Elevate - for business leaders

Oratory is back in business

Friday, January 22, 2010 | Posted by: Fiona Cullinan
Categories: Business, Finance | Tags: business, Alex Connock, media, Ten Alps, Bob Geldof, CEO, presentations, Edinburgh, skills, Steve Jobs, speech, Royal Television Society, PowerPoint, persuasion, MacTaggart Lecture, oratory, Channel4, Apple, speaking

Alex Connock, CEO, Ten Alps: Next Wednesday (27 January), Steve Jobs of Apple will stand up on stage in California and (we’re told) introduce the new Mac tablet computer. It’s easily the most anticipated electronic product event since the iPhone, which actually he launched, too.
Jobs will have no lectern, no notes or autocue, and a cinema-screen-sized presentation with barely one short phrase per slide. It will be as different as you can get from a boring man reading out a PowerPoint at a trade convention. It will be the CEO as orator.

Word has it, meanwhile, that one of the tests Channel 4 are applying to their shortlist of chief executive candidates is whether, if they were about to give the key annual TV industry MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh Festival, anyone would turn up to listen?

It’s the CEO as orator again.
In fact, a paradox of the increasingly remote-connected business world is that in-person persuasion is more important than ever before. And that demands of leaders that they can stand up on stage, deliver a message and make you believe like never before. That message gets filmed, stuck on the internet and databased forever – so we had all better learn how to do it.

Yesterday I gave a conference speech – something like the 40th I have had to give in the past 12 months as CEO of multiplatform factual media company Ten Alps – at the RAW entrepreneurial event in Manchester.

It was a business convention, but it looked more like a music gig: no lectern, no chairs for the audience, big stage, nowhere to hide. And, in fact, the previous speaker was a guy from New Order using the story of the Hacienda as a what-not-to-do business case study.

The fact that everyone was standing up was empowering, because it removed the barrier to interaction, and the audience contributions came thick and fast throughout.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum my colleague Bob Geldof, clearly an über -A-list speaker is on the elite circuit of four or five global personalities – think Clinton, Blair, etc – who fly in, speak to thousands without notes, give their inspirational thoughts and fly to the next continent for the next one. Again – it’s like a rock tour.

Speaking is undoubtedly very big in business right now. And that has consequences for everyone.

If you want people to believe in you as a business leader, no way can you any more get away with standing on stage and reading with your nose in your notes. I’ve seen that done recently at the excellent Royal Television Society convention by a couple of speakers – and great concepts failed to get traction with the very industry and Government audience they needed to reach, as a result.

PowerPoint is now a misnomer. Giving a PowerPoint presentation as a speech to a large room (unless it’s a technical lecture) points up that you actually don’t have a good, simple point to make.

At the Government’s three-day C&binet media/tech event, PowerPoint was completely banned. And all this was predicted, brilliantly, in the definitive New Yorker account in 2001. You must read it.

Oratory is not just about conference speaking either now. It’s about speaking in all kinds of contexts, and being well prepared for it. As Mark Twain said: “It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech. ”Anyone at the top of a business organisation needs to be able to speak – apparently impromptu – to an office floor of employees. That can be a great deal harder than a conference, because of the difficulty in getting the tone right.

A CEO needs to be able to speak on TV, too, because much of what he/she does will now be recorded on video. Never mind actual TV appearances, roughly half the conferences I attended last year were filmed by the organisers.

And is all this a good thing?

Yes it is. Oratory is entertainment, but it’s also psychology; the transparency of body language telling you a huge amount about the speaker beyond the words they actually convey. Churchill’s oratory was what kept Britain in the war in 1940, and your oratory can be what helps you keep up the sales run rate in the Redditch office next year.

Steve Jobs knows this, which is why he has come back from serious illness to put himself live on the world stage. Whatever charismatic genius he has, we could all do with more of it – and that’s not just some cool new electronic gadgets.

Image: Sir Bob Geldof, © Ten Alps; Steve Jobs, © Acaben

Alex Connock, CEO, Ten Alps reports on the media industry for the Grant Thornton blog. Read his previous posts.