The Presentations Japan Series

This seems a ridiculous construct – of course we when we are presenting in business we shouldn’t lie. However, look at what is happening in the rest of the world.  Kellyanne Conway introduced “alternative facts” into the American political debate to explain lies.  Donald Trump rails against the fake media and fake news. It would appear that many people, including leading Republicans, think he lies a lot, and yet half of the American electorate support him.  Are we now in a free fall where anything goes? I know this is dangerous territory to wade into, because to paraphrase basketball legend and entrepreneur Michael Jordan, “Republicans also buy sneakers and corporate  training”.

Donald Trump wrote in the Art Of the Deal that, “I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration – and a very effective form of promotion”. This idea is often linked to German Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels quote, “If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth”.

So when we are presenting, is it allowed to introduce exaggeration?  You could answer that question by applying a gauge on the extent of the exaggeration.  Is a small exaggeration acceptable or is the line struck such that no exaggerations are allowed?  In Japan, at least, I would suggest that no one in business uses any “truthful hyperbole” or “alternative facts”, or exaggeration whatsoever.

This whole focus on fake news has created an audience full of cynics and doubters.  We all feel it. Every single day, I receive multiple fake emails and messages trying to get me to click on their attachment, or give them information so that they can rob me.  These fakes are getting better and better in sophistication.  More and more often, I have to contact the firm they are claiming to be from, to check they actually sent me that email or not. Back in the day, you took your chances outside with highwaymen and pirates. Today the modern era equivalents come over the internet through your email provider.  As a consequence, we are all highly tuned up on fakery and dirty dealings.

As a presenter, if we start exaggerating, our audience will doubt not just that point we are making, they will doubt every subsequent word which comes out of our mouth.  They will also warn all of their friends and colleagues to be careful of us, because we cannot be trusted, because we are a bold faced liar.

As presenters, recognising that the world is spiralling further and further down, with political discourse peppered with lies, we have to differentiate ourselves or some of this mud will get attached to us as well.  The way to do that is to offer proof, evidence, data, statistics, testimonials demonstrations, exhibits etc.  If we show a slide with a reference to some data, we need to include the source of that data.  Probably 99% of the audience won’t check it, but it doesn’t matter, we have to presume they will all check it and we need our information to be tight.  If we make a claim we have to be able to back it up with proof that what we are saying is true.  We have to see the audience in front of us as one filled with battle hardened sceptics and supreme doubters and prepare accordingly.

We must also realise this is only going to get worse and that the doubt factor will be applied to more and more of what we say.  We have to be very, very careful about making statements which stand on their own.  An opinion is fine and we have to flag it as exactly that, an opinion.  Every other statement needs to be surrounded by provable evidence.

The key is in the preparation.  We have an important message we want to get across.  What are the main points we will make and what proof do we offer to back up our claims.  That evidence has to be verifiable and cannot be “alternative facts” or “truthful hyperbole” or subtle exaggeration.  Depending on the situation we might distribute some additional documents which nominate the sources for what we are saying to head off any doubt arising in the minds of the listeners.  As things degrade further, we can be proactive about it, rather than trusting that people will take what we say at face value. As I mentioned earlier with slides, we definitely have to include the references to any data or claims we are making.

“If in doubt leave it out” is always good advice when stitching the presentation together.  If I see a slide with a reference to statistics from 2019, I wonder why is the speaker showing such outdated data and why can’t they offer something more credible.  Are they cunning, lazy or stupid?  Now, both their point and they themselves are firmly placed in my “highly doubtful box”. 

In Japan, by the way, official government statistics are usually three years out of date.  What should be an official, reliable source of information is made dubious by its antiquity.  We have to be very careful about claims we make and the proof we offer to back them up.  As usual, the Americans are leading the way for the rest of the world to become highly sceptical about what we are all being told. This pungent mud can stick to us as presenters too, no matter where we are located.

Tell the truth, back up what you say with verifiable data and avoid “alternative facts”, “truthful hyperbole” and exaggeration.  This is the path forward if we want to be regarded as credible presenters.

It was a big affair.  The entire Shinsei Bank retail staff were assembled for a series of updates from the Division Heads on what each Division was doing and where they were going.  One of my erstwhile lifelong banker colleague Division Head gave his presentation.  It was dull, monotone, low energy and not engaging in the least.  Unfortunately for him, it was my turn next.  By this time, thanks to my previous work as a Senior Trade Commissioner and Consul-General for Australia,  I had given hundreds of public speeches, mainly in Japanese, to audiences of all different stripes in Japan.

I knew how to give this talk in a way which would be interesting for the audience and in a way in which I could grab their attention.  My sharp elbowed colleague instantly recognised there were light years between his miserable efforts and my professionalism. 

Did he commit to self-improvement, to build the biggest skyscraper in town, to become excellent in public speaking?  No.  He sought out ways to pull down all the other skyscrapers, so that his could be the tallest instead.  He informed all in earshot, except for me of course, that “Greg is all style and no substance”. 

When this comment was duly reported to me, honestly, I just burst our laughing.  Not in an exaggerated thespian, ironic way, but a genuine belly laugh, because the idea was so ridiculous, so preposterous, so revealing about his insecurities.  I had given enough public speeches by that time to know it wasn’t just style that was engaging my audiences. 

What was ironic was that originally I was scouted to leave Austrade and join Shinsei’s Retail Bank, because of a speech I gave to the American Chamber of Commerce here in Tokyo.  In fact, that speech changed the direction of my career, although I didn’t realise it at the time.

Recently, I was reading an article by Kathryn Brownell in the Financial Times, where she referenced the first televised debate between Kennedy and Nixon in 1960.  Nixon didn’t understand the medium of television as well as Kennedy.  Kennedy saw the opportunity to speak directly to voters, rather than just relying on highlighting policy differences. I recall some reports I have come across at different times, which said that those who only listened to the debate, gave it to Nixon, while those who watched, gave it to Kennedy.

Nixon certainly made the complaint that the televised debate format brought in a new era where “politicians focused on style over substance”.  It was a dividing line between eras and the future belonged to those who mastered the skills needed to be successful with the new medium. Kamala Harris killed Donald Trump in the recent debate and that wasn’t just style and no substance.  She was extremely well prepared and brought all guns blazing to what Trump thought was going to be a knife fight.

So what about businesspeople presenting here in Tokyo?  I recall coaching a Japanese President who forsook the opportunity to do a professional speech, because he felt his vendor audience wouldn’t be ready for it.  He knew what to do but chose to not do it. That was highly perplexing to me as his coach, but standing out in Japan is never a popular course of action. He just gave the same old boring monotone performance, because that was the norm for his company and industry. It was painful for me to watch and know what he could have done instead.

I saw another local businessperson give a very good performance, as he was a skilled presenter.  However, when I sat back and thought about what he was saying, as opposed to just being mesmerised by how he was saying it, I felt there wasn’t much meat in that speech. 

Before Covid, I saw Shigeru Ishiba, a Liberal Democratic Party hopeful, currently  trying to secure the Party Presidency and thereby become Prime Minister, give a talk as part of a panel discussion. He was slumped in his chair, looking bored and his comments were lifeless, monotone and dull.  However, when I closed my eyes and listened to what he was actually saying, it had more impact. If he wants to run this country, I hope he has improved as a communicator since then.

It is obviously not a choice between style and substance.  We need both, and I want to replace the word “style” with “professionalism”, to make the point clearer.  Talking crap fluently is no help and neither is being valuable, but not being heard.  The big difference between Harris and Trump, I believe, was in their understanding of the occasion and the preparation for it.  This is precisely the same for us in business.  If we spend all of our time crafting the slide deck and none on the rehearsal, then our talk will not be optimised.

Observe any public talks today and even the good speakers face some people in the crowd who have whipped out their phones and are no longer concentrating on what is being said.  Having great content, which is ignored by the audience, because we are unskilled and so boring is no better than turning up with weak content.  We fail to have any impact. 

Let's wrap our numbers up in stories, so that people can remember them. Let’s work on our professional delivery skills, so that we can keep the listeners with us, from start to end. Let’s defeat the mobile phone, as the escape alternative to what we are saying.  By the way, it will only get worse. We have no time to lose to improve our communication capability.

Recently I was teaching a class of technical experts to have more impact when they spoke.  Like many specialists, their areas of expertise required great detailed knowledge and experience and they have to interact with other non-expert parts of the organisation.  In their case, they have to report to senior management and they also had to deal with the sales team.  The brief from HR was that the senior leaders didn’t take sufficient note of their reporting and advice because of the way they were delivering the information.  Salespeople were also pushing back on the direction they were receiving and not accepting what they were being told either.  They needed more impact when they spoke.

When we started the session, we discussed with them the areas where they wanted to improve.  Many people mentioned being more clear and succinct when they spoke. They felt that the complexity of what they were trying to convey sometimes made it difficult for the listeners.  Also, rambling during their explanation was identified as an issue.

One thing which I noticed was common across the group was their level of energy when they spoke.  They were bringing the same voice strength they would employ when having a chat over coffee with their friend to their presentations.  In Japan, this is a very typical area for more work needed when we are teaching presentation skills.  When we are speaking up in a meeting or standing before a group, we have to switch gears and bring a lot more vocal range to the content of what we are saying.

Not every word should have the same voice strength, though, but that is what a lot of people do.  They give keywords the exact same voice power, as they do less important words and phrases in the sentence.  This is highly democratic, but not very useful when trying to get our message across. We need to either hit those keywords with more volume or we need to strip the volume out and make it an audible whisper.  Both will work.  Applying the same strength throughout the sentence from go to whoa is the death knell of messaging.

Voice modulation is critical to keeping an audience with us. Listeners are so easily lost today to the allure of the internet on their phones and if they feel disengaged they are gone, gone, gone. If the vocal power is set at the same dial strength from beginning to end, then listeners will just tune us out, as it becomes repetitious and morphs into a boring, sleep actuating monotone. Like classical music, we need crescendos and the opposite, decrescendos or lulls.

The problem though, is often we have a lot on our mind and are supremely nervous.  We are not even aware that we are speaking at the one constant volume or in a monotone throughout our talk.  By the way, this doesn’t have to be a formal talk.  It can happen in a normal meeting, where we are presenting some results or giving some guidance on what needs to happen next. We lapse into a monotone and we are tuned out by the assembled masses.

Now, the nervousness has to be a best kept secret when we are speaking.  During the training, it often happened that someone would suddenly laugh nervously during their talk as the pressure mounted within them.  That laugh is a physical release from the internal mental pressure building up inside their mind. We can be nervous, but this information has to be kept from the audience, because it instantly diminishes our credibility as a speaker. 

We were filming the talks and for the first round we had them do the talk facing the camera and conducted at a ninety-degree angle to the audience. In this way, the speaker couldn’t easily see the faces in the audience. Instead, they had to concentrate on me as the coach. We sometimes do this to try to lessen the pressure of having to present to a crowd where there are a lot of beady eyes and faces staring back at us.  Later, when they had gained more confidence and poise, we had them give their talk directly facing everyone and they were able to do it without looking nervous. 

Remember, only we know we are feeling nervous. If we don’t show it and if we speak with a strong voice, we come across as confident and the audience will believe us.  That strong voice part can be a problem, though, for a lot of ladies who speak very softly.  One of the dangers is that their soft voice is ignored by the executives, usually men, who they are presenting to. They lack what is called “executive presence” and a big part of that is confidence, portrayed though voice stength. Fair or unfair, a meek, soft, tiny voice just won’t command the attention and credibility of hard driving male bosses.

When these softly spoken ladies were presenting, and I asked them to increase their voice volume, I would ask their colleagues if they thought they were yelling?  The answer would always be “no”.  I would then ask if they thought they could go even louder and the answer would always be “yes”. What a difference it made when they did.  Being softly spoken, for them, it felt like they were yelling. However, from an audience point of view, they just sounded very confident, credible and clear. 

We can get into a debate about whether women should have to change their speaking style to pander to men, but reality is reality.  Men occupy a disproportionate share of senior executive positions in most companies and they are an important audience for these ladies.  By making a small change, they will be heard as opposed to being ignored, which was the current situation in this company.

When we understand that our presenting voice cannot be at the same volume as our coffee chat with a friend volume, we will make the required adjustments.  The good news is that the results are immediate and we come across with a lot more credibly.

Josh Shapiro, the Governor of Tennessee, was regarded by many as certain to be Kamala Harris’s pick for the role of Vice President, as part of her campaign to defeat Donald Trump. Ultimately, she chose Tim Walz.  The six-minute speaking spot at the Democratic National Convention then, was a good opportunity for Shapiro to position his own future credentials for a run for the Presidency. Barack Obama used his 2004 keynote spot to catapult himself into the limelight, as a relatively unknown eight year Senator from Illinois.

Therefore, I was expecting a very good speech from Shapiro, but I was disappointed.  To me, it seemed to fall flat.  This evaluation has nothing to do with political affiliation, because as an Aussie, I have no right to take part in the coming election.  I am just using his talk by way of analysis of what works and what doesn’t and as a guide for business people who give speeches. 

Now we have to be careful of expert evaluations.  I was watching a video from an American guy who was also evaluating the Convention speeches.  He started with “I am a speech coach” and he then made a fatal error, which for me at least, indicated he was a fraud or at least a total dud, as far as being a speech coach is concerned.

What did he say?  He mis-quoted the famous research from Professor Albert Mehrabian on key factors when presenting.  The dubious speech coach started telling everyone that what was being said was 7% of the impact, 38% was based on the voice and 55% on how they appeared.  That is total crap and if you ever have that quoted to you, run far from that person, because they are clueless and dangerous.  Mehrabian’s research had a critical caveat on when those numbers apply.  He said that when what we say is incongruent with the way we say it, the audience gets distracted. They subsequently focus on how we sound and how we look, as opposed to what is the content of our talk.  However, if we are congruent, then the audience pays attention to our message and is not distracted, so voice quality and how we dress become less important.

Rant over and back to Shapiro and what went wrong.  I am not just comparing him against the absolute, so let me include some other prominent speakers who were also considered for the role of Vice President by Harris. I looked at Gretchen Whitmer and Mark Kelly’s speeches.  For me, I thought Kelly was wooden in his delivery and not able to really connect and engage his audience, so he is out as a model. 

Whitmer was the star in my evaluation.  Shapiro was talking at us, whereas Whitmer was speaking with us.  Shapiro used only one volume control throughout his six minutes – strident. Whitmer used modulation and had variety in how she got her message across.  Sometimes soft, sometimes strong, and always engaging.

In business talks, we want this facility to vary our delivery so that it isn’t all soft or all strong, but mixed together and re-formed in the right way, at the right moments.  Remember Mehrabian – we need congruency between the content and the delivery.  A strong emphasis on a word lifts its appeal, as does an audibly whispered version and we should use both.

Whitmer employed personal stories and examples we could to relate to in order to make her point.  Shapiro was mainly just using powerful motivational exhortations.  I wondered whether the organisers had allocated different roles to each of the speakers, but I doubt that was the case.  Each of these high-profile speakers would have worked on their speeches in isolation to best reflect what they wanted.

Being told what to think by the speaker is not as effective as providing context, evidence and laying out some alternate ideas.  Constant and rigorous admonitions are hard for an audience to handle because it tires them out.  You could tell from the applause that the audience was struggling.  During Whitmer’s speech they were energised and the difference was quite stark, I thought.

So when we are giving business talks, we should definitely be including relevant stories wherever we can.  If we can make these personal stories, that is the best because audiences will identify more strongly in those cases.  We are looking for points of agreement and commonality with the speaker and we need more information about them to be able to do that.  Just telling an audience what they need to do isn’t going to provide that personal connection. Also, audiences don’t remember statistics as well as they remember stories. In business, we have tons of stories to draw on, but often we don’t go looking hard enough to find them.  We have plenty of numbers, but let’s go find the stories we can wrap them in.

We can’t be lecturing the audience on how they should think about an issue.  We need to lay out information and insight and guide the audience to agree with the stance we have arrived at based on the context and our experience with the issue.

Whitmer used humour well to create a better personal connection with the audience, whereas Shapirio was deadly serious from woe to go.  Whitmer was relaxed and smiling and Shapiro looked taut and ardent.

In business, we need to look for ways to help our audience relax.  Smiling is good, but somewhat difficult, when you are feeling nervous.  Humour is also not an easy one either and that is why it is generally left to the professionals – comedians and politicians.  Nevertheless, we can at least try to appear we are relaxed and happy to have the audience listen to us.  Just a calm vibe is enough to help an audience relax.

So we can take away some lessons from Shapiro and Whitmer and inject the learnings into our own talks.

Watching the avalanche of speakers to the Democratic National Convention has been interesting.  Some really hit the mark and others not so much.  What makes the difference?  From what I could see they were all using teleprompters, so effectively they are reading what they wrote to us.  Some I felt were just reading back to us what they wordsmithed and others connected with us.  How did they do that?

Comfort with the medium is a big differentiator.  There is also the issue of which teleprompter you look at, because they had them left, center and right.  Too much rapid head turning is distracting. Burrowing into just one screen seems to be denying the love to the other areas of the audience.

Teleprompters are set at certain speeds and the advanced models will coordinate with your personal timing.  You stop and it will wait until you start again. I couldn’t tell which type they were using, but I would have to expect the most advanced tech was being used for such an important event.  Nevertheless, it was obvious that the cadence for some people was slightly off and that may be because they don’t get a chance to give many speeches using teleprompters. 

If you think about the case of businesspeople, I would guess that 99.9% of those located in Japan, have never had an occasion to use one.  So here is a hint, don’t make your speech your test bed for trying out a teleprompter. Get hold of one early and practice with it until you feel comfortable.

Holding the moment is another skill.  Imagine facing an audience of 25,000 people and having your face projected on the most monstrously huge JumboTron screen for the folks in the cheap seats at the back.  You also have all of those at home tuning it on television to watch, an audience of around 29 million people, plus all the social media views.  That would make anyone nervous, but the pros are not feeling rushed or speeding up because their pulse rate is going through the roof. They know how to hold the moment and build anticipation for what they are about to say.  As business folk, we have to have the same ability to hold the moment. Probably we won’t have a massive audience putting incredible pressure on us, so we should be able to manage it, if we do our planning well.

Pausing is a tough skill.  You feel the pressure to speak, but the ability to deny that itch is important.  By creating a gap between what you have just said, what you are saying now and then between that and what you will say next is powerful.  I thought Michelle Obama did a masterful job of combining the anticipation component with her pauses.  The speaker’s one liners are like a punchline for a comedian and timing makes all the difference.  Too short doesn’t work and so does too long, so it is a real skill to find the right gap. 

The key for businesspeople is to programme in pauses at certain points of emphasis in the talk.  These pauses will highlight and illuminate the key point we want to make and have it rise above all the other points we are making.

Energy is a tricky beast.  Too much and you are seen as verging on insanity or at least hysteria.  I recall when I saw Kimberly Guilfoyle at the Republican National Convention, it seemed too much to me.  Her speech felt histrionic and just too forced.

Too little and the connect with the audience is hard to establish.  Biden and Clinton are both losing their voice strength and it stood out in terms of the energy they could bring to their points.

Where is the line is a good question? There is a tendency to go hard from start to finish, rather than having some modulation.  That is easy to say but hard to do, with 25,000 people screaming out, while you are talking. You feel you have to project above the noise of the room.

In business, that is not a likely scenario, so we can have better control over where we insert strength and softness throughout our talk and we should be aiming for both. 

In my observation, American politics continues to descend into a morass of nastiness topped up with a lot of name calling and rabid criticism of the other side.  In my native country of Australia, politicians won’t publicly call their opponents “stupid” or “weird”, because they know the voting public won’t accept that type of behaviour.  In our national Parliament during the policy debates, the language is carefully monitored by the Speaker and always kept within the bounds of propriety.  As in most things, America is a different planet, especially when it comes to domestic politics and elections.

What about in business when we are giving public speeches in Japan?  Should we call elected officials or bureaucrats “stupid” or “useless”, as we rail and lament against their shortsighted, unwieldy, ludicrous, ridiculous policies?  Can we attack our sneaky, underhanded competitors in public and complain about the evils they are doing?  In general, can we do some good old-fashioned whining and complaining about whatever is aggravating us at the minute? Basically, the answer is “no”. 

We don’t have American style comparison advertising here in Japan because it is banned.  Showing your product’s better virtues up against the opposition is felt to be endangering societal harmony and is against the law.  The thought of a Japanese CEO publicly laying into a Minister or official, regarding some policy felt to be egregious or unfair, is unthinkable.  In general, public venting is not a thing here. 

The fear of the consequences to the firm by the Government taking revenge as a result of the public name calling is certainly a part of it.  Future applications requiring official approval may suddenly get slowed right down or rejected outright.  Maybe a surprise tax audit suddenly springs up out of nowhere. Complaining publicly about your company’s rival is thought to be very low-level, unrefined behaviour (品がない- hinganai) and would reflect very badly on your firm’s brand and reputation.

We can mention about industry wide negative events like the 2008 Lehman Shock, the 2011 triple whammy of earthquake, tsunami and triple nuclear reactor meltdown and the 2020 pandemic.  Referencing the hard times resulting from these external events is acceptable, because we all probably suffered to some extent during these recent events, too.  We can’t labour the point though and we can’t go into too much hidden detail about the impact on our businesses.  If we share too much data, the thought will arise that we are unstable and maybe not long for this business world.

The Phoenix is a symbol here of rising for the ashes and Japan loves a good resurrection story.  We can lay out in general terms that things got very bad and talk about how the team pulled together and we made it through.  Going into detail about how we did it is a good idea.  Everyone loves to learn lessons at the expense of others, rather than themselves.  Balancing negativity with hope and revival is the key. Even if things are not totally hunky-dory just yet, talking about what you are doing to get out of the hole you are in is of interest to the audience.

In my experience, the glass tends to be half empty in Japan most of the time, so we have to make an effort to break out of that formula.  Telling people things are bad garners a “so what” reaction, because that is how they see things as being normal and not news to anyone.  From another angle, I don’t think too many Japanese enjoy schadenfreude though, at hearing about our troubles. Telling listeners how things were bad and that now they are slowly improving is felt to be more interesting.  Our efforts to revive are seen as worthy and admirable, because we are ( 頑張ってる - ganbatteru) or working hard and that is a good thing in Japan. 

Japan suffers earthquakes, tsunami, typhoons, flooding, landslides etc., on a regular basis, so every year there is some area wiped out. On television, we see scenes of people trying to rebuild their businesses and lives and their efforts are respected.  “But for them, there go I”, being the prevailing thought.

We don’t have to be Pollyanna in our talks, expounding how wonderful and successful we are.  That approach is not well regarded either, because it sounds elf-serving and boastful.  Leavening the good with the bad is a better balance and better accepted when giving speeches in Japan.

Most business speeches are very definitive.  We did this, and it worked for us and you could do the same and also get similar results. Usually, we are asked to speak because we have had good results and have rich experience in our industry. The hosts believe that others will be interested in hearing what we did, so that they can take lessons from it and they will be able to pull a crowd.  The problem is today we are in the Age Of Distraction and the Era of Cynicism.

If what we are offering doesn’t sound valuable or sounds dubious, then the audience loses interest immediately and lunge for their phones to hit the internet and escape from us.  Once upon a time, listeners would sit there politely and absorb what we were saying and wait to reach judgement.  Now we have to win them over from the very start.

They are also more sceptical than in times past and are constantly on the prowl for fake news. No wonder though, given the barrage of scams and fake information hammering us every day.  I constantly get fake emails trying to get me to click on something that will allow them to take over my computer and clean out my bank account.  The fakes have become more and more sophisticated and sometimes I have trouble telling if they are real or not.  I have had to ring my bank or my credit card company to check that what I have received is legit or not. They are now that realistic. Little surprise people are on guard.

This combination of short attention spans and cynicism about what we are telling them makes it very much harder to advance our arguments when we are speaking.  One approach is to use a couple of simple tools.  One is the rule of three and the other is recency. 

Basically, audiences cannot take in more than three points and remember them, so to prove our arguement, we should assemble the strongest three points we can come up with.  The way to use these three points, though, is not to just list them and explain what they mean.  This Age of Cynicism demands that we offer more balance.  We should list the pros and cons associated with each point we are making.  So as we go through them, we offer the pluses and minuses for each point. 

I remember when I was an undergraduate student doing Modern Asian Studies at Griffith University in Brisbane, we had a guest lecturer come in to talk about the causes of the Battle Of Sekigahara.  Tokugawa Ieyasu won that battle and set up a dynasty which lasted for hundreds of years and it was a major turning point in Japanese history. 

He started by going through a long list of the usual explanations for the events leading to the battle, and it was all very convincing. I was sitting there in the front row busily making notes.  He then proceeded to pull down each of these standard arguments and replace them with his own interpretation of events. It was a powerful intellectual example of providing balance and therefore becoming much more convincing than if he had just rattled off what he thought explained the situation.

We should do the same with the points we are making in our talk and provide balance. This invites the audience to observe that we are not being dogmatic and that we are considered and looking for fairness in our argument.  It is very disarming. We don’t present a static target to be attacked because we are demonstrating our intellectual flexibility.

Additionally, the recency phenomena is a key contributor to being believed.  We all tend to remember best what we heard last.  So, of the three points, the strongest recommendation should come last.  We do the same thing with the pros and cons for each point. Finally, we offer the last point as our strongest recommendation for the audience.  They heard this last, so it has the impact of being the most memorable argument and therefore more likely to be accepted.

Is running it last cheating?  No, we are just adapting our order to best suit human psychology to have the best shot at convincing the listeners of our argument.  We have shown balance by going through the pluses and minuses and we just order the points in a way which is the most convincing and effective.

So next time you give a talk, consider how you can introduce more balance in the argument you are making. If you do, the chances are much higher that you will be believed and well regarded as an expert in your field.  This will advance your professional and personal brands.

I am not an American, so I cannot vote.  I always tread the line of neutrality when discussing what is happening in America, turning myself into the Switzerland of speech giving advice.  Previously, I have written about the presenting skills of both Biden and Trump.  Now I move on to the new Democratic candidate for the US Presidency. 

Republican politicians and Fox pundits criticise Kamala Harris for only being coherent and capable when she is reading her lines off a teleprompter.  I have no idea if that is true or not, because I don’t see enough of her unscripted talks.  Donald Trump, apparently, has trouble reading teleprompters and so he prefers to speak extemporaneously.  He is often criticised for rambling and going off message.

Teleprompters are certainly part of the machinery for politicians and sometimes for captains of industry.  I was coaching a German executive who headed up a large Japanese manufacturer here.  He had an international keynote due to be delivered in English. The major Japanese PR company had brought in a single teleprompter for him and set it up to his left. Actually, I didn’t work well because the teleprompter was like a magnet and his ability to engage his audience was compromised. 

Audience members on his left got all the love.  Those on the right and in the centre got almost nothing from him. I suggested he drop the teleprompter or get one for the other side as well. In the end, he went with just his notes as prompts. This was so much better.  He also wasn’t reading his speech word for word, which was a major blessing.

I read a funny story the other day about Barrack Obama when he was President giving a speech based on a written text.  You can imagine how much vetting goes into a Presidential speech before it is delivered and how carefully the wordsmithing is considered. Midway through the talk, he turned the page over and he suddenly realised one of his staff had managed to miss placing the next page there for him.  He had to wing it on the spot, which he did.  So even written speeches can provide unnecessary excitement and potential heart attacks for the speaker. Remember folks, only we know what we are going to say, so we can wing it if we have to.  The lesson for all of us though is to always check the pages are all there before we give the talk.

A couple of things I think we can learn from Kamala Harris are timing, creating anticipation and relaxation.  I notice she has very good timing with her delivery when giving campaign speeches.  Even if you are using a teleprompter, getting the right cadence is not easy.  She makes good employ of pauses when she is speaking.  This is smart because for most of us we get nervous giving a big speech and consequently, we can tend to speed up.

This happened to me.  I was giving my very first public speech. It was in Tokyo and in Japanese to some unlucky Sundai Yobiko prep school students.  I was terrified that my poor Japanese grammar would be totally unintelligible and a mess, so I wrote the whole thing out.  I did this romaji which uses the English alphabet to reproduce the Japanese sounds for words. My Japanese tutor Ms. Higashi helped me to put the speech together, so I was ready for the big day, for my first public speaking debut.  I looked down at my page the whole time, read every word and never engaged my audience in the slightest. It was a total disaster, which put me off public speaking for many, many years. 

Originally, I was scheduled to give a twenty-five-minute talk.  My hands were sweating, I felt red hot, my mouth was as dry as the Sahara desert, my pulse rate was pounding and so elevated I finished the whole thing in eight minutes. The point is that when we get nervous, we can really speed up.  Kamala Harris doesn’t do that because she injects a lot of pauses to control the cadence of her talks.

These pauses allow the audience to diligently digest what has just been said and for each point to be clearly heard.  Even though we may find ourselves speeding up, the judicial placement of some pauses enables us to control the pace, regroup and slow down.  In her case, she often gets applause throughout her talk.  Pauses allow her to avoid speaking over the applause.  Now, this is unlikely to be a problem for any of us in business when giving speeches, but pauses are still a valuable tool for cadence and clarity.

She is also quite skilled at slowing down her remarks to draw out the anticipation of what she is about to say.  The audience correctly guesses where she is going with her remarks and they applaud before she even gets there.  We may not get any applause midway through our business talk, but we can use the same idea of building anticipation by slowing down.  Let’s make sure we get the audience to mentally meet us where we are going with our points.

She is also very relaxed and looks like she is enjoying herself.  I am struggling to think of too many CEOs here in Japan who I have seen in action looking relaxed and like they are enjoying the occasion. I see Japanese Presidents, in particular, utilising the corporate video so that they can reduce the amount of torture they have to endure, by cutting down the time they have to speak. 

If we are feeling the pressure and are nervous, it is very hard to look relaxed and like you are enjoying yourself.  As we get more experienced and add more notches on our speaking belt, the process improves.  We can seem more relaxed and like we are enjoying the opportunity to proclaim our message.  Until that happens, it is a good idea to fake it until we make it.  A nervous presenter makes the audience uncomfortable. We all want to see people presenting who are bursting with skill and confidence.

Looking cool, calm and collected makes it much easier for our audience to accept what we are selling.  Confidence convinces and bolsters the words we are saying.  Try speaking with the face muscles relaxed, the body language congruent with the words being used and pay careful attention to gestures.  Nervous people tend to get stuck in the same gesture and hold it for way too long.  After fifteen seconds, that gesture loses all of its power and just becomes annoying to an audience.

So copy Kamala and be relaxed when you speak.  Introduce well timed pauses and use anticipation. Enjoy the opportunity to deliver your key messages to your business audience and burnish your professional and personal brands.

As an Aussie, I can’t vote in the American elections, so I am a casual observer of what is going on. I was watching a very recent interview with Donald Trump and he briefly made mention about his public speaking approach.  That got my attention, because I teach this stuff. Of late, I have been using Joe Biden as an hanmen kyoshi or teacher by negative example on public speaking, so let me now bring in Trump too. 

You could make the argument that neither of them are relevant to those of us in business, but I think there are lessons to be learnt.  Admittedly, as business speakers, we won’t have an audience of cult like followers, who hang on our every word.  I would absolutely love that, but after giving 560 business speeches so far, that hasn’t materialised as yet.

When you see Trump rallies with the background of patriotic American flags, various message placards and sea of MAGA red hats, you know he has assembled the true believers and I doubt they are much aware of the intricacies of his public speaking techniques.  According to the studies I have seen, he is most popular with non-college-educated males.  That automatically impacts the content and his delivery mechanisms. 

In business, here in Japan, we will be speaking to the very well-educated, most sophisticated international businesspeople, Japanese and foreigners.  This requires we be operating at a very high level of public speaking, because the crowd isn’t going to automatically be with us and, in fact, may think we are just spreading fake news.  What we say and how we say it becomes very important in these circumstances.

In the interview, Trump said he looks for a reaction in the crowd to what he says.  If he reads from a script or a teleprompter or from his notes, he found that he couldn’t get the same reaction as when he speaks extemporaneously.  That is why he is so keen to wander off topic and ramble along, looking for embers to convert into flames amongst the faithful.  In his Convention acceptance speech, he couldn’t keep to the main points and started to wander off, looking for inflammatory content to rev up the crowd.

I agree with Trump that this direct engagement is the best approach to working an audience and owning the room.  Now, ironically, as far as I know, he doesn’t usually employ a slide deck at his political rallies.  Having said that, the slide deck is the only reason he is alive today.  That assassin’s bullet should have penetrated his skull and killed him, but at the most critical moment, he moved his head to the side to look at a graph up on a big screen to his right.  That screen saved his life without a doubt.

In business talks, we can usually use a slide deck or we may choose to not do so.  The slide deck advantage is it creates the navigation path for us and we don’t have to remember the order of what comes next.  If we don’t want to use the slide deck, we can just have a simple list of topics to talk to in front of us to keep us on track.  Trump’s point about looking down and not engaging our audience is correct.  A quick glance at the next topic, however, is certainly not going to be a crowd disperser.

What he has found is that the eye contact with the crowd and his observation of their energy has been central to keeping the crowd with him.  If we are looking at our page notes or at a laptop screen or a tablet, we are not looking at the people in front of us and that is a big error.  As business speakers, we need to be equally hard working to engage our audience.  This means looking at their faces and choosing our words carefully. 

When we see their energy or concentration flagging, we know we have to step it up and change the pace.  We may do that by hitting certain keywords much harder or even much softer.  It sounds counterintuitive, but dropping down to a conspiratorial whisper is also very effective.  It forces your audience to lean in to what you are saying.  It is also a pattern interrupt. 

When there is a change in the proceedings, that pattern break is what jars with the crowd and forces them back to listening to us.  If we hammer the audience with a full power download from start to finish, we exhaust them and they tune out.  The highs and lows are what we need and that variety is what maintains the crowds’ focus on what we are saying.

Whether we like Biden, or now Harris, or Trump, there is always something to learn from the positives and negatives, if we take that moment to reflect on what is going on full faced in front of us.  Most people just view the speech, but never bother to analyse what they can take away from it. I am agnostic about learning from the good and bad and will happily lift, pillage and copy all that I can to improve my own speaking abilities.  I suggest we all be agnostic too and look for where we can find things to make ourselves more effective communicators.

Joe Biden gave a disastrous debate performance. His team floated the idea that he had a cold and that was why his voice sounded so weak and soft.  There was also talk that his prior busy international schedule had also taken a heavy toll on him. Should he have gone on with the debate?  Looking back, I am sure he regrets the decision to go forward with it, rather than rescheduling. What about for us in business?

Dates for events are set well in advance, but a lot can happen in the interim.  If we get Covid, that is an easy one – there is no way we can turn up and infect the multitudes gathered to hear our pearls of wisdom.  What about a cold, food poisoning, toothache or something a little less dramatic than the residues of the pandemic?

If you were a man brought up in macho Australia, you would keep going and “soldier on”, regardless.  But is that actually the best policy?  We have to keep in mind that like Joe, we are putting our personal and professional brands out there on public display. Does anyone seriously forgive Joe for his shambolic presentation simply because he had a cold or a flight back from Italy?  I doubt it.  We judge what we see in front of us, and we are all so sceptical and unforgiving today.  We quickly jump to conclusions and we have no tolerance for underperformance or time for excuses.

It is tough in Japan, because the number of occasions we may have the opportunity to give a talk are relatively limited, even if you speak fluent Japanese.  We may not want to miss the chance to speak. The organisers will expect you to turn up and deliver and we will feel obligated to make sure the show goes on regardless of how bad we are feeling.  Often, the organisers in Japan are not expecting fireworks with the talk and their main concern is that the programme is completed in full and on time. If you give a reputation destroying effort, the hosts don’t feel any remorse about pushing you to perform as scheduled. They did their bit to pull a crowd and after that, it is up to you, to carry it off.

I would suggest that we take the long-term view.  Your reputation and brand are inviolable.  Once you create doubt about your professional competence, it is hard to win it back.  That is what Joe Biden is finding.  He cannot mount enough capability to overcome the train wreck and by the time this podcast gets released he may be out entirely.  Bad news moves at a fast clip and good news travels along on the saddle of a sloth.

We may compromise our relationship with the event organisers, but in most cases, we are speaking for no pay and just for glory.  If Joe had said I am unwell and can’t debate on this particular date, then the whole thing would have been rescheduled, despite the inconvenience to everyone.  After a day of headlines, everyone would have forgotten about it and would be focused on the new date.

Hardly anyone will remember that you cancelled your talk.  However, everyone there watching will remember you were a disaster or were fundamentally unimpressive.  And that is precisely what they will say about you when you name comes up.  “Oh, yeah, I saw him speak once and it was dreadful”.  Is that really the legacy we want to haul around with us as we move through this business life.

Making excuses doesn’t go down well either, once you do turn up.  Telling the crowd at the start that you are unwell gets no sympathy vote whatsoever.  Everyone expects you to be on top of your game and any excuses are seen as whining, weak, and pointless.  Japanese speakers do this a lot.  They start off their talk by informing us they are a terrible speaker or have a cold or didn’t have enough time to properly prepare the talk.  This is all seen as tatemae – superficial truth – by the audience and as a weak flex to show humility.  No one pays the slightest attention to the content of what is being said and expect the speaker to perform, anyway.

Our brand must be protected at all times.  If we feel we are not going to be able to defend it, we are better to be like the ballad of Davy Crocket and come back and “fight another day”.  Better to reschedule if you are not doing well and can’t pull it off.  There is no upside for you to go on stage and a huge downside if you do perform and fluff it.