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What makes or breaks a good public speaker

linguisticguide — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 09:30:24 +0000

I work in a field that allows me to observe public speakers frequently, unfortunately sometimes I get to be one of them, and I haven't yet decided whether I like it or not. The last occasion was a 4 hour conference on a theme very different from any of my areas of interest. I am a linguist present to a conference on diabetes and drug delivery for that category. I couldn't understand a thing and I didn't take along something to read (I had thought about it, but it would have been very impolite, the speakers might have felt offended, and it was not their fault I was in the wrong place). So I stared at them, focusing on their presenter skills. First, learn the language in which you deliver your speech. There was a professor from Spain that the audience could hardly understand. I am talking about doctors whose English cannot be expected to be at such level that they understand different accents produced by non-native speakers. The Spanish professor spoke with great difficulty, his voice was low and his English poor. You draw the conclusions. That's about it regarding the fashion in Romania nowadays and please correct me if I am wrong, but it is a must to bring along, at a national event, some foreign speaker, as he or she brings added value instantaneously, no matter the manner in which the speech is held, not to speak about the content. I'll come back with other, very illustrative examples, there are plenty out there. Second lesson: this lady was facing the big screen at all times and her back was turned at the audience during the entire speech. Needless to say, most of the audience behaved like pupils whose teacher is not in the classroom: whispering, drinking water, reading, making all sorts of noises that demonstrated their boredom and freedom NOT to listen to somebody that doesn't want to be heard. If you want to be heard and listened, learn a few things about what you want to say so that you don't have to constantly turn your back at the audience in order to be able to read from the screen. If you think you will be able, during your presentation, to read and look at the audience, think again. A lot of amphitheaters settings do not allow you to do that and you well know that if something wrong can happen, it will happen.

Absolutley flawless - Afterburner key note speech

nickop — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 14:45:34 +0000

As I mentioned in my previous post yesterday, I headed off to the ifs School of Finance Isle of Man lecture at the Manx Museum. I didnt't know what to expect really and I was very pleasantly surprised.

The turnout was excellent and the quality of speakers was second to none.

The Flawless Execution key note was delivered by two ex US Airforce and RAF pilots highlighting how business's could adopt the flawless execution model made up of 4 elements which are:

Plan

Brief

Execute

Debrief

What I particulary enjoyed was how they compared the objectives that a Thyphoon Fighter Pilot has to achieve with the business objectives that we have to meet in our day to day jobs.

The key themes that I will certainly take away and look at when project planning will be the debrief, something that virtually all organisations don't do. They might be very good at the Plan, Brief and Execution stages but very rarely do they debrief and learn from any mistakes. Something that I really liked was the rankless debrief that these pilots undertake after every mission. Within the debrief session there is no hierarchy and everyones opinion and comments are as valuable as everyone elses, again something that I would consider needs to be addressed in many of todays organisations. How many of them could honestly say they value everyones views equally?

Which brings me on to my next point - mistakes. Mistakes can be good things and people in organisations that make mistakes are assets. If we just fired these people and moved on we would lose so much experience and we could make the same mistakes again - something that a fighter pilot in combat definitely could not make and I would hazard a guess that many business's operating in todays highly competitive market place couldn't afford to do either?

Another area that I found very interesting was on the subject of 'task saturation'. During this talk we watched some video footage of pilots flying a commercial airline. During the flight they became almost obsessed with the fact that the landing gear light had failed and focussed all of their efforts and energy on trying to rectify the problem, whilst all this was going on they failed to notice the fact that the aeroplane had lost over 2000ft of altitude and it eventually crashed causing the death of over 90 people. I think the point that was being made here was that we can become saturated by a task or tasks during are daily working lives and we can lose sight of what is actually happening around us and need to react to in order to prevent a major problem.

The delivery was excellent, the two guys had done their homework on the Isle of Man, the audience and finance sector. They had obviously constructed a plan, undertaken a brief, executed this flawlessly and I have no doubt they will undertake a debrief with the ifs organisers after the event.

Afterburner - absolutely flawless

Steve Jobs, cosa ci proponi questa volta? [keynote 2008]

aratriel — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 08:50:12 +0000

E se il keynote di oggi ci proponesse questo?

...non esiterei un solo istante a comprarlo. Oh no.