When I am running half day or full day training sessions there is no rehearsal. There is a lot of participant interaction in our sessions, so you need to have the participants for that bit, if you were going to do a rehearsal. Instead, I plan the training down to the last second. I have a roadmap of the training, which nominates precisely what will need to be happening at every minute during the training and I follow that religiously. If the timing speeds up or slows down I know where I am relative to the plan, so I can make the necessary adjustments. I need to do that because we must not go over the time allotted for the training. It is the same with speaking and presenting. The organisers have a programme to get through and they absolutely don’t want the speaker to go beyond their allotted time. Are you planning your talks down to the last minute?
What do we see? Speakers who go too long on their subject or who go crazy and try to cram fifteen minutes of content into two minutes. They start whipping through their slide deck like deranged people. Sitting in the audience, your head starts spinning because you cannot keep up. Their point of departure is always, “I will need to move through this next section quickly”. Why is that? They knew from the start how much time they had and they knew that when they started the talk.
The “I will need to move through this next section quickly” statement is notification that this person is not professional. Consequently, their personal and organisation brands suffer. If they cannot figure out how to give a forty minute talk in forty minutes, do you really want them in charge of some work for you? We also extrapolate their lack of professionalism to the rest of the people who work down there. Without really thinking about it, we tar them all with the same brush, so this is a major unforced error we have here.
The quality of your presentation also suffers because often you had some really killer content, but you cannot really utilise it fully, because you are moving so fast. All of this self-inflicted reputational damage could easily be avoided if you spent time to rehearse the content. When you allocate the time for the first rehearsal, you quickly realise that you have too much material for the length of time to present it or the other way around. In my experience though, it is usually too much information and not a lack of information, which is the problem. We have this great slide we want to use and oh, yeah, there is that other great slide too. Before you know it, you have a perfect presentation for an hour, the problem is they have only given you forty minutes.
So instead of embarrassing yourself in front of others, you can make the adjustments beforehand. The subsequent rehearsals can now focus on the delivery component. There is always plenty to work on in this regard and it requires dedicated time. What do busy leaders lack? Time. The tendency is to short change the preparation for the talk and spend that time on something else. This is a mixing up of priorities. Most of that other stuff won’t be you in public exposing yourself to the world as a professional. It will be internal projects, meetings and reporting, which are hidden to judgmental outsiders.
We need to get the content right, the timing within the limit and then we need to really impress the audience with our delivery. Senior company representatives having to read their talks is unthinkable, but you still see it. How shameful that you don’t know your business well enough to talk to key points and instead you read the whole thing to us. Just send us an email with the text, and we can all stay at home and read it for ourselves. You need to practice before you get in front of any audience. What they should see is the polished you, the confident you, the persuasive you, not the frantic, disorganised you.
When rehearsing, video review yourself and have others give you “good/better” feedback. Polish the performance, because that is what it is, a performance. When you understand that then your approach changes. We remain business like though and don’t attempt to transform ourselves into amateur thespians. We present as professionals, in our particular field of expertise. If you can organise it, video yourself presenting live to the audience and then study that later for areas where you can improve. Professionals rehearse, review, improve and above all else keep to the time allotted. Are you a professional?
Many Japanese companies have expanded their operations outside of Japan to enlarge their business, as the population decline guarantees to keep shrinking the domestic market. Many multi-national companies have established a strong presence on the ground here, because they like the rule of law and freedom to conduct their business, without having to hand over their IP to domestic partners. One of the things which keeps popping up as a request from Japanese and multi-national companies here is the challenge of how to ensure their Japanese leaders have more “executive presence” on the international stage.
What do they mean by “executive presence”? Usually, they are asking their leaders to be better presenters by getting to the key points concisely, clearly and convincingly. They want persuasion power. A big barrier for Japan has always been speaking in English, the international business lingua franca. Yet, this is not the major barrier to having “executive presence” when dealing internationally in business.
Mindset Inhibitors For Japanese Presenters
There are two mindset aspects which make it extremely difficult for Japanese executives to operate at the international professional presentation level. One is perfectionism. Japan is a country with no defects allowed, no mistakes tolerated and no errors entertained. It is a product and service heaven for consumers here and totally aspirational for the rest of the world. The idea that “we will make more money, if we allow for a defect rate of 5%”, doesn’t exist here and no CFO will ever be able to push this idea through the organisation. This “no error culture” extends to presenting in a foreign language.
I had the same difficulty when I first started learning Japanese. I would be forming the perfect Japanese sentence in my mind, all ready to go forth and launch it into the conversation, only to see the topic suddenly switched to something else. I learnt to launch forth perfect or otherwise, if I ever wanted to be able to speak the language in public. Japanese executives have trouble making that leap into imperfection and so are often very, very quiet in international meetings. They often avoid giving presentations if it is possible and if they have to, then they love to read the whole thing, either off a script or off the slides. Perfect English, but pretty boring and guaranteed to produce zero “executive presence”.
No “Braveheart Speeches” For Japan
The other mindset issue is that presentation skills are not as highly valued. In the West, we still hearken back to Athens and Rome, to the great orators and their stirring speeches. Hollywood has had a field day with this trope. In Japan, there were no Mel Gibson Braveheart style speeches being given by the warlords. Battle commanders would sit in a guarded, cordoned off area and receive reports and give orders from there, as the hostilities raged forth. There were no modern movie style stirring entreaties, while riding up and down in front of the troops, urging them on to fight and win. The samurai leadership class didn’t make mass public speeches. If the local authorities needed you to know something, they would post it on a notice board.
Yukichi Fukuzawa, one of Japan’s most famous Westernisers, opened the Enzetsukan or Speech Hall on May 1st, 1875 on the campus of his new Keio University. It is still there and you can visit it when travel resumes. We could call this the foundation of Western style speech making in Japan. That was only 150 years ago, so compared to Athens and Rome, public speaking is quite a recent phenomenon here in Japan.
Standing in front of people and speaking has an element of assumed superior status, which usually requires the Japanese speaker to apologise at the start for standing above others, while everyone else is seated. Often, when I was asked to give one of the 200 plus speeches I have given so far in Japanese, a table, chair and a microphone stand were automatically prepared. The idea of standing and speaking was thought to be tiring for the speaker and it also got us all seated at the same height. Quite clever because no awkward “status” faux pas were possible. Being confident and outspoken isn’t valued in Japanese culture. Here we should be humble, shy, modest and self-effacing.
Is There A Japanese Way Of Public Speaking?
Reading your speech, word for word, to achieve linguistic purity and carefully displaying no great confidence as a speaker is the accepted formula. Not a great platform for achieving “executive presence” in an international environment. Can Japanese become great public speakers? Yes, but they have to overcome a few mindset issues first. We teach public speaking here and sometimes will get pushback about the “Japanese way” of public speaking being different to that in the West. This is a false flag. It is a wily justification for a lack of competence by poor speakers. We are producing plenty of professional competent speakers in our classes, so we know it can be done and that Japanese executives can become excellent presenters. There are common basics for effective presentations that will transcend national borders.
One of our arrogant faults in the mono-lingual, Anglo Saxon West is we presume people who are not articulate, especially in English and who cannot present well, are not up to snuff. Big mistake. Skill absorption is the key. With proper training, I believe every Japanese leader can achieve “executive presence”. Some may take longer than others to throw off their mindset issues. Gaining proficiency means we will all improve international mutual trust and enjoy clearer communication. This is really one of the last global frontiers for Japan.
Many internationally oriented Japanese executives here, will eventually catch up in English communication skills. Korean, Chinese and numerous other Asian nation’s executives, for whom the international language of English is not their mother tongue, have managed it. International conferences are where you realise the gap between Japan and the rest of Asia is vast. Japanese executives can certainly manage it as well. It might be right or it may be wrong, it may be fair or unfair, but it is a reality. Being capable of giving professional presentations in English is how to garner “executive presence”.
I was confirmed into the Anglican Church when I was twelve years of age. I remember it was the first time I ever wore a tie in my life. Prior to that, every week I had to ride my bicycle to the church after school and do bible studies with other kids with the Minister in order to pass the test to be able to confirmed. My parents were not religious at all, but I guess because Christianity is such a central component to our belief systems and literature, that they wanted me to get the basics.
Years later I discovered Zig Ziglar, one of the most famous modern day sales trainers. He was raised in the Deep South of America where bible studies is very big. I have read his books and watched his videos. I am fan. I noticed he was an incredible communicator. I also noticed that a lot of his sales stories where like the parables he would have read in his “red letter” bible, that is where the words attributed to Jesus are written in red. Australians are not particularly religious like Americans are, but I did recognise the power of these parables in communication. I don’t mean the actual quotation of the parables themselves, but the storytelling structure.
The parable structure always has a learning component wrapped up in the story being told. Often in business, we want to achieve the same thing for our audience. We might be giving a “persuade” speech rather than simple “inform” speech” or we may be calling for the audience to “take action” rather than just “entertain” them.
The parables are always from real life, rather than being a confection created for effect. This makes it easy for us to identify with the story. When I mentioned going through the confirmation process as a child, I am sure many readers went through a similar experience, including those who are from Muslim or Buddhist religious belief systems. Our real life stories make it easy to connect with our audience, because they can understand or emphasise with what we are saying.
The parables are also very easy to understand. The message is crystal clear. Do this and things will be good. Do that and things will be bad. This simplicity is what makes the storytelling so effective. Zig Ziglar was a master of telling his stories which each had a lesson there for us in sales to absorb. They were from his experience or the experience of others from the real world, not from the “how it should be world”.
This is the danger when we become speakers. We pontificate from on high, from way above the clouds, as if we were superhumans who never made a mistake or had a failure. The ego has to be strong to tell a story against yourself. We have grown up supersensitive to being criticised and so it is like kryptonite, we avoid it completely. Criticising yourself sounds crazy, so we only talk about what a legend we are.
Zig understood that audiences love a good redemption tale. Of course we like to hear how to do things so that they go well, that parable is always in fashion. Interestingly though, we often feel distant from this model story of bravery, perseverance against the odds, intelligence, strength and wisdom. We naturally aspire to those things, but they can feel like they are a million miles away from where we are at this moment. Now failure, disaster, train wrecks all feel much closer to our reality and of course we want to avoid those. Parable stories on what no to do are much more popular than the ones on what we should be doing.
When things go pear shaped, don’t miss the chance to take a note on that for a future talk. The events may feel radioactive at the time, but get it down on the record, so that you can retell it when the pain has subsided. Particularly include the characters involved, the extent of the damage and the depth of the heroics or stupidity involved. Don’t be limited to your own disasters. Comb through the media and books for other people’s disasters, which can then be trotted out as a parable for doom and gloom.
Storytelling master Zig Ziglar copied the parables, probably without even giving it a second thought, because it was so much a part of his cultural upbringings in Yazoo City, Mississippi. As presenters we can find our own blue ribbon stories of triumph and catastrophe. We can wrap these up in simple, true renditions of reality that our audience can identify with and easily recall. The parables are well remembered for a reason – they work as a storytelling structure and we can adopt it for our own talks too. In ten minutes, I bet you can come up with at least two or three good incidents that have parable like qualities, which can then be fleshed out into mini-stories of business good and evil for an audience. Give it a try!
Whenever I hear that Jesper Koll, CEO of WisdomTree Investments Japan,
is going to give a talk here in Tokyo, I want to attend. I have heard him speak before and he is very good, so my anticipation level of another great presentation is high. I am not alone in thinking like this and his talks are always packed. This underlines why being able to present at a professional level builds your personal brand. The basis for a professional presentation is receiving high level training and then getting a lot of practice to hone the craft. You might be thinking, “well I don’t get that many opportunities to give talks, so the frequency index is a bit low for me”. Fair enough, but you can get the training and that is the starting point to get the speaking spots. All professional business speakers did a lot of speaking for free, before they ever got paid. In business, we will have to give excellent talks from the very start and then at every opportunity, to build our reputation. This is why the training needs to come first and the frequency becomes a consequence of the training results.
For those who are not in the “established reputation” group, which obviously is the majority, there are things we can do very easily to join them. While we are working in our companies, there will be chances to give updates, reports, represent the section, etc., and this is where we need to start building our reputation. Fortunately, there is rarely a queue formed on the right to give these talks. Most people hate speaking in public, because they have no clue what they are doing. They just bumble along, shuffling forward like the army of the dead reluctant presenters. Good, keep bumbling. That means we can get the opportunity to volunteer our services instead.
When the top bosses see you give your report and your slides are crystal clear, well presented and your delivery is really excellent, you will be noted as someone who can represent the firm. It may not happen quickly, but don’t worry, those very same abilities as a competent presenter are also the requirements for leading others. You are likely to be promoted in your firm because you are seen as a skilled communicator, someone with persuasion power.
Rising through the ranks opens up more possibilities for giving presentations. Often the big bosses themselves hate presenting too and will be very happy to throw you the speaking spot. Grab it every time. Once you get into the public arena, other will start to notice you. More invitations will come. I have never asked Jesper about this, but I will bet he wasn’t an overnight success as a speaker. I am sure he took years to polish his delivery. As you wise up to how the system works, you will start creating your own chances. You will be nominating yourself to give pertinent talks, on some worthy subjects for the local burghers. Don’t let “imposter syndrome” hold you back. Remember that 99% of people giving business presentations range in skill from average to rubbish. You have every right to be out there and because you have received the training, you are automatically in the top 5% straight away.
Picking topics which are hot is a no-brainer. This is where your copy writing skills are called upon to draft the gripping blurb advertising your talk. Don’t rely on the hosts to do this for you. This is your brand we are talking about here and you must have total control over how you are represented to an audience. This is what the people will see and on that basis they will attend, until such time as you are well regarded speaker and people will turn up to hear whatever you have to say regardless, because they are fans.
This is what happens for me when Jesper’s name is bandied about as a speaker. I just go straight to the signup page and register, without reading the finer details, because I know it will be good. The other dimension is that not everyone will be able to attend your talk but many, many more will see the notification. They will start to associate your name with a particular topic. In Jesper’s case it will be Japan’s economy, because he is an expert economist and that is what he talks about. Your name in lights as an expert on a topic is part of building an audience and personal brand for the future.
When we get to the delivery stage, we can also build anticipation. You are introduced by the MC, who is absolutely quoting from the brilliant introduction of yourself, which you prepared in advance. I say “absolutely” because you need to nobble the MC beforehand and give firm instructions they follow the script and don’t go off piste. It should be brimming to overflow with credibility and this starts to build a positive anticipation in those who don’t know anything about you as yet.
When the MC introduction is finished and you are on stage, don't start immediately. Just hold the proceedings for a few seconds, which by the way can seem like an eternity and then start. If you want to see an anticipation build of stupendous proportions, then watch the video of Michael Jackson, when he performed at the Super Bowl in 1993. He didn’t move a muscle for one minute and thirteen seconds. At that point, all he did was change his head direction to the left. He then held that new pose until the one minute thirty two mark and then he began his performance. It takes a huge amount of guts to hold an audience for that long. Well folks we are not Michael Jackson, so we can only hold our audience for a short time, but we should still hold them in order to build that anticipation.
Keep close the idea of creating anticipation in the mind of your audience and develop your presentations accordingly. If you start this way, you can anticipate a lot of success for your personal and professional brands.
We normally think of omnichannel in relation to the medium being used to contact buyers. We can also use this idea when thinking about planning our talk. We automatically revert to the brain when we start this exercise. Our logical, rational, analytical mode is needed but that is not enough for audiences. We need heart, value and sex appeal for our messages to resonate. We tend however to get stuck on the first rung of the planning ladder, the intellectual angle. We all know though that we are emotional creatures, running around justifying our emotional choices with a veneer of logic. Our talk need to access all of our human instincts.
We need our brain to be working well. Logic is required to make the argument make sense to our audience. It means we need to be piling on the evidence, proof, data, statistics and testimonials etc. The navigation of the talk should be logical, so that it flows like a good novel, making it easy for the audience to follow where we are going with this content. I have mentioned before a talk I attended, where the visiting VIP just rambled through this maze and mist of an esoteric discussion, peppered with his vague musings, which was totally impenetrable. It lacked structure, logical flow and clear, concise communication. It was totally self-indulgent. To this day, I still have no idea what he was on about, but his personal reputation and his organisation’s reputation were both shredded that day.
Some members in the audience will be analytical types who love the logic, the detail, the nitty gritty, the evidence and they will be happy to see it. They will be calibrating everything we say and running it through their mind looking for inconsistencies, gaps, flaws and mistakes of fact. We will win this group over if we are well organised, however they are not the only personality type in the audience. We have to go omnichannel to appeal to other personality types.
Some will be more swayed by their hearts. We need to get them in touch with their emotions and feelings during our talk. Novels and movies are emotional engagement masterpieces in many cases. We are drawn into the characters in the story and what happens to them. I am a pretty logical guy, but I remember being captured by the heroine in the Japanese television drama Oshin. Her rise from crushing poverty to running a massive retail empire was a true story, which appealed to my logical brain, but her travails were all pulling at the heartstrings.
We do not have multiple weeks like a television show or three hours like a movie or hundreds of pages in a novel to emotionally engage our audience. We can have some elements of the human drama of what we are talking about. Because we are in business there is absolutely no shortage of drama which we can relate. There are the full spectrum of characters to draw upon as well, from amongst our colleagues, subordinates, superiors, suppliers and clients. Everyone loves a gory tale of corporate value destruction, factional bloodletting spitting out winners and losers and the dirty deeds done dirt cheap by business nasties.
Another instinct is the gut and this is where we are appealing to value for money. Is what we are talking about bringing concrete value to the audience. Have we proffered some information or insight, which was previously unknown to them? Are we making their business or personal life substantially better? Are we tuning into the conversation going on in in the minds of the audience and suggesting questions which they want answers to and then magically unveiling the solutions? The “what is in it for me” question is always the uppermost thought in an audience’s mind, when they sit there listening to us pontificate about a subject. I attended a talk by a big shot executive from one of the largest companies in the world. She was talking about personal branding, so she pulled a good crowd. However, it instantly became apparent that she was talking about how to brand yourself within a mega monster of a company like hers, when the audience was full of punters from small to medium sized enterprises. There were zero take-aways and zero value on offer that day.
The last omnichannel is sex appeal. Is your topic sexy, will it fill the seats? The title is always a key. A lot of thought needs to go into the best shorthand description which will grab attention. Sometimes we need a provocative title to break through the daily detritus filling the minds of our potential audience members. “How to” titles also work because we are flagging you will learn something if you attend. The delivery is another aspect of sex appeal. We have to be excellent in giving the talk, looking for every opportunity to engage with our audience. We want them thinking, writing down our stuff and often we have to branch into edutainment. I am not good at snappy repartee, quick wit, zinger one liners or being a skilled raconteur. I can tell stories though, which are interesting and insightful, which seems to get me by.
When we sit down to design the talk, we need to be asking ourselves, “have I got all of the omnichannel touchpoints covered for this talk?”. We know people are quite various in how they absorb information and in their interests. We have to do our best to appeal to as many people as we can in the one sitting. In the end, it is the planning starting point which matters most. If we plan to incorporate these four omnichannel elements of brain, heart, gut and sex appeal, then we will be more successful.