Allgemein Archive - Page 52 of 158 - The Art of Communicating

But our product is dry stuff

It’s not!

It solves a problem that businesses are willing to pay good money for.

It saves them a lot of hassle. Just imagine the trouble they would need to go through to solve the problem without you?

It’s a huge time saver form them. Knowing that they can rely on you provides them with peace of mind. Which in turn frees their mind to come up with better solutions for their customers.

It’s just not true that these things are dry. They are highly emotional. Because they are highly relevant.

It’s not the product that’s dry. It’s the story.

What makes a story dry is when the humans get written out of the story. When it’s only about features. And processes. Rather than what these features and processes enable the humans to do.

Businesses don’t lack sexy products.

They lack the courage to go beyond the features and see the humans who use their products. If it solves a real struggle, it’s almost guaranteed to be attractive (at least) or even sexy.

I’m not going to miss that

What outcome would make your next meeting so valuable that you wouldn’t want to miss it at any cost?

How about your co-workers? Do they feel that the outcome of your next meeting is so valuable that they wouldn’t want to miss it at any cost?

If yes, bravo! You’re a rare breed.

If not, what would make it so? What can you change to make it more valuable? (Maybe switch to a doing instead?)

Making a speech funny

It’s easy to make a speech funny. Hire some comedians, gather them in a room and they’ll make it funny.

What’s hard is to make it consistent with your story, fit your brand, match your personality – and most of all: to make it relevant. This is inherently your job. You need to provide the direction and you need to make the final call.

(But when you do, I’m all in for more entertaining speeches.)

Consistency vs. Stagnation

There’s a fine line between consistency in your actions and stagnation.

Stagnation is almost inevitable when you act the same way over and over again. You figured it out once, and repeat it over and over. It’s consistent and thus, inflexible.

Here’s a different kind of consistency: If you act according to the same principles over and over again, your actions can vary, probably by a lot. It’s consistent and thus, flexible.

While the former might be the recipe for a failing business, the latter is invaluable for building a sustainable business.

Bypasses

Straight lines are not always the quickest path.

That’s why bypasses exist. It might be shorter to drive straight through the town, but the detour is quicker because you travel faster. It’s a clear, fast track without all of the messy obstacles and annoyances that city traffic brings with it.

But (a big but): It took time and (a lot of) money and workforce to build the detour.

Now that it’s ready, you wouldn’t want to miss it.

It’s the same with clarity. It takes time and commitment to achieve it. But when it’s there you wouldn’t want to miss it.

The problem: Not everyone is willing to make that investment.

Taking responsibility for our work

Knives can kill people. Are the makers of the knives responsible?

How about the marketers?

Let’s assume X out of every 100,000 knives are used to do harm. When they do more effective marketing to sell more knives, does that affect their responsibility? After all, it increases the number of knives out there that can potentially do harm – and in extension it quite likely increases the number of knives that are used to actually do harm.

When you take ownership of your marketing success, do you take ownership of the side effects as well?

Just thinking out loud …

You better pay attention

Andy Miller, who after he’d sold his company to Apple reported directly to Steve Jobs, explains what it was like when he wasn’t paying attention for a brief moment. Jobs pulled him out:

“You weren’t paying attention. If I’ll ever notice that again, you’ll never again sit in one of these meetings.”

It sounds harsh but it makes sense when you turn it into a bidirectional deal: You must pay attention. But at the same time you get the right to demand that the content is worth paying attention to.

Essentially, as the leader you not only demand attention but you also demand to make good use of the attention, e.g. you guarantee everyone the right to point out when someone (including you) speaks a lot without saying much.

When you demand that everyone pays attention it means that there’s an incentive for everyone to prepare their material in a way that makes it worth paying attention to. (That’s, basically, how Amazon’s study hall approach to meetings works.)

It’s not how good you look or feel

A lot of speaking advice is about feeling good and looking good, e.g. how to feel more confident, how to use convincing body language, how to find more beautiful words or design stunning slides, etc.

While all of this certainly helps, it’s never the point when you’re looking to make change happen.

It’s not how good you look and how well you feel but how strong you resonate.

The main difference is that “feeling good and looking good” is concerned with the speaker while “resonating” is concerned with the audience and how it relates to the speaker.

In order to resonate strongly you need to empathize with how the audience feels. You need to understand what matters to the audience.

It’s about seeing and hearing your audience and caring for their struggles and desires.

It’s about doing the work of figuring out a path and lighting it so that your audience doesn’t have to.

Ironically, my clients tell me that this posture leads them to actually feel good on stage. By shifting the spotlight away from themselves and onto the people they seek to serve, they let go of the heavy weight of being the star of the show. They merely help their audience make change. And that feels good.

The best part is that adopting that shift ripples into everything you do because you can’t unsee the audience in anything you do.

The (real) importance of the first impression

Every once in a while a study pops up that proves the importance of the first few seconds of a speech. Often, the conclusion is that the first impression would be the most important part of your speech.

Yet, one crucial aspect usually gets overlooked by these studies: Great speeches are often great from the start. Not the other way around.

As humans, we’re quite good at estimating the quality of a talk from a few impressions. Body signals, voice signals, but also the clarity in the text. We’re super quick to make first estimations based on these signals. Amazingly often, these estimations prove to be correct.

Here’s the pitfall: The speech is not great because it begins great. The beginning is just an accurate snapshot that we base our estimation on. Judging from a short snapshot of the middle or the ending of a great speech would quite likely predict the quality of the speech just as accurately.

Great speeches are usually great throughout the entire duration of the speech. (Because the speaker cares, actually knows what they’re talking about, prepares well and rehearses thoroughly.)

It’s a mistake to focus on the beginning of a speech as the deciding factor (if only because great speeches exist that started poorly and vice versa).

The better strategy is to make a great speech and make it great from the start.

How Spotify chooses the price it’s willing to pay for success

Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify, had this to say during a company wide town hall about the Joe Rogan controversy:

“If we want even a shot at achieving our bold ambitions, it will mean having content on Spotify that many of us may not be proud to be associated with,” he says. “Not anything goes, but there will be opinions, ideas, and beliefs that we disagree with strongly and even makes us angry or sad.”

The crucial word in this statement is “if”. It’s a choice. In many ways. You choose your goals (what Ek calls “ambition”), and you choose the conditions which you are not going to sacrifice to reach the goal (in other words: the price you’re willing to pay to reach the goal).

For Spotify, the ambition Ek is speaking of is named later in the meeting (emphasis mine):

“So I think ultimately, this really comes down to two things. First, do we believe in our mission: 50 million creators and 1 billion users? And finally, are we willing to consistently enforce our policies on even the loudest and most popular voices on the platform? And I’m telling you, I believe both.”

Their mission is “50 million creators and 1 billion users”. That’s the goal they’re trying to reach. That’s the ambition that motivates the company. Together with the first quote, it’s clear that the policies are a servant to this mission. They are designed so that they get out of the way of reaching the mission as much as possible. For example, the policies ensure legality, not pride.

That is a valid stance and Spotify is free to choose that stance.

But the takeaway here is that it is a choice. Spotify can choose to have different policies, e.g. policies that ensure that they would be proud of any content that’s on Spotify.

Spotify can also choose to have a different mission, e.g. related to the quality of the content, the kind of content, the kind of relationship they have with their customer, or a vast number of completely different takes.

They choose to make their ambition purely about numbers. As a price to achieve this mission, they choose to accept to be associated with content that many will “not be proud to be associated with”.

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