Owning Your Material When You Didn’t Create It

The minions are swarming around the venue.  There are people setting up cameras, sound equipment, teleprompter invisible screens, and additional hangers on and assorted riff raff just standing around watching the chaos.  In swans the big shot to rehearse the delivery and the tension in the room rises.  This is Japan, a no defect, no mistake, no error society where big occasions scare the hell out of everyone.  The pointless game of panic induced “what if” now gets going, as various nobodies try to run the speaking coach ragged, in their efforts to head off the thousand things which could possibly go wrong.

The speaker has not had much time to even look at the content and the time allowed for the rehearsal is zen like minimalist.  Someone in the marketing department or the PR department has prepared the material or maybe it came from the big name PR company.  The speaker certainly had very little chance to even look at it, let alone rework it.  To reduce the amount of speaking time, the geniuses organising the speech have stitched videos into the proceedings, unknowingly sacrificing valuable face time for the speaker, who is now relegated to the second string, behind the video images.

This is what it is like being the speaking coach to big shot executives in Japan.  In one case, the speaker was thrashing around trying to fit into the straight jacket his staff had created for him and the speech rehearsal was going nowhere.  The teleprompter set up had just one screen, so the speaker was very efficiently speaking to only the left side of the room.  The rest of the audience were being blanked by the speaker and that is not a good look. 

When I looked at the material, I wondered why does the President of this company have to read his speech at all. Doesn’t he have some personal knowledge of the business?  Can’t he just throw out the prepared script and speak to a number of pertinent points, following the theme of the talk?  He could tell this set up wasn’t going to deliver him the best opportunity to get his message across.  In the end he tossed out the teleprompters and came up with his own speaking points and used those at the international event.  It was so much better.

Another senior Japanese executive from the automotive sector was due to speak overseas in English, even though his English wasn’t strong.  The slide deck from the PR company had speaking notes for every page, written in perfect English.  The speech was short, only seven minutes, but even so memorising the entire speech was folly.  I assured the executive that speaking English perfectly was unimportant, because communication goes beyond words. Mimes discovered that centuries ago and there was an entire silent movie industry that thrived for decades without any words ever being spoken, until the “Talkies” arrived.

Next the slide deck presented a problem.  How was he supposed to follow the script?  He could spend his time with his head down, reading the words in English for each slide.  If this is all that was required, we could keep him at home and just show a video of him doing just that and have almost the same lack of impact as having him do it in person.  Instead, I asked him to distil the essence of what each slide meant to him, down into one single sentence and then one single word.  That word was placed on each slide in Japanese kanji, like a secret code, and all he had to do was speak to that word.  By telling the audience what that slide meant to him he was authentic.  His English may have been garbled and the grammar mixed up, but it didn’t matter.  He was communicating from his heart what the slide content meant to him and that message registered with his audience, in a way a speech just read out loud to the audience could never do.

No matter how busy we are, we take a big personal brand risk of allowing others who know nothing about presenting, to decide how we will appear as a speaker.  Get an expert to help, if the stakes are high or work out a way to own the material.  Make it yours and the speech will go more smoothly and easily.  The impact on the audience will be significant and the key messages will get through.  That is what we want isn’t it.

How Much Selling Should You Do During Your Presentation?

The organisers of public presentations are usually not very happy for the presenter to start flogging their company’s products to the audience.  They are looking for good information for the assembled masses and no propaganda.  This makes sense because if you are sitting in the audience and you start to hear what sounds like a commercial for the speaker’s products or services you feel offended and belittled by the presenter. 

I was in such a gathering when the host of the Chamber of Commerce event introduced himself as an “expert”, in his particular line of work, when kicking off proceedings.  It had a bad smell about it.  If you have to go around telling everyone you are an expert, then we will question just how much of an expert you really are.  Participants will also complain to the organisers about you and your blatant self promotion and you may not be invited back to speak.

Obviously we give these public presentations to promote our personal brands and our companies.  Where is the tipping point when you have pushed it too far?  Subtletly is always the best policy.  I still remember visiting the German Pavilion in the Tsukuba Expo in 1985.  There was a long, winding staircase to the second floor and all along the wall were framed photographs of all the German Nobel Prize winners.  There was no banner announcing “we Germans are smart”, but the huge number of faces peering down, as we wound our way up the stairs was a subtle tour de force of German intellectual power.

We should rely on some key elements when selling ourselves when presenting.  Bald faced telling people you are an “expert” is completely up for debate, but showing through the quality of what you present that you really know your stuff, is very convincing and makes you highly credible.  There needs to be some fresh data or perspective to cut through all the competing messages floating around the internet and media.

I like Jesper Kohl’s presentations.  He is a perennial favourite of different Chamber events here in Tokyo.  He is a leading economist in Japan and I have probably seen Jesper present twenty times or more over the years.  Every time he is super engaging as a presenter and always has new and high quality information on the Japanese economy.  He is the master of the pregnant pause when asking his audience members questions.  Just as the victim is ready to bumble out their answer, Jesper slips in the answer, revealing that was a rhetorical question after all and not requiring an answer.  As an audience member it certainly keeps you on the your toes!  He doesn’t have run around telling us he is an “expert”.  His content and delivery tell us that. 

Delivery is the other indicator of expertise and professionalism.  You can be beautifully attired, shoes with a mirror shine, hair perfect like looking like a Hollywood idol and still be a dud if the presentation isn’t done correctly.  I was watching a VIP visitor to Tokyo, representing a huge multinational energy company, who gave a very dull presentation. The information was fine, because some minions in the marketing department had cobbled it together in a workman like fashion.  The perfectly coiffed, suited and booted presenter delivered the whole thing slowly, clearly and completely devoid of passion.  It was painful and decimated his personal brand.

To be credible and prove you are the goods, have first class content and deliver it in a completely professional manner.  Blatant self promotion is self defeating and your speaking career will be short lived, as the invitations dry up.  Please never allow the claim that you are an “expert” leave your lips.  We are not that dumb.

Advice For Your First Major Presentation

At different stages in our careers we are asked to give a presentation.  It may be a simple reporting on progress on a project or the state of play with the current results.  The audience usually starts with our colleagues and bosses.  Over time, as we rise through the ranks, the scope of the presentations we have to give increase in complexity and the audience size also increases.  It might be at a  whole firm kick off event, an offsite with senior management or a public presentation representing the firm or the industry. The leap from talking in front of colleagues to the company Board or to a public gathering is quite steep.  The nervous tension is also profoundly different.

We can feel quite confident in front of colleagues but presenting to the members of the Board raises the stakes completely.  Consequently we become a lot more tense and nervous.  When we are in the spotlight it can often feel more like an interrogation lamp.  Our pulse rate climbs alarmingly, we start perspiring more than normal, our palms become sticky, our throat is parched and our stomach feels a bit queasy. 

This is the fight or flight adrenalin rush kicking in.  The blood is directed to the larger muscle groups like the arms, shoulders and thighs, away from the internal organs, which is why our stomach feels a bit strange.  The pulse rate quickens due to the chemical cocktail floating around our system, as we prepare for action.  Logically, we are not about to sprint out of the venue or engage in hand to hand to combat with the members of the audience, but that doesn’t matter because our brain’s instructions to the body has overridden that logic and is prepared to just such occurrences.

Deep breathing to slow down the pulse rate or purposely striding around in some private space, away from prying eyes, helps to burn off some of that nervous energy.  There is only so much you can do to calm down the chemical reaction.  It also doesn’t necessarily matter how many times you may have presented either, because the nature of the event, the composition of the audience and the scale of the occasion can make us nervous.  I read once that even such a regular performer as famous singer Frank Sinatra, was always nervous about getting that first note correct.

The other antidote to nervousness is good preparation.  You would think this was the most obvious and logical thing in the world, but an amazingly high proportion of people spend all of their preparation time on the wrong things.  The slide deck gets all the love and attention and rehearsals are totally neglected.  This is lunacy but also reality.

A competent presentation needs a couple of elements.  Understanding who is in your audience and what they want to hear is very basic but often overlooked.  I attended a senior executive’s talk on personal brand building.  It was odd, because it was basically aimed at people who work for similar major companies.  The audience was 99% small and medium enterprise staff.  The speaker had not considered her audience at all when she developed her talk.

A clear point of the talk boiled down into one sentence, brings clarity about how to structure the talk.  What evidence can we gather to support this central point of our talk.  How will we wrap the talk up both before and after the Q&A.  What is a grabber opening which will draw the audience in to want to hear what we have to say.

We also have to be clear who is the boss on stage – the slide deck or us?  So many presenters become slaves to their slides and that content becomes the main event not the presenter.  I am about to coach a senior Japanese car company executive on a speech at an international car show to be held shortly.  The PR company has prepared the slides and the draft English content for each slide.  They asked me if the content was suitable.  Well it is great, except that he will never be able to use it. There is no way he could memorise that amount of content in English for that length of speech and still put in a good delivery as a presenter.

My suggestion is for him to think what does each slide means to him, boil that down to one word and let’s put that word on the slide and he can elaborate on that word during his talk.  No memorisation needed and he will speak in his authentic voice about what that image says. 

Get the basics right, rehearse, rehearse, rehearse and once you start the nerves will calm down.  You will be able to switch your focus from you and everything that is a problem, to your audience and trying to get them to buy your message.  Keep doing that and presentations will lose their scariness.

Who Are You Presenting For?

My regular Rotary meeting held every week at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo has a featured speaker.   Our speaker this time was a celebrity in his eighties and very well known to the audience.  Rotary runs like clockwork and every section of the hourly meeting is choreographed and the meetings always finish on time. Not this time though.  Our speaker gave a rambling talk, which seemed to lack any direction or point.  For no good reason he also managed to go way over his allotted speaking time, so the meeting finished late.  This Rotary audience is full of the captains of industry in Japan and so they are busy executives, for whom time is their most valuable resource.  I was sitting there thinking what have we go there with this speaker?

My conclusion was that this speech was for his pleasure.  He wanted to ramble around and across a number of unrelated subjects.  He clearly liked the sound of his own voice and was happy to have a big audience in front of him.  The fact that he managed to go over the time was amazing given there was almost no structure to his talk and he could have ended anywhere really.  Japan loves its celebrities, so they get cut a lot of slack and are indulged.  This has probably been the speaker’s experience for decades and today he is quite indulgent with himself, because there are no boundaries.

It reminded me though of the importance of focusing on our audience.  The danger can be we become wrapped up in our subject or in this case, wrapped up in our own importance.  This happens in business too. High powered CEOs jet in to give a speech, they have people fawning all over them and are treated like rock stars.  A few years of that and their sense of proportion starts to drift.  The issue, as speakers, is they represent the brand.  If they are too impressed with themselves and their superior expertise and ability, the audience can feel it.  They are focused on themselves and not the message or the audience. This is not a brand plus.

It can happen with passionate speakers too.  They may be legitimate experts in their field and are fully sold on the merits of what they Are doing or offering.  All great, but this can lead to a shift in focus away from the audience on to the details of the subject and their glorious part in it all.  In many ways this talk is all about them and their love for the subject.  We don’t want that.

From start to finish the focus has to be on getting the key messages into the brains of the audience and selling them on why those messages are important.  We the speaker are the vehicle not the main act.  As we get more confident speaking in front of audiences and as we start to enjoy holding sway over crowds, the danger arises that this becomes an extension of our egos about how great we are.  Anytime we switch focus off our audience, be it to the details of the technology or to our glorious selves, then we are going in the wrong direction.

The design and execution of the talk should be solely focused on the audience and giving them what they want.  We know this by our prior research into who is coming - gender, age, job titles, company name - and by mingling with the early arrivals, to get a sense of what brought them here etc.  We know that the Q&A section will help us address specific interest points for individuals in the audience, which may not have been fully covered in the maIn body of the speech.

The starting point of why we are doing this talk should be clear.  It is not about us, but about those who have taken the time and made the effort to listen to us.  If we start the design phase from that perspective we will be well down the track to get the talk right for that audience.