Practical Eloquence Blog

The Power of a Four Minute Business Proposal

By Jack Malcolm / 7.23.2018 / No Comment

General George Marshall helped save the world when he delivered an impromptu three minute speech that convinced Franklin Roosevelt to increase military spending on the eve of America’s entry into WWII. It took him just three minutes to deliver a forceful and effective speech on a critical topic, and if he could do that, surely you can sell your business proposal in four.

I wrote a previous post about the Four Minute Men who helped to mobilize public opinion during the first World War, and in this post I want to bring it to your day to day work level and urge you to accept the challenge to design your next important business presentation to fit into a four minute window.

It won’t be easy but if you can pull it off, you—and your audience—will benefit hugely from greater clarity, creativity and credibility.

Brevity drives clarity, because it forces you to skim off the crud and the clutter that can hide your meaning. The discipline of fitting your idea into a tight package forces you to think very carefully about every word and sentence to be sure that it fits with your message and adds value to your audience. It also forces you to reveal the bare bones structure of your logic. That serves as a road map that your listeners can follow to figure how you’re getting from A to B in the neatest and cleanest possible way.

Constraints force creativity. It’s no accident that some of the most sublime words in English are written under the severe constraints of poetic meter and rhyme; and it’s also well known in software circles that coders with hardware constraints produce more elegant and cleaner code. As a recent Inc. article states: “With constraints, you dedicate your mental energy to acting more resourcefully. When challenged, you figure out new ways to be better.” It works because it forces you to dig deeper into your own mind for the good stuff. Our brains are lazy, so our first thoughts on anything as we begin our initial “data dump” are necessarily the easiest, which also means the shallowest and sloppiest.

Finally, Brevity makes you credible. The simple fact that you’re expressing creative ideas clearly is going to be a refreshing differentiator to your listeners, but you also get two added benefits: first, you will know your stuff cold, which means you can express it more fluently—you’re not going to be stammering and spewing out filler words. and especially—you won’t have to use your slides as a crutch. Second, it makes you credible because you sound like you know what you’re talking about, because you’re using plain and direct language.

Of course, there are some downsides to a four minute presentation:

You won’t be able to spend a lot of time touting your credentials or telling your corporate story.
You won’t be able to crack too many of your favorite jokes.
You won’t be able to pack your deck with tons of slides that you’ve lovingly crafted.

Seriously, there is one important concern you might have, and I do need to address it. While you can certainly get the big picture across in four minutes, a lot of proposals hinge on lots of small details, especially when you have a room full of diverse stakeholders. And those take time.

And I actually agree with you. I’m not saying that those four minutes will be enough for the actual decision, but they are critical to starting off your proposal on the right foot. Ideally, a presentation is the setup, and the prelude to the real conversation and deliberation that goes in to making important decisions. Besides, I firmly believe the 80/20 rule applies to presentations; you can give them 80% of the value in the first four minutes and use the rest of the time to give them the additional 20% that they want answered before they decide.

So, prepare a crisp four minute presentation, but then be prepared for the deep dive and the tough questions that you’re almost guaranteed to get.[1]

But if you’ve been clear, creative, and credible—and you haven’t wasted anyone’s time doing it, you will go into the deep dive with a huge advantage.

[1] By the way, even if you’re expected to give a 60 minute presentation, put together a 4 minute version first, and then set it aside. I guarantee that the second will flow so much more easily, and will be much tighter as a result.

Uncategorized

How to Change the World in Just Four Minutes

By Jack Malcolm / 7.17.2018 / No Comment

Can you really change the world in just four minutes? Can anyone?

I’m going to tell you a story about a group of people who set out to do just that, how they did it, and how you can too.

One hundred years ago, America went to war in Europe to make the world safe for democracy. In a democracy, war requires not just the consent of the people, but their active participation and support. The US created the Office of Public Information and put it in the hands of George Creel, a newspaper editor from Mississippi. Creel recruited 75,000 volunteers to go out and speak to their communities, in theaters, churches and lodges. Their job was to sell war bonds, and their tool was the four minute speech.

Why four minutes? Because even then, attention spans were short, and if you could not get your point across in that time, additional time would simply create waste for both parties. Because the discipline of fitting your message into four minutes is a wonderful way to sharpen your thinking and clarify your expression. Because it’s roughly 600 words, or two double-spaced pages of type, and there’s a lot you can pack into that space.

So, how do you distill a complicated idea into just four minutes? Here are my top three suggestions, with a little help from George Creel himself:

Be crystal clear about what you want your listeners to do, and why they should do it. They should know what is in it for them, and it doesn’t have to be—and in fact many shouldn’t be—just about practical or monetary gain. Some of the most influential and inspirational speeches tap into higher and more fundamental human motivations. People didn’t buy war bonds for their return; they bought war bonds to make the world safe for democracy.
Structure your ideas logically. As Creel advised: “Divide your speech carefully into certain divisions, say 15 seconds for final appeal; 45 seconds to describe the bond; 15 seconds for opening words, etc., etc. Any plan is better than none, and it can be amended every day in the light of experience.” A three part structure is ideal for four minutes. 30 seconds for your opener, a minute a piece for each point, and 30 seconds to bring it home. Or make it a story, and chunk the four minutes into the situation, the conflict, and the resolution.
Prepare carefully, rehearse often, and refine relentlessly. If you want your audience to care, you have to show that you cared enough to give them your absolute best. As Creel told his volunteers: “Let your friends know that you want ruthless criticism. If their criticism isn’t sound, you can reject it. If it is sound, wouldn’t you be foolish to reject it?” Ironically, it takes more time to prepare shorter speeches, but the exponential improvement in the quality and value of your presentations is well worth the effort.

I began this by asking if you can change the world in just four minutes. Every speech is about change, or else why deliver it? Unless you’re speaking to entertain, or to gratify your own ego, every speech or presentation should leave your audience better off at the end than they were at the beginning. If you can do that, you may not change the whole world, but you can change their world, even if only in some small way.

I urge you to take the four minute challenge.

Podcasts - Uncategorized

Max Cred Factor #5: Caring and Connection

By Jack Malcolm / 7.16.2018 / No Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Some people you have to believe; some you want to believe. So far, we have covered the elements that compel credibility. With a sufficient combination of credentials, content, candor and confidence, people almost have to believe you, even if they would prefer not to. Even if they don’t like you, those three elements will give you a powerful engine to sail against the current of animosity.

On the other hand, it’s always more efficient, and more pleasant, to sail with the current; if people connect with you on a personal level, they are going to be predisposed to believe you and trust you—or at least give you the benefit of the doubt. Think of it as attracting credibility. Especially if what you’re asking is not that big a deal to them, so they don’t care too strongly either way, they are more apt to give it to someone they like and whom they feel likes them.

There’s a reason that one of the best-selling self-help books of all time was called How To Win Friends and Influence People. Credibility is about influencing the beliefs of others, and winning friends is a clear path to influence.

This article is about connecting with other people on a personal level—winning friends, if you will. To use more modern terminology, it’s about displaying warmth as well as competence.

Competence v. Warmth

Our brains have evolved an amazing capacity to form snap judgments about other people, because our ancestors who were good at it tended to be the ones who survived to pass on their genes. Suppose you’re walking down a lonely street and see a stranger approaching. It’s completely natural—actually inevitable—that you will make a rapid and mostly unconscious calculation about that person, assessing two questions: What are their intentions, and can they act on those intentions? In effect, we want to assess whether they mean us harm and if they do, how much power do they have? These two questions boil down to two dimensions called warmth and competence.

How do the factors we’ve discussed so far fit into these two universal dimensions? The Max Cred factors of Credentials, Content and Confidence fit squarely into the competence dimension. Candor shades into both dimensions: transparency shows strength while its openness about motives and concern with ensuring the other person gets your meaning exudes goodwill. Connection is squarely within the warmth dimension.

Connection is especially important because warmth is actually the first judgment the brain makes—within a tenth of a second of spotting a new face.[1] You can usually tell very quickly when someone has warm intentions, but it can take much longer to accurately judge their competence. It gives scientific backing to the saying: “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”

Better to be liked, or respected?

So that brings us to a question: is it better to be liked or respected? It’s an age-old conundrum that goes back at least to Machiavelli, who addressed the question of whether it’s better for a prince to be loved or feared. Even Machiavelli said “One should wish to be both”, but that’s the easy answer. And the easy answer is not so simple, because the relationship between liking and respect is complicated, and because a lot depends on the situation and context.

The relationship is complicated because, while some aspects of competence and warmth can coexist and even reinforce each other, some aspects of each are contradictory.

Let’s start with the case for competence over warmth.

Why did baseball manager Leo Durocher say that nice guys finish last?[2] Is there something about being nice that can actually harm your credibility? Amy Cuddy of Harvard Business School says that people who come across as nice may actually be seen as less intelligent.[3] Jeffrey Pfeffer, a Stanford professor of management, says likeability is overrated—that appearing tough or even mean can improve your perceived competence.

Even in a field like sales, where many people believe it’s all about relationships, there is clear evidence that competence can trump warmth. Adam Grant wrote Give and Take, which is all about the virtues of being a giving person, so you would expect he would come down firmly on the side of EQ over IQ. But after he ran two tests with hundreds of salespeople, he concluded that, “Cognitive ability was more than five times more powerful than emotional intelligence.”[4]

So, if even in a field like sales, brains are more important than social and emotional skills, it would seem that competence beats warmth. If you have to choose, you would probably be better off being a competent jerk than an amiable dummy.

Now, let’s examine the case for warmth

And yet, there is also plenty of evidence—not to mention common sense—in favor of warmth. Common sense tells us that we’re more apt to listen to and give the benefit of the doubt to people who are pleasant.

Besides common sense, there is some good evidence that being seen as likeable can make you more persuasive. Studies that have examined the credibility of witnesses in mock courtroom trials have found that more likeable witnesses were seen as more credible[5], although the effect was more pronounced for women. Robert Cialdini, the godfather of influence studies, includes liking as one his top influence factors.

Doctors who have a warmer bedside manner are more likely to have their instructions followed and less likely to be sued for malpractice. And it works in the other direction: one study found that patients who were perceived as more likeable got more time from doctors and more education from their staffs.[6]

One final point: because people infer warmth much faster than competence, it makes sense to lead with it, which also increases your chances that people will listen to you long enough to discover your competence. You can be the smartest person in the room, but if no one wants to listen, then you’re as relevant as a tree falling in the forest with no one around.

So, being nice clearly pays off. The bottom line is, likeability is not the active ingredient of credibility, but it definitely makes the medicine easier to swallow. It’s nice to be smart, but it’s also smart to be nice!

How to Connect

There are two parallel routes you can take, one internal and one external. The internal path—caring—is all about changing your focus and attitude, and the external—connecting—is about changing your outward behaviors.

Caring: Empathy Is a choice

“I don’t like that man. I must get to know him better.” Abraham Lincoln

I once sat across a desk from a cancer specialist in Miami, as he explained to my friend what would happen during and after his upcoming surgery to remove a cancerous bladder. He was dispassionately and even robotically describing the planned surgery, the difficulties to be expected, and the prognosis. He was very downbeat and pessimistic and was emphasizing the difficulties and the downsides. He was certainly exhibiting the Max Cred factor of candor, but I sensed something was missing, so I said, “Andy is not your typical patient. He’s a former world champion athlete.” The doctor asked which sport, and when I said it was swimming, his demeanor totally changed, as he told Andy about his own attempts at Masters Swimming and then proceeded to treat him as a human being.

That story demonstrates that empathy can actually be a choice you make. Jamil Zaki, who studies empathy as a Stanford professor, says “We often make an implicit or explicit decision as to whether we want to engage with someone’s emotions or not, based on the motives we might have for doing so.”[7]

As further evidence that empathy is a choice, there are studies showing that lack of empathy can be induced in people by priming their economic schemas, which is a fancy way of saying that you get them to focus on profit and efficiency.[8]

Connection: Empathy is a skill

Besides being a choice, empathy is also a skill that can be learned, practiced and strengthened. According to a 2015 article in The Atlantic, “While some people are naturally better at being empathic, said Mohammadreza Hojat, a research professor of psychiatry at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, empathy can be taught.” The article goes on to describe several courses at various medical centers and touts the improvements that have been realized in patient satisfaction and trust.

To be more likeable, here are a few reminders:

Listen more. It is the best compliment you can give another, and the best way to make them feel important.
Ask questions. Get to know them as real people.
Be upbeat. According on one HBR article, “Optimism is also helpful during the interview process, making candidates appear more likeable and capable”.
Give compliments. Flattery works, even when the recipient knows there’s an ulterior motive.
Body language. Smile more, make consistent eye contact, and keep an open posture.
Be expressive. Be yourself, let your emotions show, and don’t be afraid to be vulnerable.
Use informal speech. Especially when presenting upward, don’t try to puff up your language.
Be humble. Dial down your confidence a bit.
Play up similarities and common ground. Like likes like.

[1] John Neffinger, Matthew Kohutt, Compelling People, p. 12.

[2] Actually, what he said was “The nice guys are all over there, in seventh place.”

[3] http://hbr.org/web/2009/hbr-list/because-i-am-nice-dont-assume-i-am-dumb

[4] http://www.giveandtake.com/Home/Blog

[5] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20019000

[6] Axis of Influence, p. 8.

[7] https://www.edge.org/conversation/jamil_zaki-choosing-empathy

[8] The bedside manner of homo economicus: How and why priming an economic schema reduces compassion. Molinsky, Grant Margolis 2012.

Persuasive communication

What’s Wrong with Outside-In Thinking?

By Jack Malcolm / 7.2.2018 / No Comment

One of the most important pillars of persuasive communication is outside-in thinking, which is thinking about an issue or a situation from the point of view of the other person. I’ve written about it extensively and it’s a fundamental part of every sales or communication course I teach.

Obviously, the ability to predict other’s thinking and attitude about what you’re trying to persuade them about (what psychologists call perspective taking) is a tremendous asset, because it allows you to frame your idea in a way that is most attractive to them, or even change your idea to accommodate their needs, such as in a win-win negotiation. That’s why I always urge you to research the other person, including what their interests are, how they are measured, how they’ve made similar decisions in the past, and their possible reasons for objecting. We’re all self-centered so outside-in thinking doesn’t come naturally to us; that’s why simply asking yourself those questions is an excellent way to remind yourself and engage your mind into their perspective.

The benefit of outside-in thinking is so clear that there should be nothing more to be said. But what if it’s wrong?

I’ve recently learned that outside-in thinking is inadequate, and may even hinder your persuasive attempts. A recent journal article by three researchers involving 25 separate experiments has found that while people may think they understand the other person’s perspective by engaging in outside-in thinking, evidence shows that they don’t. We’re just not as good at figuring out others’ minds as we think we are. Even married couples are consistently wrong about predicting what their partner will answer. In one of the experiments, one spouse was asked to predict how the other would react to certain statements. They predicted they would get 13 out of 20 right; in reality they got an average of five.

If even married couples can be so consistently wrong and overconfident, it’s apparent that simply making the attempt to understand the other person’s perspective is not enough. In fact, if it causes you to become overconfident in your estimation of what they’re thinking, it can actually backfire on you.

I’m not recommending that you ditch outside-in thinking. By all means, do the preparation and ask yourself the questions. But don’t stop there. Be humble about your initial conclusions, because they’re only predictions, and predictions give you the illusion of knowledge. You’ll be better off if instead of predicting how the other person will react, you think of it as a hypothesis.

A hypothesis needs to be tested, and the simplest way to test a hypothesis about what another person is thinking is to just ask them. This is about as blindingly obvious as can be, but according to the authors of the study it’s rarely done. I’m not sure why, but I’ll take a stab at perspective taking here and make a hypothesis about what’s going on in the minds of people who don’t ask: they either assume they already know, or they’re afraid of finding out they’re wrong.

Outside-in thinking can be a great start as long as you don’t stop there. Go beyond perspective taking to what one of the authors of the article, Nicholas Epley, calls “perspective getting.” You can prepare in advance by thinking of questions you can ask to verify your assumptions about the other person but then go into the conversation with an open and curious mindset. Ask your questions and then really listen to the answers; probe further if you need clarification; paraphrase back your perceptions to confirm your understanding.

Asking questions, listening, and engaging in a sincere effort to understand the other person’s point of view will give you a much more accurate picture of what they’re thinking. Perhaps even more importantly, they will send a clear message to the other person that you actually care—and that’s probably the most important reason you shouldn’t take outside-in thinking for granted.

1 … 31 32 33 34 35 … 197