The Presentations Japan Series

I discovered the journalist Simon Kuper, when I started subscribing to the Financial Times newspaper (FT). I have a number of go to columnists in the FT and he is one of them. I like his intelligence, wit and writing style. He recently mentioned his experiences attending conferences after a long break. He outlined some advice for presenters thinking about addressing conference audiences, which I totally agree with. Let's go through them.

1. Bored Audiences. Simon made the observation that the audience is bored even before you start speaking. This can easily happen. If the preceding speakers have been awful, they will have killed off your audience for you. Simon references redundant openings as a sure signal for the listeners to grab their phones and escape to the warm bosom of the internet. How we physically walk on stage, how we start, are going to indicate to the audience, if we are worth following or not. We need a power start, with no hesitancy or tinkering around with the laptop. Walk on stage with supreme confidence and launch straight into a gripper opening guaranteed to monopolise audience attention in those vital first two seconds.

1. One Key Idea. He noted that people won't remember everything you spoke about. We have to be careful not to cannibalise our key message, with too many competing messages. Simon mentioned one idea, backed up with evidence and the use of anecdotes. He is actually talking about wrapping the points up in stories, because we will recall these more easily that just data.

1. Speak Less. Simon suggests that if we have a 15 minute spot, then stop at 12 minutes. His idea is that we don't want to be blasting through our slides at the end in a panic to get through all the content. We have all seen this, haven't we. The speaker skips what looks like the most important slides in the deck, because they are running out of time and we feel cheated. Less is more. This stop early discipline will force us to be more concise and clear.

1. Don't Read Your Speech. His suggestion is to "memorise it by saying it out loud once a day for five days beforehand". I disagree with Simon on this point. There is no shame or stigma to using your slide deck as the navigation for your talk. The same goes for notes. I witnessed a Harvard Professor give a three hour lecture during an Executive Education Course I attended in the Business School, with no notes anywhere in sight. It appeared he did the whole thing from memory. At the end, as we were filing out of the lecture theatre, I spied his secret. Behind us on the back wall, there was a large sheet of paper with 10 words written on it. These were the chapters of the talk, so that he could keep the order correct.

1. Be Visually More Appealing. Simon suggests that as we are boring to look at, we should move around on stage and look at the audience. I agree to a point. Certainly free ourselves from the confines of being trapped behind the podium. Walk around on stage, but do it with purpose, rather than your nerves driving you to wander up and down, becoming a distraction from your message. Move to the apron of the stage to have more eye contact impact with the audience closest to you. Move to the rear of the stage to make a macro point and use big gestures to try and engage the entire audience at one time.

1. Use Slides Or Videos. Again, I partially agree. Simon makes the point to not use slabs of text and that "your mouth is for words and slides are for pictures". This is a good idea and certainly pictures are brilliant for engaging the audience. What we put on the slides can be tricky though. I watched the Japanese chief economist from one of the major global banks give a presentation on currency movements, which is a very topical subject here in Japan at the moment. He was a very smart guy and his talk was very good. Astonishingly, his slides were very amateur.

He made a very common mistake we often see here in Japan, of just putting up the content, without thinking about whether the audience can absorb it easily. The slides were too dense and there were too many graphs on the one page. He needed to simplify his visuals, such that we can get the message in two seconds. If it takes longer than that, it is too complex. Also, we should be careful of the visuals competing with us. They must be our slave and we must dominate the proceedings.

1. Avoid Cliché Jokes. Simon is right to say we should skip boring statements like, "I have the difficult spot after lunch" or introducing a panelist with "and finally last but definitely not least". "Without further ado" is a pet hate of mine as well. Probably no one in the audience has any clear definition of what constitutes an "ado" and we should do a better job of getting proceedings underway.

1. Use Simple Language. Simon made this point in reference to non-native speakers of English, but I think it is something we should all adopt.

1. Forget Motherhood Statements. He pointed out the weakness of stock phrases such as "all stakeholders need to work together". I laughed when he wrote, "don't say things that are obviously false such as 'We value all our employees'".

1. Give Marcus Aurelius A Rest. Regurgitating well known quotes falls flat, because we all know them and there is nothing new on offer. I suggest you find a quote which is pithy and not so well known instead. We will learn something new and valuable and we will feel better as a result.

We instinctively know these points don't we, but sometimes we get carried away with assembling the slide deck and we forget the medium we are operating in. The chief economist I referenced earlier was oblivious about his presentation's impact, so there are still some major gaps in understanding on display here in Japan. Let's take Simon's points and work on them so that when it is our turn to speak, we are the outlier, the one person the audience will say made the whole conference worth attending.

When we are asked to give a business presentation, we may imagine we are the hero, arriving on our white charger, to rescue the audience from their woes. We may come armed to the teeth with research, data, statistics, evidence, testimonials and proof. We have it partially correct. We are definitely there to add value, to make their attendance worth it and to leave some positive residue from the experience. However, we are not the hero, jauntily dispensing wisdom and gold nuggets. We must make those attending the hero and we need to find out what is their kryptonite, the things which are making business hard for them. We are the catalyst, the seer, the guide, the trusted advisor showing a different and superior path to those already considered.

Once we know their issues, we can fix on our purpose, determine our central message to give them help in their work. We probably have a lot of good ideas for them, but we have limited time for our talk, so we need to refine the message down to something we can get through in about 40 minutes.

We have some central aims in the talk. Firstly, we have to find ways to connect with them. Our grand resume will hopefully go some way to establishing our credibility, but in this era of fake news, that may not be enough anymore. Our opening has to really crack the code and grab their attention. A boring start will ensure everyone is grabbing their phones and surreptitiously scrolling around the internet, looking for something much more interesting that us. We need to flag that we have some answers, for some of the central problems which have been plaguing them for some time.

Secondly, we want to motivate them to take action to do something. This is where we can often get carried away. Before you know it, our talk has become the hundred things you need to do to achieve wealth, happiness and the secret of life. We need to fix on one major thing which will lift all boats and make a fundamental improvement in their businesses. We will be facing a mixed audience scattered across industry, specialization, gender age and position. One key action item and one key benefit is the target, because that forces us to go for the richest vein, to tap into the motherload.

Thirdly, to get people behind the idea we need to offer proof of what we are saying. This is where storytelling is so critical. If we bundle up a whole bunch of numbers, assorted data and various details, the chances of anyone writing it down are very slim and that anyone will refer to those same notes ever again is even slimmer. For everyone else, they won't recall the content, because we forget about 50% of what we hear within an hour, 70% within a day and 90% within a week.

We tend to remember the stories we heard in presentations we have attended if they were told well. There should be a central figure, the main character and we tell the story of what happened to them. If we are trying to make a key point, then the main character can become a proxy, an avatar for those in the audience. The hero of the story is just like them and they can identify with the hero's situation.

Next we need to add in some tension. We want to create some conflict to underline the struggle our hero is going through and which the audience is going through too. For this purpose, we need the baddie and the "winter is coming" scenario of impending doom, unless we do something right now. Covid-19, for example, would fit the bill for the common evil negatively impacting our businesses.

We tell the story of some action taken by our hero, who looks very similar to our audience and what was the result of the action they took, that kept them from going off the precipice to their destruction.

When we tell this story it needs to be graphic in order for it to resonate. We need to transport the audience to the scene, the season and introduce the different characters involved while outlining the plot of what happened. For example, if there is a CFO in this story, we can't just say Suzuki was the CFO. We need to flesh it out more and make it more relatable. We can say, "The CFO Suzuki looked a very worried woman, her face was lined with worry and you could sense the high levels of stress the low revenue numbers were generating".

Each main character needs a small bio involving some emotion, so that we can connect and empathise with them. We might be having very worrying revenue numbers too, so we know what Suzuki is going through or we may have had this experience in the past, so we can relate. We need the emotion to be there, to provide the glue to get us interested in what happened to this other company.

Finally, we introduce the fix, our recommendation in the context of what it did for the hero in the story. We set the scene for what success looks like and this is appealing to the audience, because this is what they are seeking too. They have identified with the hero's dilemma and the audience will also identify with the solution.

The more we can have the audience identify with the hero in the story, the more likely they are to receive the lessons we are recommending through the medium of the example we are outlining. Our purpose was to impart some recommendation and this is one powerful way to get an audience to adopt what we are saying.

Until a number of weeks ago, I had only vaguely heard of Volodymyr Zelenskyy. I read he was an actor who played the role of the Ukranian President in a television drama production and then turned that into reality, by winning the election and becoming the leader. I was thinking of a reality TV star like Donald Trump or a B-grade movie actor like Ronald Reagan both becoming the leaders of America and put him in the same basket. In terms of presentation skills, Reagan gave some very good speeches in his time as President and although we credit him, we should also be crediting his speech writers. Trump generally tended to avoid set pieces as far as speeches went and preferred speaking to a few key points in his talks, offering a much more spontaneous style. As masters of media, they were both effective in using the bully pulpit to get their messages across.

Zelenskyy's comment back to the Americans that "I don't need a ride, I need ammunition" when offered an escape from the Russian invasion, was a spectacularly successful one liner. I doubt that a room full of his media advisors had spent hours anticipating and preparing that response. It sounded impressive because it came across as spontaneous and genuine. In one sentence he said, "we Ukrainians may have been written off by all the military and political experts but I am their leader and we are not giving up". Many of us had the image of previous Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani fleeing the country, as the Taliban pushed into Kabul. Zelenskyy's stock as a leader went straight up with that comment and he was perceived as a brave person and a real leader. Coming up with a breakthrough one-liner is certainly not easy but definitely worth the effort to try and craft a zinger. Try it and see what you can come up with. We only need one in a speech to have real impact.

Zelenskyy has obvious comfort in front of a camera from his work as an actor and he knows how to work the medium. I broadcast three TV shows a week on YouTube every week, plus produce vast quantities of video content relating to leadership, communication, sales and presentations. So after thousands of hours in front of a camera, I have become more comfortable with it, but it wasn't natural or easy for me. Most business leaders only ever have a fleeting and random relationship with the medium. As a result, few business leaders can really work the medium and get the maximum gains from it, so there is still some way to go. If I can do it, trust me, you can do it too and probably you will do a better job than what I am doing.

All modern politicians today need to gain this skill and they do learn it, so there is no differentiation here particularly. Zelenskyy has done a good job though using his speaking opportunities with the various politician audiences of countries sympathetic to Ukraine. He has been beamed into joint sittings of the upper and lower houses of these countries political elites and has proven very adept at adjusting his angle of approach.

Japan's example was a reminder for Americans of the Pearl Harbour attack that reeked such disaster, death and havoc in Hawaii and brought the USA into the war. The Japanese Tohoku earthquake, tsunami, triple nuclear reactor meltdown in Fukushima was a reminder for Japan of the damage that event caused and linked it to the current destruction that Russian missiles and long range weapons were inflicting on the villages and cities in Ukraine. For the French it was calls forLiberte, Egalite, Fraternite to be applied to the Ukraine in their hour of need. The speech to both houses of the British parliament rekindled memories of Prime Minister Winston Churchill's calls for national sacrifice to fight to the bitter end against Hitler, no matter what. When speaking to both houses of the Australian parliament, he mentioned the Malaysian Airline flight MH-17 which was shot down over the Russian separatist controlled Donbas region, in which 38 Australians died. None of Zelenskyy's references were random and we should be doing the same. We need to spend time to select examples, stories and use these rhetorical flourishes to get our messages to resonate with our audiences.

The point here is that he tailored his messages very carefully to gain maximum appeal with his audiences. Yes, there is an element of emotional manipulation involved here and I am sure everyone in these audiences were aware of that. It nevertheless worked, because he was able to link his country's current dilemma with the emotional wellsprings of his audience and to get everyone to feel a sense of shared commitment to Ukraine's successful outcome in the war against Russia. This ability to connect at an emotional level with our audience is an absolutely critical skill which presenters need to work on continuously.

We always stress the importance of knowing our audience before we give a presentation. In theory this is what is supposed to happen, but how often have you attended a talk and really felt this was tailored to your interests and needs. Most business talks feel like the speaker is talking at us, rather than speaking with us and there is a world of difference between the two. We must plan how we are going to forge an emotional connection with our audience, rather than concentrating on downloading a bunch of stuff, which will all too soon be forgotten.

"Who is going to be attending and how can I meet the conversation going on in their minds about the importance of this topic I am going to be addressing", is what I have in my mind when I am preparing my talks. The audience will have some thoughts about the topic. They will have some points they wish to hear more about and may have some need of ideas, insights, answers or recommended actions. What would these encompass? This is the type of analysis we need to be undertaking ourselves, when we are getting ready to give a talk. Preparation is the key, but that requires that we make the time available to do it properly. Remember, every time we get up and present we are putting our personal and professional brands on display.

Zelensky's dress code for these talks is usually a military T-shirt, rather than a business suit. He is projecting he is a man of action and is ready for combat. He knows his audience will be dressed in suits and he could wear a suit too, but the stark contrast in dress lends more urgency to his appeals for support. In the same way, we need to dress for battle too. Depending on who you are talking to, it may mean a business suit of armour or it may mean something more business-casual. We are anticipating how our appearance will make it easier for us to connect with our audience. When I dress in the mornings, I consult my diary first to see who I am meeting that day, what I am doing and what impression I want to make. On that basis, I make my selections with the plan in my mind to have maximum impact on my activities for that day. Style, colours and combinations can quickly alter the image we want to project, but first we have to make decision about what we want to project. How do you decide what to wear each day? Is it based on what is clean or pressed? Grab your diary and do some thinking about what sort of a day you want ahead of you.

It is good that we go to this degree of trouble about how to project our appearance, yet do we also spend the time thinking about how to design the content of our talks, so they will resonate with the audience? We should spend the time to research who will attend, what they are interested in and then zero in on those points for maximum impact. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's example offers us a chance to reflect on what we are doing to further develop our own communication skills.

Slava Ukraine!

It is a tricky balance to be clear, concise, articulate and also plausible. I was thinking about a podcast interview I heard by a titan of industry. He had obviously been trained in how to handle the media, so as soon as he spied the microphone, he went into media interviews 101 mode. Media interviews by their very nature are a fake environment. Those being interviewed are taught to be glib, keep it short, think in sound bite terms, don't reveal too much or you will get yourself into trouble. Many journalists are looking for a scoop, a chink in the corporate armour, a gotcha moment. You may come away from the interview with the gold still in your teeth and relatively unscathed, but how did you come across to the audience?

We don't sound authentic. Well this is entirely natural. You are under siege, so forget about authenticity and focus instead on survival. We don't sound conversational because we are avoiding conversation and trying to chop our thoughts up into media bites bite sized pieces. We are always aware that unscrupulous editors can rearrange our comments with a later recorded overlay, that makes us look bad. There is a lot going on in the mind when being interviewed.

Here is a little word to the wise. If you are ever being interviewed by the media, whether it is audio or video, always assume the camera or audio recorder is still rolling when the journo says "thank you - that is the end of the interview". They have learnt from experience that this is when we relax and they get us to make an off-hand, untoward comment, which we will make in haste and later regret at leisure. This offering gives the interviewer a big score and big kudos from their boss and journo colleagues back at headquarters.

The interview I referred to earlier started out wound up like a tight spring. The corporate titan's propaganda blitz on the worthiness of the company came across as a total fizzer. Pumping out the party line is a dud in these interviews. Trying to make the firm look good in an obvious, self-congratulatory manner is self-defeating. It begins to sound like the type of drivel a lot of people posing as PR types try to foist on us, to get us to like the company.

Fortunately, finally, the interviewee realised this wasn't a gotcha, media style interview and just a humble podcast seeking insights. Once he relaxed, the entire line of the conversation moved from fake to real. You could literally spot the transition point. The quality of the answers, the elongation of responses and the credibility of the speaker all lifted.

It was almost as if there were two people being interviewed – the fake and the real. We have to be clever with interviews and work out who is the audience, what is the interviewer's "form" from past interviews and understand how we can add value to the conversation in a relaxed and natural manner. We want to connect with and engage the listeners. If we try to be too smart, too smarmy, we will trigger warning signals in the minds of our listeners. We have all been trained to be wary of the smooth talking conman and anytime we hear something that smacks of that effort, we become uneasy about the person and what we are hearing.

Boris Johnson, the UK Prime Minister, is infamous for dropping in very erudite, learned words into his speeches. He went to Eton College and Oxford university, so he is well educated and he doesn't brook from flouting that fact. He also drops a "big word" and then as a throw away remark says "look it up" to acknowledge that he knows he is using vocabulary which is beyond the understanding of his audience and he does it in a humorous way to reduce the rejection facet. I always feel undereducated about my English ability, so I have bought a number of his books, because they are positively brimming with vocabulary which is rare or entirely new to me, in a desperate effort to expand my vocabulary range.

The point is Boris somehow manages to get away with it, but for the rest of us, let's do our best to be clear, without being glib. Let's be concise without masking our valuable thoughts. Let's strive to be articulate and do so in order to add value, rather than to come across as a smarty pants. If we deem the interview to be "safe", then let's relax during the interaction and try to connect with the audience in a way they will appreciate. Explaining complex ideas or information in a simple manner requires a certain level of genius and this is what we should be striving to achieve. Let's drop the corporate doublespeak and be authentic in our revelations about the contributions our company makes to the world.

I was sitting in the lecture theater, as usual in the front row, so that I could catch everything that was being said. University was a big deal for someone who climbed out of the trench and put the shovel down on a Friday and hit the campus the next Monday. Calling me earnest about my studies doesn't even get close. On this occasion we had a guest lecturer, who was giving a talk on the battle of Sekigahara, a turning point in Japanese history which would usher in hundreds of years of rule by the one family, the Tokugawas.

The Professor was reeling off the ten reasons why Tokugawa Ieyasu won the battle and I was diligently scribbling down all of these logical, worthy points. At the end of the ten points, he then said these were not the reasons and then spent the remainder of the lecture explaining his view on the real reasons for Ieyasu's success. This was very clever.

By providing sound, credible reasons first, he had established his command of the literature and the related scholarship. It all sounded very convincing to me and what is more I had invested myself in recording it all. The bait and switch technique now elevated him above the rough and tumble of academic insurgencies over the finer points of history, to stand above the fray and position himself as the one who really knew his stuff. His reputation was enhanced by a conjurer's trick of making the penny disappear and then draw it out from behind your ear.

Academic illusionist or not, it worked like a charm. Think about the standard business presentations you have been exposed to. They are usually pedestrian affairs, involving the doling out of data and information, specialised only in delivering the talk in a deadly boring manner.

Today we presenters face the most difficult presentation environment in history. It has never been this bad. Our audience are glued to their phones and live in the internet for disturbingly long periods of the day. They have microscopically short concentration spans, are quickly distracted and constantly moving, ever doom scrolling and unable to settle. Then we turn up for our little party piece representing our industry and firm. Getting and keeping people's attention has become the search for the holy grail for presenters.

Are we allowed to use magic tricks to grab and hold their attention? Absolutely we are! This is a zero sum game we are involved with here and we either get our point across or we don't even get a desultory reception. Technology and social media have made us experts at pattern recognition. This has always been a strength of our species, which has kept us going, as we anticipate trouble before it arrives. This means that as speakers the pattern interrupt aspect of what we are doing becomes very important.

The lecturer mentioned earlier took us down a predictable path, with a fulsome list of plausible explanations. He then executed a pivot and pulled off a pattern interrupt telling us all of that was codswallop. We were invested in what he had told us and I for one, had written it all down, so the shock was palpable when he said to forget about all that stuff. "Hello, hello", I thought, "what is going on here". He had removed the central pillar of our commitment to the content and now promised to replace it with a much sexier version.

When we are giving our talks, this can sometimes be added to our repertoire of techniques for commanding the attention of the audience. We can start with a predictable, safe version for the crowd, leading them up the garden path with content which is persuasive, plausible, cogent and rational. Throwing all of that overboard creates a vacuum. Our brain doesn't like that and wants the correct version to be implanted, so we are all ears to hear the truth, the real story.

We have also self-elevated ourselves above the fray and self-selected ourselves as the superior being, the enlightened purveyor of the most accurate knowledge and best quality information on the subject. This is a major credibility boost and the audience is wide open to it, because of the way we have set it up. The flip side is you have to have the goods. If you say the standard interpretation is rubbish, then your next contribution had better be totally worthy of the rock star you are purporting to be.

Obviously, we wouldn't put ourselves up on the high wire without a safety harness, if we were not confident we could carry this off. This is where we need to have real knowledge and better research on the subject than our audience. We also have to deliver the talk with a passion for sharing key information with our audience. They will absorb the trick if they feel the intention was pure. Just being a trickster won't work. We have to deliver unexpected value and exceed audience expectations.

I was recently asked to be interviewed by a University senior for a project he was doing on communication in business. I don't know if I was a good choice. After I left High School, I was working for an insurance company during the day and joined then dropped out of a night course on Communication at the Queensland University of Technology. The "communication" study idea sounded great, but what I found was the course was very theoretical and not what I was expecting. Subsequently, I have become a disciple of content marketing, which basically means you see your company as a publishing firm, in addition to your main thrust of your business. We push out copious quantities of information on speciality topics for free, to signal to potential buyers, that we are experts in these areas. In that sense, I agreed to the interview, because I have released 4 books, 1480 podcasts and have written thousands of blogs, so I thought maybe I qualify.

In the course of our interview, he mentioned that he was going to give the commencement speech at the graduation ceremony later this year. We have all seen these types of affairs. The student selected to give the talk, begins by thanking the University, the Dean of the Faculty, the worthy Professors and teaching staff and congratulates all of the fellow graduates. Boring and predictable.

As we know, the opening of our talk has to be a gripper. It has to keep the audience away from their mobile phones and instead transfixed on us. Anything which smacks of clique, predictability, platitudes or bromides will dissipate the attention on us. "I would like to thank the university…" is a death knell of an opening, so let's avoid that one. In business it is the same thing. "I would like to thank the Chamber of Commerce…", is another dud opening.

This senior had been at that institution for four years, so he will be brimming with experiences, memories, events accumulated during that time. We have been in our companies for many years, working away in our industries, so we have accumulated tons of stories. Our stories are a good place to start. We need to look at who is in our audience and divine an occurrence which will be relatable for the listeners, something topical, pertinent and uplifting. It should be uplifting. We don't want some downer memory being trotted out for such a festive occasion.

There should be a series of stories in this talk. The first one has to be short though. We are going to get to all the usual words of appreciation to everyone, but before that we can grab attention with a quick story. If we had some defining moment at the university, something which was profound and which shows the institution, the professors or the students in a shining light, that would be a good choice. If it is a business talk then we can look for something about this association or the hosts organisation we can say nice things about.

After we deliver this little episode, we get to the ordained appreciation piece and then we should look for other stories we can tell in the time remaining, to make a point about the experience we have collectively had. In a five minute commencement speech, there will be time for maybe one more story, but in a forty minute business talk, there is plenty of scope. Anytime we have data we wish to impart, then carefully bundling that up inside a story is bound to get it remembered, rather than just trying to deliver the information by itself.

Stories work better when they have some key elements included in the retelling. Placing people the audience knows in the story is very powerful. It could be a contemporary figure or a historical figure, it doesn't matter, because we can easily see them in our mind's eye and that is what we want. We need to include the season, the location and the timing. Again, we are laying breadcrumbs for our audience, to get them to the same visual image and join us inside our story. For example, "Two years ago prior to Covid, on a muggy Tokyo summer day, I made my way to the gorgeous wood panelled Boardroom of our client in Otemachi, to meet Mr. Tanaka the new President".

We know how muggy Tokyo is in the summer, we remember life before Covid, we know there are a lot of expensive high rise office buildings in Otemachi, we can see the luxurious Boardroom scene and may we even know this President Tanaka through the media or through industry contacts. We are in that room.

When we engage our audience to that extent then we are able to get our key messages across more easily. Let's avoid being predictable and instead seek out openings and stories which will keep our audience rivetted to us and what we are saying.

Kata, the way of doing things and Kanpekishugi or perfectionism are wonderful traits in Japan. Everything works well and as expected. Things have an order here and there are certain ways of doing things which will brook no adventurism. Things must also be done properly, no half measures. As a transplanted wild Aussie, I fought against both for many decades. "Why does it have to done this way?", I would ask my wife, who would just answer, "because that is how it is done". "Near enough is good enough" I would assure her, but she wasn't having any of that either.

This mindset flows into language usage too. If speaking in a foreign language like English then it must be perfect or the speaker feels shame. Sometimes the amount of exposure to the language or the amount of study hasn't been sufficient to be perfect, but that is never accepted as an excuse. The burning, hot flush of shame exists regardless, if a mistake is made.

The pressure ratchets up when Japanese business people have to give a presentation in English and they embrace all sorts of craziness in that pursuit. A recent case came to my attention regarding a very senior Japanese executive in a global firm, who has to give talks internally as well as externally. His pursuit of perfection drove him to read religiously from the prepared notes, word for word, so that it would be grammatically perfect. He also had the forethought to arrange some Sakura or "plants" in the audience, to ask him predesignated questions for which he had carefully curated answers. Everything was perfect, except it wasn't.

The senior leaders are grooming him for a huge job and when they see this type of behaviour they worry. This degree of over engineering presentations isn't authentic from their point of view. They want him to be natural, imperfect, understandable and capable and confident enough to handle questions from an audience, without having to nobble the proceedings. Here is where perspectives diverge. He seeks perfection in a foreign language and his bosses are okay with imperfection in English.

When you think about it, how many people do you know who are perfect speakers of their own language? Not every native speaker is perfect. We make a mess of the tenses sometimes, getting the verb wrong, using "is" instead of "was" for past tense. I have heard very well educated native speakers say "somethink" instead of "something" or "everythink" instead of "everything".

I have a Ph. D., an MA, and a BA with Honours. Am I 100% confident in my own command of my language of English? Certainly not. I am always paranoid about mispronouncing words I don't know or hear very infrequently. English grammar has defeated me since Year Three of elementary school. I am certain I make mistakes in these podcasts, I just don't know where.

If we cannot claim purity in the linguistic applications of our own language, then we certainly know we are not able to operate at perfection levels in a foreign language. Yet this is exactly the type of crazy pressure which Japanese business executives place on themselves. They need to lighten up a bit.

The high powered Japanese Executive in question has not had my coaching at this point, as discussions continue. One of the first things I will be teaching him is to get rid of any perfectionism baggage holding him back. You don't have to be a perfect speaker of English when giving presentations because nobody cares. If they are fellow Japanese, they cannot say anything, because they are not perfect either, so no casting of the first stones of criticism by them. If they are foreigners, then they have likely grown up listening to non-native speakers mangle the grammar and mash the pronunciation of English. They accept it for what it is and if they cannot understand what is being said, they just ask for it to be repeated.

Studying Japanese here for the first time back in 1979 I made a revolutionary discovery. If you wait to manufacture the perfect sentence to lob into a conversation, you will never get to speak. The conversation will have moved on to another topic before you get a chance to use it. Therefore, perfect or otherwise, SPEAK. Get it out and if they don't register what you mean then say the same thing in a different way, until they do get it.

If we are doing a presentation, then there can be perfect text on screen as we speak imperfectly to the content, rounding out the information further. We can also take comfort that audiences don't remember the detail of the talks, but they do remember the speakers. They will overlook imperfections in speech from a dynamic, passionate, energised speaker, because they will remember the speaker as impressive. A perfect rendition in English by a native speaker, delivered with no passion in a monotone, will dispatch that person to oblivion in the memory of the audience. Perfection isn't needed but passion for the subject and for the audience is. Focus on those two things and the world will be right, non-native speaker or otherwise.

Being persuasive is a key element to business success. You can argue the rights and wrongs of that statement, but it is the reality. We cannot avoid the fact that being able to present to others and get their agreement is a critical skill which we all need. Now we meet vigorous, go, go, go people and so when they give a presentation, their passion, motivation and power come to the fore. For them, they are not even thinking about being a high impact speaker, this is who they are. For others though, they are demure, calm individuals who speak quietly, even softly. Both types are being their true self and being authentic, so isn't that enough? Actually no.

Being an authentic individual and being a professional and successful speaker are related but not derivative. Being authentically boring isn't much help. Being authentically monotone in your delivery doesn't work. Yelling at people for the entire forty minutes of the talk, so that all the audience hair is being blown back like we see portrayed in cartoons is not humorous in real life. Authentic yes, but grossly ineffective.

Regardless of the style of the presentation, the content and the structure of the talk have to be well constructed. This is a given. However the impact of the delivery is not a given. The best, highest quality information with the best navigation for the talk can be a disaster if we are yelling at the audience the whole time or speaking so softly that hardly anyone cares what we are talking about.

You might think it is easier to calm down the fast talking, high energy speaker, so that they can get some variety into their delivery. You think this would be the easier of the two to fix. Not in my experience. They are both tricky and for different reasons. People who speak fast get on a roll and away they go. They disconnect from the audience and have created a new audience of one – themselves. They are talking to themselves, the way they like and are not focused on the listeners at all. Because this is their normal speed range, slowly down really kills them. They find it so uncomfortable and fake, they hate it.

The softer presenter, when encouraged to put more energy into the delivery and ramp things up they stop going any further, because they feel they are screaming at people. I tell them to double their output and the most they manager is a five percent lift. Well they aren't screaming at anyone and there isn't much appreciable difference from what they normally do, so there is a lot of scope to become more energised, but it feels uncomfortable and they stop.

These are the two extremes of speakers – the loud and the quiet. Should they do us all a favour and not become presenters? Every single one of us can improve what we are doing, me included and certainly it is not game over for these representative extremes. This is where coaching comes into help them develop range in their energy and voices.

A good metaphor for public presentations is classical music. We are not sitting there subjected to crescendo after crescendo. Nor are we being put to sleep with a constant lull in proceedings. There are passages in the music which are intense and some which are almost inaudible. There is distinct power in both and we have to learn to master both.

Not every word in a sentence of a presentation is equal. Some words require more emphasis than others. That doesn't mean those words have to always be yelled out. It can be equally powerful to deliver them like an audible whisper, a conspiratorial sharing of some key information. The point is to decide which words or phrases need emphasis and then decide how we are going to deliver them.

For those who speak quietly, the conspiratorial whisper will be easy to pull off. The high energy speaker will be dying to speak so quietly. The going hard part presents the opposite problem and the quiet speakers believe they sound crazy at that amplification. We video our presentations and when we do the review, the quieter speakers are always amazed that they don't sound or look like they have lost their minds. The most common reaction is that "this person on screen looks very positive and committed to their message". That is a good thing for a speaker to be doing isn't it. The boisterous speakers comment that "this person looks very professional and considered". Again, a good result by any measure.

The key is to get the coaching and to do lots of rehearsal. Usually business speakers give their talk once – when they are in front of their audience and usually they get no coaching beforehand. This is pretty adventurous stuff, given these are our personal and professional brands that we are putting out there on display. If you are too quiet or too loud, then you need to work on your range and find the strength in what you are good at and add to your presentations, elements you are not good at. The coach will make that happen for you because it is very, very difficult to do it by yourself. What you think is soft is still yelling and what you think is yelling sounds soft. Our range sensitivity is not well calibrated enough to make the adjustments by ourselves. Get coaching and do rehearsals would be my advice.

Presentations have a cadence. Notices are sent out to the mailing list or promoted through some form of media. Interested people sign up and attend the event. There is a hosting organisation representative delegated to get proceedings underway. I went into detail on that component last week, so if you have missed it, please go back and listen to that episode #280 on "How To Introduce A Speaker". When the presentation is over the host organisation has to wrap things up. Usually, in well organised events the role of the MC and the person thanking the speaker are separated. The MC will call on the person designated to give a vote of thanks to the speaker and then conclude the event once that part is completed. If that is you, it is important you do a good job, because all of this is coming at the end of the event and this is contributing to people's final impressions. Those final impressions will also include how they think about you and this will be one of the last things they remember. Last impressions can be deadly, if we don't plan for them to succeed.

If we have been given that task to thank the speaker, we need to pay careful attention to what the speaker says, so that we can refer to it at the end. If we can get hold of the slides or the speech outline before the presentation, this will make our job that much easier.

We have to remember that we are in the public eye, when we carry out this role. This is like a mini-presentation of our own. Again, these are our personal and professional brands on show, so people are judging how well we can do it.

However, it shouldn't become a complete summary of the speech, so that we come across as wanting to compete with the speaker. Have you ever seen that? The person thanking the speaker decides to take this opportunity to promote themselves and they try to hog the limelight. People are mentally heading for the door and their next appointment and here is some windbag raving on, wasting everyone's time. We need to keep it short, sharp and terrific. I didn't pay much attention to the final thanks to the speaker because most of them were very pedestrian or they were a self-centered rendition of this person's own views on the subject.

That changed when I heard Thierry Porte, then President of Morgan Stanley Japan, give the thank you speech at an event I attended. The actual presentation was a disaster. The banker giving it had put up his actual text document on screen and was scrolling through it. The font was abysmally tiny and basically he was reading to us what was on screen. It was a dagger in the heart of his firm's brand at that point, because this guy was obviously clueless about giving presentations. Then Thierry, who later became my boss at Shinsei Bank, gave his comments thanking the speaker for his talk. Actually his short comments were a lot more impressive than the actual presentation.

I didn't know Thierry at that point, so it was my first exposure to him and today I cannot remember the detail of the points he made years earlier, but what I do remember was that I thought they very intelligent and concise. It was impressive and I recall thinking, "this guy is really smart" and I made a point of exchanging business cards with him. It also showed me the power of being able to thank the speaker in an intelligent way and make an impression with the audience, promoting your personal and professional brands at the same time. The point is to think like that – "this activity is going to add to or subtract from my personal and professional brands".

So how should we carry out this important role? We have a formula for this we can rely on called the TIS model.

1. T-Thanks. We might thank the speaker using their personal name if appropriate.

This degree of familiarity will vary depending on our personal relationship with the speaker and the culture we are in. Japan is a very formal country, so it is more likely we will be using their title or highly polite forms of address like sama instead of san. So I would say "thank you Suzuki sama" rather than "thank you Suzuki san". There is a world of difference in Japan between those two polite forms. Recently, I attended an online webinar and the person giving the presentation was a bengoshi or lawyer and the person giving the final remarks addressed him as "Sensei", which is a very polite reference taking into account his prestigious line of work.

1. I-Interest. We pick up one area of the talk which we think would have been of most interest to the audience. This is an important decision because there are probably a lot of fascinating things the speaker was able to cover in the 40 minutes of their talk. We have to be listening carefully to the content and at the same time making a judgement about which particular aspects we think will have resonated most with the audience. We don't have that much time, because as soon as the applause dies down, we are up on our feet making our contribution to the event.

1. F-Formal Thanks. If the MC is doing their job, then they will take over from us and wrap things up. In this case, we would just thank the speaker and then hand over the baton to the MC. If it is down to us however, to bring things to a close, then we make a formal statement of thanks for the speaker, using their title and full name. We ask the audience to join us in applause, thanking the speaker for their presentation. For example, "May I ask everyone to join me, to again express our warm appreciation for Dr. Greg Story, giving us this wonderful presentation today", at which point we start applauding to signal to everyone that they should now start applauding too.

There are always different levels of understanding of simple roles in a presentation event and the thing I notice is how few people actually understand how to do them properly. From now on, pay careful attention to how the MC opens and closes proceedings and to how the person designated to give the thanks, carries out their role. You quickly realise it is very easy to get into the top 1% of professionalism in these areas, because most people are not much good. What a great opportunity to build our personal and professional brands!

Today we are going to look at how to introduce a speaker, something which we may not do so often, but still an important facility which we should do well. I am sure we have all seen the MC introduce the speaker. I am also sure we have seen very few do a good job of it. One of the problems is that the MC hasn't connected this role with their personal and professional brands. They are mumbling and bumbling along. Often they don't see this role as particularly vital and so do a very offhand version of the introduction.

They make a mess of reading the Bio they have been provided by the speaker or even worse they dispense with the document altogether and they freestyle, giving their own half baked version of the Bio. This is particularly annoying from the speaker point of view, because we will have written that introduction to maximise our credibility with the audience and also to stimulate their interest in the content to come. Having been on the receiving end of these MC introductions, I notice they will often leave important parts out, get the order wrong or make mistakes with the dates.

Basically, what they deliver is an insult to the speaker because they are not taking the proceedings seriously enough. Remember, it doesn't matter how long we have in the public limelight, we are being judged by the audience. Even if we are an audience member and we ask a question after the speaker's presentation, we are being judged by everyone present. If our question sounds stupid or our delivery is awful, everyone present is making a mental judgement about us.

The MC role is important because this is how we quiet the audience and grab their attention for the speaker's message. We are preparing the audience to accept the speaker into our midst. There is a delicate balance needed here though. You may have also seen the MC start to take over the presentation. They begin the introduction and then start telling us what the speaker is going to cover in too much detail. The MC should be brief and get us to the main speaker smoothly and should intrigue us with their introduction, so that we want to hear more.

We can use the TIQS model when it is our turn to introduce the speaker at the event.

1. T-Topic. We start by referring to the topic or title of the talk. This reminds everyone what the talk is about. Yes, the notice went out and everyone signed up but that could have been weeks ago. It is best practice to again focus on the formal topic of the talk, to make sure everyone is mentally geared up for the presentation.

1. I-Importance. We highlight the importance of the topic. We are reinforcing why it is in the interests of the audience to attend today and justifying this use of their time. The MC role includes that of salesperson for the talk. As the representative of the hosting organisation, the MC is selling the organisation's value in being able to procure such high quality speakers for the audience members and thereby indirectly encouraging them to attend future talks.

1. Q-Qualifications. The well organised speaker will have supplied their introduction. When we are the speaker, we need to make sure it has been professionally presented. We also have to directly ask the MC to use what we have prepared. Often the MC ad libs with our content and they don't do a good enough job. We need to be insistent they stick to the script we have prepared. When we are the MC the speaker's document will outline who they are and what they have done. We should check if there any things which need further clarification before we present it to the audience. The introduction is the chance for the speaker to promote their credentials to be the speaker on this topic. If the speaker hasn't done this, then we need to do some simple research to be able to introduce them properly.

1. S-Speaker Name. Having built up some anticipation, we now reveal the name of the speaker. The audience already knows this, because they have seen the promotional material advertising the talk. Nevertheless, we take this chance to build some buzz before the speaker begins. We now call upon the audience to join us in applause for the speaker and call the speaker to the stage, to start their presentation.

If there is no one to introduce us, then we should do it ourselves and start by stating our name and our organization. Next, we talk about the topic we have chosen for today. We now talk briefly about our qualifications to give this talk. The introduction to the talk is an important element in the event and we need to give it proper care and attention. Done well probably nobody notices, but done badly it jars and distracts from the professionalism of the event and the talk. Let's all make sure this part of the proceedings is a winner, whether we are in the speaker or the MC role.