Speaking. Presentations. PowerPoints. Storytelling. Humor. Metaphors. Analogies. How about you? Do your speaking tools enable your great ideas to “ricochet in people’s heads for hours, days, or even weeks after you’ve said them?” Be honest now.
Yikes! Apparently, I’ve done my fair share of boring audiences to death—or at least to Snoozeville. But wait…haven’t I followed the advice and wisdom of speaking coaches, train-the-trainer gurus, and many, many authors? Yet…according to Bill McGowan, an Emmy Award-winning communications coach and adviser—
I’ve been doing it all wrong!•
“Good morning, I’m so excited to be here!” Wrong! “If you can get through your first thirty seconds without telling the audience how ‘excited’ you are, you gain admittance into an elite community of communication one-percenters.” (Drop the tired old clichés!)
•
“Tell ‘em what you’re going to tell ‘em, tell ‘em, and tell ‘em what you told 'em." Wrong! McGowan writes, “Today, being memorable is the holy grail of communication. At my company, we teach this every day to our clients, because if they’ve been coached before, typically they've been chasing a dusty and dated definition of success, one that is predicated on being messaged.” (Read how to “hit the communications jackpot.”) Attention: Pastors! “Memorable” is a good thing.
•
“To drive home this point, I’ll read this PowerPoint slide again.” Wrong!“… when I urge people not to read their slides verbatim, I refer to that bad habit as ‘slide karaoke.’”
•
“Here’s a funny joke I recently heard.” Wrong! “One of the biggest reasons you don't see more levity in public speaking is that people have been burned by bad counsel. For years, presenters have been told, ‘Start off with a joke. They'll love it!’ That is the single worst piece of advice you can get, even worse than ‘picture the audience in their underwear.’”
And speaking of underwear, this is the second of our “Summer Shorts” book reviews—short, crisp, and ready for your summer vacation. Enjoy! With these shorter summer reviews, I’m trusting you to do the hard work—so buy the book! Seriously. The next time I present my half-day workshop, “
The 4 BIG Mistakes to Avoid With Your Nonprofit Board,” I’m taking the book’s advice—and orchestrating a major renovation. In just the first 100 pages, I ran out of ink underlining the “tricks, tips, and techniques” to be a more effective presenter—and make the content memorable. Examples:
LEVITY (Use humor, but use it creatively.) In “Part III: Sticky Talk,” McGowan promises: “You’re about to embark on a guided tour through a multitude of tips, tricks, and techniques that can transform even the most routine and mundane business presentation into a captivating narrative that rattles around in your audience’s noggin for a few days, a few weeks, or even longer.
The more memorable you are, the more impact you will have.”
McGowan celebrates the Stanford Graduate School of Business research on deploying the secret weapon of humor. (Read my review of
Humor, Seriously.)
BREVITY (The author’s a big fan.) McGowan writes that when X (Twitter) eliminated the 140 character limit on tweets, it was “…in my opinion, one of the worst policy decisions in social media history.” He thinks we talk too much!
Someday, the author hopes “to create a simple piece of technology that counts the number of works we speak in a given day.
With the possible exception of cloistered monks, the average person utters 16,000 words a day.” McGowan surmises that we could shred at least 75% of those words. Ditto in our staff presentations, speeches, and (dare I say?)…sermons! (Note: read the recent
WSJ tech article, “
I Recorded Everything I Said for Three Months.”
Oh, my!)
LOL! Chapter 3, “The Verbal Diet,” begins with a cartoon. A patient is meeting with a doctor at the “Verbal Weight-Loss Center.” The doc says, “I’d like to see you get down to 12,000 words a day, so remember, no chit-chatting between meals.”
That’s funny. Every chapter features an original cartoon—thus reinforcing the humor theme.
Brilliant.THE COPPOLA STORYTELLING FORMULA. After you read Chapter 2, you’ll embrace Francis Ford Coppola’s formula for making movies:
“Look and decide what’s the best thing you have, the second-best thing, and the third-best thing. • “Take the best thing you have and make it the ending of the movie,
• and take the second-best thing and make it the beginning of the movie,
• and the third thing put in between those two.”
The author says Thomas Keller, the celebrated chef, agrees.
“The most important moments of the meal are the first five minutes and the last five minutes.” (By the way,
click here for a free 16-minute “Google Play Book” audio book preview on YouTube.) You can also purchase the audio book at
Libro (8 hours, 20 minutes).
POWERPOINT-LESS! (
Did I mention, I’m reworking my presentations and my PowerPoints?) And speaking of “death by PowerPoint,” don’t skip Chapter 12, “PowerPoint-Less.” Learn why Jeff Bezos “replaced slide decks with
a six-page memo that he gives everyone to read at the beginning of a meeting.”
(I wonder if his upcoming wedding prep included six-page memos?)Every chapter ends with a two-column coaching summary:
“Do This. Not That.” For PowerPoints: don’t read your bullets verbatim. Don’t turn your slides into an eye chart (see the LOL cartoon on page 211), and don’t delegate your PowerPoint to a subordinate.
WAY TOO TIMELY! Chapter 5, “The Magnificent Seven,”
showcases seven effective tools to make your presentations memorable: 1) Analogy/Metaphor, 2) Creative Label, 3) Twisted Cliché, 4) Wordplay, 5) Data with Context, 6) Original Definitions, and 7) Mathematical Equations. The authors give a “Four-Star Cleverness” salute to the late secretary of state Colin Powell (1937-2021). He “combined an analogy with a creative label, a double bang-for-the-buck quote.” In addressing the Middle East options in 2004, he said,
“This is the Pottery Barn Rule. If you break it, you own it.”ONE-LINERS. You’d expect the
co-authors from a communications company to be great wordcrafters. They are. Each chapter features fresh research on communication with bar chart stats.
Plus, you’ll love their major-league lexicon with one-liners and memorable labels: slide karaoke, banalogy, corrosive faux pas, twisted cliché, meeting fatigue, the primacy/recency effect, the first seven seconds (audience snap judgments), the dreaded “agenda slide,” jumbo analogies, the drumroll line, the finish line (“a crisp, punch synopsis”), “empty-calorie words,” the junk-word habit, and my favorite: “mindless mumbling.”
REVIEW #2 and #3? Some books require two reviews.
Speak, Memorably is so meaty, I couldn’t help myself—and added some color commentary over at my
Pails in Comparison Blog. Maybe…I’ll return with a third review here...later this year.
If you lead staff meetings, teach, instruct, preach, seek to inspire, or even present monthly financial reports, you’ll appreciate this book. If you coach others—this book is an absolute no-brainer.
, by Bill McGowan and Juliana Silva. Listen on
(8 hours, 20 minutes). And thanks to the publisher for sending me a review copy.
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