Great Resources for Improving Your Presentations

by Charles H. Green on Friday, July 25, 2008 (post #322)

Giving great speeches is all about combining form and content. All content and no form is boring. All form and no content is fluff.

Those who focus on form—the really good ones—respect this balance, and have created their own content around form. I’ve had the pleasure to know two: Sims Wyeth  and Patricia Fripp.  Let me introduce them to you.

Sims coaches presenters. He also sends out newsletters and articles about the craft of speaking--communiqués that are themselves little gems. They are short and to the point. But they are provocative. And they are elegant.  The messages themselves represent the marriage of form and content.  If you’re going to tell people how to communicate—then communicate that message well.

Here are two examples from Sims:

The DNA of all reasoning is the syllogism. Given A, and since B, therefore C. For instance, given "All men are mortal," and since "Socrates is a man," therefore "Socrates is mortal."

Can you use this as the structure for a presentation? I think so. You could say: Given the situation we find ourselves in (and here you describe it in detail), and since we agree that our goals are XYZ (and here you describe your goals), therefore, this is what we should do (and here you elaborate on your solution.)

See? Logic is the language of presenting.

And:

Variety is the difference between a river and a canal. The river offers a surprise around every bend--calm pools, sounding cataracts, deep gorges, spreading fields. A canal is straight, plodding, dull.

Good presentations are like rivers; bad ones like canals. Your listeners want variety--broad truths buttressed by homely examples. Solemn purpose marbled with wit.

Variety perks things up!

Years ago, Patricia Fripp gave me a speaking structure in two days that I’ve used ever since. We should all aspire to a page of testimonials like this one of hers.

She also respected my content.  She was fully capable of grasping my content; she offered her content expertise, in service to me, as a means to support my content. 

She had her own content too.  Like Sims, the subject of her content is form. How many of the “8 Mistakes Made Using Powerpoint”  do you commit? I reviewed them tonight and found three—and I’m pretty good at this stuff!

Fripp's business is speaking, and training others to speak. Zero content stuff? No way! Her website is loaded with topical programs, discussions, articles, videos, insights.

One tiny example: if you were interested in booking Fripp herself as a speaker, eventually it would dawn on you that you’d want to promote the event. You’d want her bio. You’d want a suggested introduction. You’d want pithy quotes; a set of sample speech topics; a sample brochure for advance promotion. And of course—it’s all there, right on her website. Because Fripp is a content pro—about the content of form.

The people I’ve met who are worldclass in what they do--Sims and Patricia in speaking, for example--do not see a “form vs. content” issue. They find the two mutually reinforcing.
 

Self Help Con Jobs

by Charles H. Green on Wednesday, July 23, 2008 (post #321)

Would you like to be more trusting? Maybe you’d prefer to be more trusted?

Most of us would like to get better at both. But how does one get better—at anything?

Virginia Heffernan has done the heavy lifting for us in the NY Times Book Review section in Advice Squad, her just-slightly snarky look at the New York Times’s advice, how-to and miscellaneous best-seller list from March 9, 2008.

You’ll recognize every genre, if not every title.

For example, there's the "buy up the Alabama rights for some 800-number fish lure that keeps showing up in obscure publication, then re-sell them via the internet to some other person looking to get rich quick" scheme.

There are the “serenity now” variations once satirized on Seinfeld.

There are variations on looking young, not looking old, great skin, less fat, you are what you eat, get skinny by cleaning your house.

I don’t know what you call Suze Ormon; like Dr. Ruth and Tony Robbins, she clearly knows her stuff, but it’s somehow more about the Suze show than the subject.

There’s a special circle of hell reserved for Deepak Chopra, who ages ago (another lifetime?) actually wrote intelligibly about things medical. Not any more.

But the quintessentially American number one best-selling self help book—for a long time running, I believe—is The Secret.

This book is the capsule story of all the other books—they all promise the One True Way, if you will just follow their advice.

It is also number one because it captures the true secret of a con job—bad logic applied to serious issues. Which results in some major tsouris.

What do I mean by bad logic? This.

Imagine all four variations of a syllogism:

1. If you got B, you must have done A.
2. If you do A, you’ll get B.
3. If you don’t do A, you won’t get B.
4. If you didn’t get B, it’s because you didn’t do A.

The trouble all begins with number 1:

“I never gave up the dream that I’d [make it in Hollywood, win American Idol, own the big house, win the SuperBowl, hit the lottery]. I never stopped believing I could do it. And today, here I stand—I did it!”

This is what logicians call a “necessary condition.” If you’re going to win the lottery, you have to buy a ticket. To win American Idol, you’re going to have to stay positive. To play in the NBA, you gotta have some big ambition.

The biggest problem comes with shifting to number 2—believing that a necessary condition implies a sufficient condition.

A necessary condition means that if B is going to happen, you will have to do A. A sufficient condition means that if you do A, then B will happen. The shift from a necessary to a sufficient condition is the central con job of The Secret—and of most cults. From “all winners believe” to “all believers win.”

Such a small shift. Such a Big Lie.

In the particular case of the The Secret, the Big Lie is compounded, because it's not about believing in a diet or a magic pill; it's about believing in belief itself. You gotta believe! Anything is possible if you only believe! This is the stuff of Oprah's evil twin; of snake oil salesmen.

If dreaming big were a sufficient condition, every dreamer would win the lottery. If mere willpower were enough to win American Idol, the parade of early season misfits would be in the finals. Simon Cowell’s role is to remind us all that talent and hard work matter too. We love to hate him because we want to believe those self help books are enough—if you just dream hard enough!

But no—just because the winner dreamed, doesn’t mean dreaming makes you a winner. Hope is not a strategy. Strategies require more than dreaming. The inner city is full of kids whose life's hope is to play in the NBA—far too many for the NBA to accommodate. And they have no strategy to back up the hope.

That’s the con job. But the evil of The Secret lies in versions 3 and 4—especially 4.

Version 3 says, all those poor fools out there who aren't winning; it's because they don't believe. I, of course, know better. I know the power of belief.

Then the clincher, version 4. If you didn’t get wealth fame and happiness, it’s not because The Secret is a lie—it’s because you didn’t believe strongly enough in The Secret; in belief itself.

When Dorothy and Toto say “you have to believe," we call it entertainment. But Madison Avenue sells the same Secret, as George Carlin pointed out so brilliantly: If you don’t buy our product, you will emit sinister genital odors and everyone will know it's you and shun you and it all will be your fault, because you were warned. So Buy Now.

The Secret is a closed system. You cannot argue with someone who believes both that A is necessary and sufficient for B, and that the absence of B is necessary and sufficient to infer the absence of A. Work that one out. Like any closed system, every attack on it is rejected as illogical. That's why they call it a closed system; an objection is defined as wrong.

For True Believers, it doesn’t matter what A is—it’s the experience of having an Answer for Everything that seems so seductive.

Some of us suffer more than others from an inability to believe, particularly in ourselves. A shot of energy, a bit of belief itself, can be a bracing and positive thing; when coupled with a strategy, even life-transforming.

But an entire industry selling people the belief they can influence lotteries and believe BMWs into the front driveway—no. Some of those end up as the ones we laugh and cringe at in early American Idol episodes. Others just slink off in shame when they come to. But most just buy another self-help book, desperately secure in the belief that belief will be enough—this time.

How do you get better at trusting and being trusted? Don’t peddle snake-oil. And don’t buy it either. Belief is necessary; it is not sufficient.

From Financial Relationships to Financial Transactions, Losing Trust on the Way

by Charles H. Green on Monday, July 21, 2008 (post #320)

The New York Times this Sunday has initiated an ambitious and comprehensive look at the financial crisis facing us. Gretchen Morgenson, a crack business writer, has not only her normal Sunday business page lead, but also the entire issue’s Main Section Front Page lead.

And rightly so. Count me among those who believe this is no ordinary recession; we’ll live to live again, but there has been huge financial misbehavior by all of us for a very long time; we’re going to have to pay the piper for some time to come.

Morgenson points out we doubled our mortgage debt in 7 years as a country; our savings rate—at 8% in 1968—is now 0.4%. And the biggest scorecard of all is the fall of the dollar, already precipitous, and likely to get worse.

One of the patterns that emerges is the conflict we have created in the world economy in the last two decades between efficiency and trust. It’s a major trust issue—one of social and political structure.

Here’s the idea.

The global financial system has gotten far more efficient by applying business process thinking “best practices.” Define processes so they can be outsourced to others, the thinking goes, who can then do those processes at a global level of scale, more cheaply.

That logic is what drives the outsourcing of payroll and benefits processing. It's the same logic that drives mortgage lenders to sell loans to banks, and banks to package them to asset packagers.

It has in many ways worked: more capital became more available in more places to more people more quickly and at lower costs than had been the case 20 years ago.

Unfortunately, there was a side effectT—the substitution of short-term transactional fee income for longer term relational income sources (like interest).  And fee income has turned out to be the crack cocaine of the financial industry.

It isn't just mortgages. It shows up in banks every time you get hit for $2 to withdraw $100 from an ATM not your own. It shows up in credit cards—in late fees and over-limit penalties, in huge rates for cash withdrawals. And of course if you refinance a mortgage, fees abound—enough to become the primary source of profitability for the refinancing institution.

Who cares about your damn loan when they can make money off of the act of taking out the loan, and more money out of selling it to someone else. Give ‘em a ten-year balloon loan at teaser rates. On Wall Street, the moral decline was captured with the phrase, “I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone—just do the deal.”  Gimme more crack—gimme the fee income, you can have the relationship and the loan.

So here’s the social trust issue.

One of the four Trust Principles (see my article “Trust: the Core Concepts” or my book Trust-based Selling) is the focus on relationships, not transactions; on the medium-to-long term, not just the short-term.

That idea is pretty simple and clear. Trust thrives in relationships, not in random encounters between strangers. Economic models that link entities—and people—allow trust to grow.

Economic models that structurally dissociate people—blind online bidding systems are an extreme case—are at best trust-neutral, and in many ways trust-destroying (in the case of blind online bidding, that is in fact the intent).

So we have a dilemma. The economics of outsourcing processes has indeed resulted in lower costs. It has also resulted in lower trust.

Can we have both? And if so, how?

I don’t have the full answer, of course. But I believe the answer is going to rely on two things:

• The political will—in government and in business—to recognize that, in the long run and in the big picture, we are all inextricably linked, and we’d better behave as such. In other words, an ethos or common belief-set based not on competition, but on collaboration.
• The insight that low cost alone does not drive value; that relationships, in fact, are the source of far greater value than the micro-process-here-now-self-aggrandizing instincts we have been propagating as “best practices.”

It ain’t going to be easy, though.

How Contracts Can Feed Trust Rather than Destroy It

by Charles H. Green on Friday, July 18, 2008 (post #319)

David Zechnich leads Deloitte’s Contract Risk and Compliance service, a unit within their internal audit group (I think I’ve got that right).

In speaking with him recently, he has given me a new angle on contracts, trust and relationships. In this blog I have decried the increasing tendency to rely on contracts instead of trust (see, for example, “How Too Many Legal Contracts are Costing Business” .

True enough, fair enough, and I don’t disavow any. But David reminds me of another truth:

In a business relationship, over time there will be hints and evidence of things that cause you to challenge trust; in a business relationship in general there will be many temptations to stray.
In a negotiation (which may start every minute of every day), every mistake you provide provides fodder for disbelief and mistrust. So, conversely, every discussion to clarify the facts increases the basis for trust.
Sharing data in contract negotiation turns out to be a great basis for trust.

Properly treated, contract discussions are not adversarial, or even impersonal. Properly treated, they are opportunities for transparency and mutual disclosure.

What’s at stake, as David points out in a brochure co-authored with Eric Hespenheide (More Than a Matter of Trust: Managing Risk in Extended Business Relationships), is the level of trust in what he calls the Extended Enterprise. (It’s what I mean when I talk about horizontal commercial interactions taking over vertical management structures—see for example "Trust is the New Leadership.")

In other words, transparency in contract negotiations is good business—in part because it feeds trust.

David might get hired by company A in advance of licensing contract renewal negotiations with licensee company B. Company A hires Deloitte to dig up the data.

But that's not all.  David lives the values. He tells both companies in advance that he’ll be sharing the findings with company B as well as company A. That cuts down on argument and friction, because he is providing unbiased facts. Unbiased, in part, because the fees to his client A are based on time and materials—not a percent of the “damages.”

He even tells A that part of his objective is to make B inclined to hire him down the road—because of his obvious integrity and transparency.

I’ll be more careful in future about my wording of the dangers of over-contracting. It depends a lot on how the contracts are developed. If developed as a source of transparent information-sharing, then the cause of trust is served, not hurt, by contracting.

July Carnival of Trust is Now Up!

by Charles H. Green on Thursday, July 17, 2008 (post #318)

The July Carnival of Trust is most ably hosted by Andrea Howe of BossaNova Consulting.  And a tasty feast it is.

The Carnival of Trust is a  monthly collection of the Top Ten best blog postings on the internet related to the subject of trust, with selection and distinctive commentary added by the host.  Like movie reviews in the New Yorker, the Carnival is insightful and succinct in equal parts--a oncentrated dose of wisdom, perspective and humor, all in an easily digestible format.

Andrea's selections this month include these provocative topics:

• How to increase trust by violating the no-talking-politics rule with clients
• What Tim Russert's passing taught us about what we value
• How meetings kill trust
• Creating value before the sales call
• A call to arms for lawyers--to increase trust in the profession

Andrea's commentaries are worth the price of admission (actually much more, since admission is free), and click-through's are easy. 

Drop by the July Carnival of Trust at Bossablog today.

Past Carnivals can be found here.  If you'd like to enter a blog posting for the next Carnival, click here.  The next Carnival of Trust will be held at the beginning of September.