 m
  • 317 Sales Is A Process In Japan

    317 Sales Is A Process In Japan
    Jun 30 2024
    Because the vast majority of people in sales have no idea what they are doing, they are making it up as they go along. Wouldn’t it be better to have a roadmap to progress the making of a sale? This roadmap will keep us on track and not allow the buyer to take us off on a tangent that leads to nowhere. Foundering around with no central direction wastes a lot of key buyer facing time and we don’t want to do that. We can’t expect unlimited access because of their busy schedules, so once we are in front of them we have to get all of the discovery process done in usually around an hour. The sale call roadmap starts even before the call. These days with so much information readily available, especially with the advent of AI tools, we can’t turn up and ask basic questions about the company. We need to have done some research beforehand on media reports, their website, annual report, social media and using LinkedIn where possible, to check on the individuals we will meet, before we meet them. Having done all of that, we are well armed to get the conversation off to a great start. We may have friends or contacts in common; or shared a similar working experience in the same company; or lived in the same town; or went to the same university or studied the same subjects. When we have done our research we will have an opportunity to try and find these little connectors. I was working with an American guy when I was at the Shinsei Bank. He was an absolute master at this. He had just joined the bank and I was supposed to brief him on the work my division was doing. We spent the whole time with him making connections between people we both knew. He did this to break the ice and establish rapport. I never did get to brief him on my division! This rapport building is important with clients. We know if we don’t get a good relationship going at the start of the conversation, then it is unlikely they will buy from us. Even if we don’t have much in common, we can use other techniques like bring some interesting industry data or intelligence to them. We might have seen something work somewhere else and we can introduce this idea to them. In this initial meeting process, we need to make a very important intervention. We need to get permission from the buyer to ask questions. When they are happy to meet us and having established some rapport, they are more likely to say “yes” to our request to ask questions about the inner details of what the company is doing and all the problems they are encountering. In other words, all the firm’s dirty laundry. If there was no rapport or trust created would you be keen to share that detail with strangers? Now in a western business environment, asking questions is no big deal, but with Japanese buyers it is crucial we do this. They are used to being hit with sales pitches, so the concept of them being questioned by the seller is not something they are used to. Having gotten that permission we should ask very intelligent questions, so that we can fully understand their needs. Now buyers sometimes don’t want to tell us their precise situation. We have to ask our questions in a way that gets around that reluctance. We are searching for an entry point where we might become useful to them, to solve a problem they have. If they don’t have a big enough problem or if they think they can fix it themselves, then we will have a lot of difficulty making the sale. We have to show why this issue is best addressed now, rather than after. And why they should leave it to us to fix, rather than trying to do it themselves. Left to their own devices and a hundred year time frame, businesses can solve their own problems and they don’t need us, which is why we have to emphasise speed and the urgency of time to get them moving. If we don’t deal with these issues up front, then no sale. Once we understand their needs, we move along the roadmap to the part when we present the solution. Now in Japan, this will usually take place at the second meeting. There will be a discussion about the technical pieces of what we will do, talking about how this solution will fit their company. We can’t leave it there though, because that is still too abstract. We need to talk about how they can project and apply these benefits inside their company, in order to get better results. This is where word pictures are very powerful. In most cases, we are selling a future that they can’t fully appreciate. So we need to explain how we can add to their business through increasing revenues, reducing costs or grabbing greater market share. If we have been able to uncover what the success of this project will mean for them personally, then we wrap that bit around the benefit too. The client naturally doubts what sales people are telling them, so we need to show evidence for them that this has worked for other companies. Once we have done...
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    13 m
  • 316 Inspire Your Audience

    316 Inspire Your Audience
    Jun 23 2024
    At the start of our class on High Impact Presentations, we ask the participants to think about what type of impression they would like to have linger with their audience, after their presentation has been completed. How about you? When people are filing out of the venue, what things would you like to hear about your presentation, if you were able to eavesdrop on their conversation? Being clear is always a favourite and another high ranking popular desire is to be more inspiring. Now “inspiring” can be defined in many ways, but for the purposes of giving presentations, we can think of it as lifting people up, getting them to take action, to challenge new things, to push themselves harder than before. Actually that is a pretty tall order in a forty minute talk. Unless we are a professional motivational speaker, the majority of our talks will probably be focused on dispensing information and offering advice on how to solve business problems. What would a business audience find inspiring? It could be a tale of daring do, where great adversity had been overcome through the human will. Conquering dangerous elements of nature, one’s circumstances or fellow man, often come up in this regard. The problem is business people’s activities usually are far removed from conquering the poles, vertiginous mountain ascents or vast ocean crossing exploits. These are very specialist pursuits, which are out of our purview. The arc of the story of rags to riches is a popular trope. This works in business, because we are looking for hope in the face of tough odds. When we hear that others made it despite all the trials and tribulations, we take it that maybe we can do it too. It can be a personal story or it can the saga of a firm or a division and its imminent elimination, coming from back from the cusp of destruction to rise again and prosper. We are magnets to lessons on survival. We prefer to learn through the near death experience and ultimate triumph of others, than try it on ourselves. You might be thinking your life is rather dull, your industry absolutely dull and your firm perpetually dull. How could you liven up a talk with stories than were inspiring to others? Maybe you can’t. Perhaps you have to draw lessons from other industries or personalities and weave these into the point you are making in your talk. I like to read biographies and autobiographies for this reason. I enjoy interviews with outstanding people, telling how they climbed the greasy pole and got to the top. Strangely, obituaries are also a good source for this type of information. They are usually brief summaries of a person’s life. They often contain snippets of great hardship or success and frequently both. Don’t just skim over these heroic tales, instead collect these rich stories. These can be your go to files for greatness, when you want to introduce an idea that needs some evidence. There may be legendary figures in your industry or your firm. These are stories you can retell for effect, to drive home the insights you want illuminate. Okay it wasn’t you, but the audience doesn’t care that much. They like to learn and they love hearing about disasters, so the train wreck doesn’t have to be your personal catastrophe. Usually the founders of your firm went through tough times. There are bound to be tales in there you can use. Or you can draw on recent recessions, the Lehman Shock, the 2011 triple whammy of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear power plant meltdown, the pandemic, to find episodes where all looked grim, but a legendary team battled on and survived, while many businesses around them disappeared. You may have some personal experiences that are also relevant. This can be quite hard, because you are sharing something quite personal with the world. As an introvert, it took me a long time before I was comfortable to talk about my own experiences. When I did though, the impact on the audience was immediate. I could sense the feeling of closeness with strangers, as they listened to my tales of error, overreach, miscalculation etc. I still have trouble with this, so I do prefer the woes of others to my own, but definitely my own stories are always so much more powerful. I just need the temerity to tell more of them. So pepper your talk with uplifting examples from others or from your own experiences, that justify the action you want them to take or boost the feeling of confidence you want to instill in your audience. The raw material is all around you. Just start looking for it and begin compiling it. When you hear something, you can use, capture it immediately for later employ. Dig into the vaults of your own experiences and draw out examples that will make you magnetic for your audience. Telling these types of stories is how speakers have inspired audiences down through the ages. The reason we still do it today is because it ...
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    11 m
  • 315 Don't Fear Failure

    315 Don't Fear Failure
    Jun 16 2024
    For decades I drove myself hard, based on a fundamental fallacy. Fear of a future of living in a cardboard box haunted me. I pushed hard so that cardboard box and I would never become well acquainted. You see homeless people in Japan and other countries living that way and it is a reality for them, that they never chose. It happened to them anyway. The odd part was that this was a deep seated fear within me, that I wasn't really all that conscious of. It was sort of sitting there in the background, in the inner sanctums of my mind. My father had been a big smoker (died of lung cancer at 51), big drinker (every night) and a big gambler (every Saturday at the track). If you grew up in a gambler's household, then you know what never having any money is all about. The weekly pay packet received on Friday evening is taken down to the racetrack and blown on Saturday morning. I never gamble, I never smoke and I drink very, very moderately. Hanmen Kyoshi (反面教師) it is called in Japanese – my Dad was my teacher by negative example. So as a gambler's son, you start below the waterline and have to work hard to break the surface and make something of yourself and eventually you do. The strange part is that the fear of poverty, the fear of failing never leaves you. Somewhere in the back of your mind is the idea that success is not allowed for you. So you drive yourself hard, constantly dissatisfied with your progress. It is never big enough, never good enough, never fast enough, never safe enough. I could never answer the question of how much was enough, so I just tried to maximize it every time, in every way, in every situation. This put enormous stress and pressure on myself. Then one day, something happens or someone says something, that makes you rock back on your heels and think hard about it. That is what happened to me. I was describing my fears of the cardboard box and my listener questioned that thesis. He said, "Greg, you have a Ph.D., you have a big job with lot's of responsibility, you have money, you have assets and investments, you have drive and energy, so why are you operating on a false premise of failure. Why can't you drive forward based on a different idea? What about the concept that you can live out of your potential, rather than your fear of failure?". Wow. You could have knocked me down with a feather. I was stopped in my tracks by that comment. That thought of living out of my potential had never occupied my mind, not for even one nanosecond. Getting good information and doing something about it are not the same thing. I was gripped by what he said and started to ask myself whether that was actually feasible. After so many decades of living out of fear of failure, could I just switch gears completely? Well it turns out that I could. From that moment in 2000, I forgot about a cardboard box bound future. I made the switch by starting to concentrate on what I had going for me and looked for ways to make more of that. Find out more when we come back from the break I made a list of all the things I thought were my strengths and I added that list to my goal setting routine, for daily review. I concentrated on the positive, not the negative. It sounds simple to say that, but this is not simple, when your whole lifetime narrative has been one of probable failed future prospects. I changed my perspective about myself. I started by questioning my basic assumption - why I thought I would eventually fail? What was the evidence for that assumption? Was I still caught up in my father’s paradigm of self perpetuating poverty, as part of the gambler’s curse. He was a hard worker. He started work at 13 out in the bush on a sheep station in the west of Queensland. He tried many things, but he could never get ahead because of the gambling. When I analysed it, what had any of his life challenges to do with me? I said to myself, “Hey, I don’t gamble – ever”. My real narrative should be different to my Dad’s and it should be about who I am, not who my father was. When I put it like this it sounds so obvious but it took me a long time to work that out. I was trapped in a mindset of possible total failure looming in the future. For other fellow "fear of failure" travellers out there, hear me now - we can change gears. We can live everyday with drive and hard work based on a new premise. There is such a thing as working toward our potential, rather than trying to escape from our fear of failure. We can change our view of who we are and where we are going. We can objectively analyse our current and future prospects. We can prepare for the future without worrying about it. We can take steps to head off any possible calamities and take action now, rather than just spinning around in worry circles. Don't be like me though and spend lost decades working this out. Don't rely on getting lucky through the most random chance of a single comment. Hear...
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    11 m
  • 314 Technical Salespeople Need Good Presentation Skills In Japan

    314 Technical Salespeople Need Good Presentation Skills In Japan
    Jun 9 2024
    Knowledge of the specifications, functionality, inner workings are all fine and dandy but not enough anymore. Increasingly technically specialised people are being asked to deal with people other than their normal counterparts. Once upon a time, the engineers spoke with other engineers on the buyer side and that was about it. A nerdy lovefest on the specs, so to speak. Today there are broader spectrum buying teams. These “civilians” are often the key decision-makers and are not technical in the traditional sense. This means the technical person has to be able to communicate and present to them in a way which they can understand. Communication skills have always been low on the totem pole for technical people. At High School they hated English and thrived on Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry etc. At University, the key focus and preference was on technical subjects. In fact, after the second world war, these technically oriented people were creating problems in the workforce to such an extent, that Universities had to create a new programme for them. This was the basis for the origination of the Masters in Business Administration. The aim was to teach technical folks the non-technical sides of running a company. I was reminded of the big gap in fundamental presentation skills recently at a presentation I attended. It was a big crowd and the speaker had a star studded resume. He had a Ph.D. in his technical field and was a Corporate Officer in his very, very large, global firm. He was a big wheel in that world and someone often called upon to give technical presentations, representing the firm. When he started his presentation proper, I was shocked. I couldn’t believe that someone in his position, with his experience, in that role, with that amount of responsibility for the brand, would be making such a basic, fundamental mistake. The first slide went up and it was densely packed with text. I thought it was the typical compliance required disclaimer statement that usually goes up first. No, no, no. This was his first slide of the actual presentation. To make it really exciting, he had made the text in ten point sized font, so it was almost impossible to read. To add insult to injury the bottom quarter of the page was blank, unused white space. There was no concept of balance on the slide and it was ugly. He then proceeded to basically read the slide to us. The next slide was even worse. Same ten point font, but this time the bottom half of the slide was tantalising white space. After that ordeal by tiny text, we got on to a series of line graphs. This was a relief, except that a lot of the graph text descriptors were impossible to read too. I was sitting there thinking WOW. In the 21st century, how could this be possible? A High School student would do a better job than this gentlemen of presenting the information on screen. The snapper is that he is in a role where he would be giving a lot of these types of presentations. He is highly technically trained and often graces the boardrooms of major companies, who are clients of his firm, giving this and similar presentations. He has been doing this a long time. He is one of the most well recognized public faces of the company, after the President and Chairman, because his role is to promote the technical expertise of the company to grow the stock price. After the initial slide deck shock, I started zooming in on how he was delivering the presentation. There were a lot of numbers involved, so it was a rather dense talk. Pointedly, there were no stories to bring the ramifications of the numbers to life. These were just dry, dull data points that were not thought to need any elaboration. The audience however were a mixed industry bunch, so there were varying levels of technical expertise in the room. Pulling out experiences with similar numbers in the past, would have been great pointers to what we might expect in the future. Dry numbers can come to life when wrapped up in an interesting example. Also, we are much better at remembering stories, than concentrations of data points. As a public speaker, he did look toward his audience, but somehow managed not to look at any of the people in his audience. You have seen this one before too, I am sure. He moved his face from left to right and back again, sort of rapidly scanning the room, but not actually making any eye contact with anyone in particular. This precluded his ability to make a stronger connection and engage with the people in the room. In the time he had allotted, he could have connected with each one of us individually and directly, if he had tried. We know that around 6 seconds of eye contact works very well. It is not too intrusive, yet allows us to really engage with individuals one at a time. His voice was soft and even throughout. It hung perilously close to a monotone. This habit is deadly for a ...
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    14 m
  • Salespeople Bitchiness

    Salespeople Bitchiness
    Jun 1 2024
    Sales is a tough enough job without having additional complications. Clients can be very demanding, often we depend on logistics departments and production divisions, to get the purchase to the buyer. We can’t control the quality, but we have total responsibility, as far as the client is concerned. There is the constant pressure of producing revenue results, with bosses always pushing hard on the numbers. If we are successful and we are doing well, you would think that life would be good. Fat chance of that. We know the emotional roller coaster that is the sales life and you are only ever as good as your last deal. Perhaps with a little bit of success should come some respite from the turmoil of hitting the numbers. I hate to break this to you, but no such luck! Our sales colleagues, by definition, cannot all be equally successful. The Pareto Principle says that the top 20% of salespeople will account for 80% of the revenue numbers and commissions. So that means the other 80% of the team are scrambling around for the remaining 20% of the sales. People come into sales from different backgrounds, with different levels of experience, with degrees of motivation and they join at different points in the annual results cycle. This means that some will be in the top group, a chunk will be in the middle and the rest are at the bottom. In the West, the usual way sales teams are managed is based on the Darwinian theory of the survival of the fittest. Those who can’t cut it are cut loose. Those who can continue to produce get to stay. If they can survive a couple of recessions, they may even be moved up into management positions. This means that those at the bottom are basically on their own. This should spur them on to greater efforts to move up the sales ranks and to strike for the top position in the sales results table. Yet often this doesn’t happen. In Japan, most salespeople are on a salary and bonus structure, rather than salary and commission. Almost nobody is on 100% commission arrangements and nobody wants that type of sales structure. This means the financial ambition or necessity to get ahead in sales is not as strong as we see in the West. Often the base salaries are large by foreign standards and so people can live on the base. In some cases, there can be pushback against the top salespeople, by those failing, because the successful are making everyone else look bad. Snide comments can be made, negative inferences drawn and a host of other petty signals that says “we don’t like you”. This is driven by spite, jealousy and envy. This is their “the way to build the tallest building in town is to tear down all the taller buildings” approach to greatness. In a small sales team this can be very uncomfortable. There is a degree of mutual cooperation involved in sales teams and this is usually where the disputes arise. Who owns the client, who owns the deal, and how is the revenue commission going to be split up? If the sales politicians in the firm get going, they can really do damage to the morale of the organisation. These people are usually excellent at whining, gathering whiners together and hosting whine parties. They use their energy to pull down those who are successful, instead of trying to become a success themselves. When you are the top performer or if you are in the top ranks, you can feel you have become a target. Instead of just worrying about getting sales done, you now have to waste precious energy walking around on egg shells, to avoid criticism from your colleagues. This is all kept below the radar, so the boss is often unaware of what is really going on. However, in many cases they don’t care anyway. They are looking for numbers and they don’t want to have to deal with personalities and sales soap operas in the office. If the bosses are any good, they would be sorting out the toxic few, but often they don’t. The top salespeople are razor focused on serving clients and doing all the hard yards needed to get the sale, so they are not politically minded. The whole mess gets made worse because in a declining demographic, many organisations are looking at their salesperson retain strategies. They do this because they know they cannot easily recruit enough salespeople replacements. This means the internal war goes on for much longer that it should. We lose sight of the external competition and fight amongst ourselves. Bosses, hear me, sack the toxic! If you don’t, you will find the whole organisation will start failing as the wrong culture takes command. If you are one of the top salespeople, insulate and isolate yourself from the whiners. They don’t work as hard or as long, so there is plenty of opportunity to get to the work, without having to engage with them much. Winners start early and concentrate on their Golden Time between 9.00am-5.00pm on speaking with clients, not idiots in...
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    13 m
  • Chasing Buyer “No” Replies

    Chasing Buyer “No” Replies
    May 26 2024
    Everyone hates to be rejected, but not many people have this as a fundamental aspect of their work. We ask colleagues for help and they assist, we ask our bosses for advice and they provide it. Buyers though are a different case. They can easily find a million reasons not to buy and unashamedly tell us “no”. The rejection itself is not so much the problem, as is how we respond, how we deal with the rejection. In Japan, the two areas our clients flag with us for special attention in sales training for their team are around understanding the client’s needs and asking for the order or closing, as it is commonly referred to in sales parlance. The poor questioning skills are a result of salespeople wanting to tell the buyer a lot of stuff about the features, but not bothering to ask some well designed questions to uncover what their clients need. This in itself will explain a lot about why buyers say “no”. If we don’t properly understand what they need, then how do we suggest solutions that make sense and motivate the buyer to action? The two problems are closely linked. Even assuming that the questions are well thought through and that the solution selected is professionally conveyed to the buyer, they may still say no. This is because the buyer’s hesitations have not been properly addressed. There was something unclear or unsatisfactory in what they just heard from the salesperson and they are not convinced this is the right solution to their problem. This is why a “no” will certainly be forthcoming, especially from Japanese buyers. Risk aversion is a fundamental part of the fabric of Japan and buyers more than most, observe this in distinct detail. They would rather give up on something better, if they thought there was a possibility their decision might bring some stain on their record. Failure is hard to recover from in Japan. There are no second chances here. People have learnt the best way to avoid failing is to take as few decisions as possible. Especially any decisions which can be traced back to you. Best to have a group decision, so the blame can be spread around and no one loses their job. Actually that works like a charm here, so no one wants to buck the system Having given the sales presentation, many salespeople in Japan simply don’t ask for the order. They get to the end of their spiel and they just leave it there. The buyer is not asked for a decision, it is left vague on purpose, so that if it is a “no” then that will not have to be dealt with directly. The Japanese language is genius for having circles within circles of subtle obfuscation. The end result is a “no” but nobody ever has to say it or hear it. To get a sale happening, the buyer has to do all the work here in Japan, because the salespeople don’t want commit, to take the plunge and ask for the order. If they get a “no”, their feelings of self worth are impacted, they feel depressed, that they are failing. Not doing fully competent work or being highly productive, yet keeping you job is a pretty safe bet in most Japanese companies. The level of productivity amongst white collar workers is dismally low. Collective responsibility helps because it lessens the impact of personal inability to reach targets or make deadlines. Sales though is totally crystal clear about success and failure. It is very hard to argue with numbers – you either made the target or you didn’t. Sales is also a numbers game. You are not going to hit a homerun every time, so the number of times becomes important. You will have certain ratios of success that apply right through the sales value chain and the only way to increase your sales, is to improve these ratios. You have to up the ante, regarding the volume of activity. This sounds easy, but it isn’t when you are feeling depressed, insecure and plummeting in confidence. The key is to see sales in a different way. The increased volume of activity will even out the rejections. The way you think about rejection has to change. Rejection isn’t about you personally. Buyers don’t care that much about salespeople as people. They are rejecting your offer. As it is made today. In this part of the budget process. At this point in the economic cycle. In this current construction. At this price, with these terms. We haven’t shown enough value yet, to get a “yes’. As these aspects change, the answer can go from a “yes” to a “no” and from a “no” to a “yes”. That decision is irrelevant of the salesperson and how the buyer feels about them. These are macro and micro factors which can impact the decision one way or another. The answer is to see more people. In that way you can have a better chance of meeting a buyer for whom all the stars align and they can say “yes”. At the same time, you need to keep working on getting better, at showing more value....
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    14 m
  • What The Pro Public Speakers Do

    What The Pro Public Speakers Do
    May 19 2024
    When you see someone do a very good presentation, your faith in public speaking humanity is restored. There are so many poor examples of people killing their personal and professional brands with poor public speaking skills, it is refreshing to see talks done well. It is not that hard really, if you know what you are doing and if you rehearse and practice. This is where the majority of lousy, boring and uninspiring speakers trip up. They don’t rehearse or practice. Instead, they just unload on their poor unsuspecting audience. Here is a pro hint. Never practice on your audience! The global CEO of a major pharma company jetted into town recently and spoke at a chamber of commerce event. The presentation was well structured and flowed in a way that was easy to follow. The slides were professional and clear. He spoke fluently, wasn’t reading from any script and instead was talking about the key points up on screen. When we got to Q&A, he repeated the question, so that everyone could hear it and then answered it. He did that while addressing the entire audience, rather than just speaking to the inquirer. When he did not have the information referred to in a question, he admitted it straight up, without trying to fudge it. This is not an admission of weakness, rather it builds trust and credibility. I doubt he did any rehearsal for that audience, because it was a stump speech he has given so many times he was entirely comfortable with the content. Could he have done better? Yes, he could have added more stories into the presentation. A few vignettes from the exciting world of white lab coats, where they were developing new medicines to save humanity, would have been good. He could have delivered it with a bit more passion. It was professional, but it came across as a stump speech. He was supremely comfortable delivering it and that is one issue we have to be alert to. When we are too comfortable, we can sometimes slip ourselves into cruise control mode. We should keep upping the ante each occasion, to try and see how much further we can push ourselves as presenters. Another function I attended was an industry awards event and the main VIP guest made some remarks before announcing the winners. Humour is very, very hard to get right. For every professional comedian we see on television, there are thousands waiting tables and trying to break into the industry. When you see humour done well by a public speaker, you are impressed. You need to have material that is funny for a start. Then you have to be able to deliver it so that people laugh. This sounds easy, but as professional comedians know, the timing of the delivery is key. So are the pauses and the weighting of certain key words. It has to be delivered fluently, so no ums and ahs, no hesitations, no mangling of words. Getting the facial expressions to match what is being said is also tricky. Our humorous VIP was delivering some lines that he had used a number of times before, so he knew his material worked. It is always good when big shots are self depreciating. We can more easily identify with them, when they don’t come across as taking themselves too seriously. “I am good and I know it”, doesn't work so well with the rest of us. How do you become humorous as a speaker? Where do we acquire our humorous material? We steal it. Our speaker had probably heard those jokes somewhere else and just topped and tailed them for this event. Very cleverly, he made them sound personal, as if these incidents had really happened to him. This is important in order to build a connection with the punters in the audience. So when you attend an event and you hear someone make a good joke or tell a humorous story, don't just laugh and reach for another Chardonnay, quickly write it down and later start using it yourself. The secret though is to practice that humorous telling on small audiences to test you have the delivery just right. The cadence is important and that takes practice. I would guess our speaker had told those jokes many times before. It is fresh for us, but for him, it was well within his range of capability. This is what comedians do. They introduce new material in small venues, filter out what doesn't work, and then they bring it to the big audience on the big stage with the best gags. We should do the same. Another place where we can find humor is in what we say that makes an audience laugh. When I was returning to Japan in nineteen ninety two as a diplomat and as a trade commissioner, I was called upon to do a lot of public speaking in Japanese. I began with constructing jokes in Japanese that I thought were humorous. This was a pretty bold step, because I had no track record in being funny in English, let alone in Japanese. These jokes of my own crafting all bombed completely. However, I would say something not meaning to be funny and the Japanese audience would laugh. I ...
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