Great Speakers: Malcolm Gladwell

From Forbes, by Nick Morgan, Contributor: I'm passionate about communications, especially public speaking, "Speakers Worth Catching 5: Malcolm Gladwell and the Norden Bombsight," on 2 November 2011  -- Well, it’s time to give Gladwell a second look. His TED talk from July 2011, posted in October, is a masterpiece of the storytelling art, and it is delivered well. This is a talk that any speaker can learn from. If you’re a polished performer, learn from Gladwell’s pacing and tonal variety – and his storytelling. If you’re a novice, then focus on Gladwell’s storytelling, because it is so good that it makes me wish that more speakers would up the ante on themselves and weave a tale as well as he does.

Malcolm Gladwell - Spaghetti Sauce

OK, what is it that Gladwell does so brilliantly? Five lessons of the storyteller’s art come from this TED video and the “Strange Tale of the Norden Bombsight.”

First, Gladwell grabs our interest with the high stakes of the story. The best stories are matters of life and death. Of course, a story about a bombsight is exactly that. Our interest is piqued because we’re talking about war, death, and destruction. It’s the storyteller’s equivalent of shouting “fire!” in a crowded theatre – it gets our attention.

Second, Gladwell structures the story in three parts or acts, with the right kind of conclusion. In the first part, or act, Gladwell tells us about Norden and his bombsight and what it was supposed to do. In this way he builds up the interest in the device. Instead of telling us the story retrospectively, he puts us in the time period, in the search for an accurate way to aim bombs, and he tells us why that’s important.

In the second part, Gladwell tells us what actually happened with the Norden bombsight, and why it didn’t deliver on its promise for pinpoint accuracy. This unexpected turn keeps our interest in the story high, because he’s made us care about the device and we want to know why it fails.

And in the third part of his tale, Gladwell draws the larger moral of the story. The point of his tale, again surprising, is that the search for pinpoint accuracy is not the right quest. Instead, we need to be thinking about things like the bombsight in a different and more profound way, with their inherent limitations. The complexity of human issues, we learn, defies solution by the simplicity of things.

And stay tuned for the postscript with which Gladwell closes his tale. It’s brilliant.

Third, Gladwell peppers his story with precise, relevant details – but not too many. Details bring stories to life. And they kill stories when there are too many of them. Gladwell knows exactly when to give us a telling detail, and when to ease up and keep us at the 20,000-foot view. We know exactly how many SCUD missile launchers the US successfully took out during the Iraq war — zero – but we never get a precise description of the bombsight itself. Why? Because only an engineer would care. The bombsight is too complicated. The average listener only care about its effects.

Fourth, Gladwell has (mostly) conquered his ‘happy feet’ problem. In his earlier talks, Malcolm’s nervous energy showed up in relentless pacing up and down the stage. Now, he’s relaxed enough (or practiced enough) to come to a halt and plant his feet occasionally, and that simple shift makes an enormous difference in his effectiveness. A storyteller’s job is to stand and deliver, so that motion doesn’t get in the way of comprehension, but rather reinforces it.

Fifth, Gladwell varies his pacing and pitch with the ebb and flow of the story. Advanced speakers should watch and listen to the video focusing on Gladwell’s voice. It’s resonant and strong, and he varies it expertly, speeding up and raising the volume at times, and slowing down and lowering both pitch and volume when he needs a dramatic emphasis. This TED talk shows Gladwell at the peak of his game. Now, if we can just get him to tuck in his shirt…. (source: Forbes)

Great Speakers: Jim Rohn

Jim Rohn (September 17, 1930 – December 5, 2009) was an American entrepreneur, author and motivational speaker. His rags to riches story played a large part in his work, which influenced others in the personal development industry.

Rohn was invited by a friend to come and tell his "rags-to-riches" story to his rotary club. He accepted and titled his talk "Idaho Farm Boy makes it to Beverly Hills." The talk went so well that soon others began asking him to speak at various luncheons and other events. In 1963, at the Beverly Hills Hotel, he gave his first public seminar. He then began presenting seminars all over the country, telling his story and teaching the personal development philosophy he felt had led to his accomplishments.

In 1966, a friend and fellow ex-Nutri-Bio distributor, William E. Bailey, started a company called Bestline Products. Bailey hired Rohn to host recruiting and training meetings all across the country, paying him the sum of $250,000, up front, for his services. (source: Wikipedia)

Jim Rohn: The Why behind Personal Development!

Great Speeches: Randy Pausch's Last Lecture

From the website The Last Lecture  --  On September 18, 2007, computer science professor Randy Pausch stepped in front of an audience of 400 people at Carnegie Mellon University to deliver a last lecture called “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.” With slides of his CT scans beaming out to the audience, Randy told his audience about the cancer that is devouring his pancreas and that will claim his life in a matter of months. On the stage that day, Randy was youthful, energetic, handsome, often cheerfully, darkly funny. He seemed invincible. But this was a brief moment, as he himself acknowledged.

Randy’s lecture has become a phenomenon, as has the book he wrote based on the same principles, celebrating the dreams we all strive to make realities. Sadly, Randy lost his battle to pancreatic cancer on July 25th, 2008, but his legacy will continue to inspire us all, for generations to come. (source: http://www.thelastlecture.com/)

Five Key TED Talks

From the New Yorker, "Five Key TED Talks," by Nathan Heller, July 2, 2012 -- In 1833, Ralph Waldo Emerson, a New England pastor who’d recently given up the ministry, delivered his first public lecture in America. The talk was held in Boston, and its nebulous-sounding subject (“The Uses of Natural History,” a title that conceals its greatness well) helped lay the groundwork for the nineteenth-century philosophy of transcendentalism. It also changed Emerson’s life. In a world that regarded higher thought largely as a staid pursuit, Emerson was a vivid, entertaining speaker—he lived for laughter or spontaneous applause—and his talk that day marked the beginning of a long career behind the podium. Over the next year, he delivered seven talks, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., tells us in his 1996 biography, “Emerson: The Mind on Fire.” By 1838, he was up to thirty. Then his career exploded. In the early eighteen-fifties, Emerson was giving as many as eighty lectures a year, and his reputation reached beyond the tight paddock of intellectual New England. The lecture circuit may not have shaped Emerson’s style of thinking, but it made that style a compass point of nineteenth-century American thought.

Whether Emerson has a modern heir remains an open question, but, more than a century after his death, the speaking trade he enjoyed continues to thrive. In this week’s issue of the magazine, I write about TED, a constellation of conferences whose style and substance has helped color our own moment in public intellectual life. As many media companies trading in “ideas” are struggling to stay afloat, TED has created a product that’s sophisticated, popular, lucrative, socially conscious, and wildly pervasive—the Holy Grail of digital-age production. The conference serves a king-making function, turning obscure academics and little-known entrepreneurs into global stars. And, though it’s earned a lot of criticism (as I explain in the article, some thinkers find TED to be narrow and dangerously slick), its “TED Talks” series of Web videos, which so far has racked up more than eight hundred million views, puts even Emerson to shame.

Why? Trying to understand the appeal of TED Talks, I found myself paying close attention to the video series’ distinctive style and form. Below, five key TED Talks, and what they illuminate about the most successful lecture series ever given.

1. The TED Moment: Bryan Stevenson on Incarceration and Injustice

At TED’s flagship conference this past spring, in Long Beach, California, Bryan Stevenson, who heads the Equal Justice Initiative, took to the stage to give a TED talk for the first time. He prepared less exhaustively than many TED presenters do: he told me that he’d planned his remarks in large part on the flight over. (Stevenson, whose work included arguing Miller v. Alabama before the Supreme Court later that month, had a busy spring.) Yet his lecture was a perfect expression of everything a TED talk, at its best, achieves. Stevenson approaches an issue of national concern—in this case, hidden prejudices and injustices of America legal procedure—through a series of personal stories, giving the issue a warm emotional valence. As the talk drew to a close, you could feel excitement gathering in the Long Beach theatre; when Stevenson finished, he received a long, ecstatic standing ovation—the biggest of the conference. Many veteran TEDsters call this kind of thrill a “TED moment.”

2. The Next Big Thing: Jeff Han Demonstrates Multi-Touch Technology

TED has always enjoyed a strong connection with Silicon Valley. Over the years, the conference has unveiled major products (like Adobe Photoshop) and served as an early showroom for other innovations (like the Apple Macintosh). In February, 2006, a year before the first appearance of Apple’s iPhone, Jeff Han, an N.Y.U. researcher, demonstrated multi-touch technology on TED’s stage. For the crowd in Monterey, California, where the conference was then held, and for Web viewers later that year, the interface was a revelation. Hear people murmur with astonishment as Han explains pinch-zoom gestures, or as he types on a screen keyboard. Han’s talk, from the first conference filmed for Web distribution, also shows TED’s sophisticated camera work and editing. Frequent shifts in perspective, plus occasional cuts to a feed from the multi-touch screen itself, help to give Web viewers the best, most intimate seat in the house.

3. The Theatrical Polish: Susan Cain on Introversion

Many of the most popular TED talks share a strong narrative and a polished theatrical style. In preparation for her first TED talk, Susan Cain, who’d just published her first book and had little public-speaking background (the book was about introversion), worked with an acting coach, Jim Fyfe, to polish her stage style. Note her narrative reënactment and use of props—a common TED gambit—to turn a counterintuitive, data-based argument about the leadership potential of introverts into a miniature theatre piece. Cain’s début on the TED stage had an exceptional response, getting hundreds of thousands of viral views in its first day online.

4. The Breakthrough: Jill Bolte Taylor on Her Stroke

TED’s live audience, like its speakers, tends to represent the upper echelons of education, public achievement, and wealth: everyone from Al Gore to Pat Mitchell and Bill Gates has sat in TED’s seats as spectators, and the conference sells its pricey tickets through an application that includes essays and references. What do these people want that they can’t already get? Often, it seems, they are looking for a kind of transcendence, one that lies past the rational and erudite work at which they excel. In narrating a stroke that afflicted her left hemisphere, Jill Bolte Taylor establishes her ample intellectual credentials and then describes breaking beyond them. In the last part of the 2008 talk, Taylor allowed emotion to overtake her, describing the beauty of a world unmarred by analytical intelligence. Her analytically trained audience ate it up.

5. Thinking about Thinking: Sir Ken Robinson on Education

The most popular TED talk of all time contains no slides, no props, no technology, and very little movement—a success that seems anomalous until you look closely at its argument. In this 2006 TED lecture, Sir Ken Robinson fires a shot over the bow of modern public education, suggesting that schooling is, basically, set up to guide students toward becoming university professors. As a result, he argued, they’re led away from their natural creative impulses. Robinson’s lecture captures a common project of many TED presentations and, in fact, of the conference itself: closing the rift between a systematized, cumulative idea of higher thought (as we find in academia) and a more personal, directly applicable model (an ideal of entrepreneurship and the arts). His talk’s wild popularity suggests that effort strikes a cultural nerve.  (source: The New Yorker, Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/07/five-key-ted-talks.html?printable=true&currentPage=all#ixzz2KqoJM4hw]