Speeches for Leaders: Leave Audiences Wanting More

speeches for Leaders leave audiences wanting more

by Charles Crawford

A Special Book Edition by

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Speeches for leaders leave audiences wanting more by charles crawford

diplomatic courier | MEDAURAS GLOBAL washington, dc

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Copyright Š by Charles Crawford All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

First Published 2015.

Published in the United States by Medauras Global and Diplomatic Courier.

1660 L Street, NW, Suite 501, Washington, D.C., 20036 www.medauras.com www.diplomaticourier.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Crawford, Charles 1954Speeches for Leaders: Leave Audiences Wanting More / Charles Crawford ISBN: 978-1-942772-05-7 (Digital) ISBN: 978-1-942772-04-0 (Print) 1. Crawford, Charles, 1954-. 2. Speeches. 3. Leadership. 4. Diplomacy. I. Title.

Notice: No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, except brief excerpts for the purpose of review, without written consent from the publisher and author. Every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of information in this publication; however, the author, Diplomatic Courier and Medauras Global make no warranties, express or implied, in regards to the information and disclaim all liability for any loss, damages, 4 errors, or omissions. For permissions, email info@medauras.com.

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To James, Robert, and Elly That they love words too

PRAISE “A lively, shrewd, and, above all, engrossing practical guide to speechwriting for top-level leaders in all fields—from politics and diplomacy to business and academia. Crawford, a former British diplomat and speechwriter in the U.K. Foreign and Commonwealth Office, known for his unconventional but highly effective style, is an accomplished master who understands that it is ‘not what the leader says, but what the audience hears’ that matters.”

Paul Nash, Senior Editor, Diplomatic Courier magazine “Crafted for leaders and their speechwriters, this short, sparkling, and wise book has much to say to learners. Crawford picks out the fundamentals and sticks to them—it is not what you say but what they hear that counts. He provides advice on what to avoid and what to strive for with well-chosen and trenchant examples of successes and failures from the high and mighty. For anyone who will at any time face an audience large or small—and that is most of us—this is an invaluable guidebook to improving your power of presentation—in all its aspects.”

Thomas R. Pickering, former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., Russia, India, and Israel, and Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs “There are many pearls of wisdom in this book, the most important of which concerns preparation: ‘don’t write a speech, speak a speech.’ Charles Crawford does not pretend that delivering a speech is easy, for it requires the skills of a craftsman. But those skills can be acquired. Amusingly—and in a highly readable format—Crawford reveals the crafting of a speech with examples of fine oratory and the pitfalls to avoid.”

Lord David Owen, former U.K. Foreign Secretary “It was said of Winston Churchill that ‘he mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.’ Waging war with words is as old as civilization, and in his bold and insightful analysis, Charles Crawford draws on his huge experience and talents to analyze how well today’s leaders measure up – and how we could all improve our speaking skills.”

Lord Michael Dobbs of Wylye, bestselling author of House of Cards and Executive Producer of the American TV series of the same title; former advisor to Margaret Thatcher, and former Chief of Staff and Deputy Chairman of the U.K. Conservative Party “This book is a must for any person on the path to leadership: full of practical advice and real life examples. Charles Crawford uses wit and honesty to bring to life what works. And what doesn’t.”

Julie Chappell OBE, Partner at Hawthorn London; previously the UK’s youngest ever ambassador “Charles Crawford is the Dale Carnegie of speechwriting. Also its P.G. Wodehouse.

His book is not only terrific practical advice that will win supporters and influence audiences, but also a very funny, entertaining read. It’s unputdownable.

And when you’ve read it, you’ll be unputdownable too.”

John O’Sullivan, former speechwriter to Margaret Thatcher and currently Editor-at-Large, National Review

CONTENTS Preface.............................................................................................................1 Introduction.................................................................................................5 1. More, Please............................................................................................12 A Public Speaking Horror Story .......................................................................13 A Leader’s Basic Message: More Please ..........................................................17 Leaders’ Speeches: Risk and Responsibility.....................................................21 Ronald Reagan.............................................................................................22 Radek Sikorski..............................................................................................23 George Soros................................................................................................26 Emma Watson.............................................................................................27 2. Leadership and Tone...........................................................................30 Getting the Right Tone.....................................................................................31 A Speech is a Conversation, Not a Lecture.......................................................37 Supporting a Leader’s Speech...........................................................................43 Business Speeches............................................................................................47 Annual General Meetings.............................................................................48 Important Announcements.........................................................................49 Conference Speeches...................................................................................50 Business Thought Leaders...........................................................................51 After-Dinner Speeches.................................................................................52 Crisis Speeches............................................................................................53 3. Event and Audience ............................................................................56 What’s this Event About?..................................................................................57 Interpreting........................................................................................................61 Culture, Protocol, and Opening Formalities.....................................................63 Death by Teleprompter......................................................................................69 E-Heckling.........................................................................................................73 4. Preparing a Leader’s Speech............................................................78 Don’t Write a Speech, Speak a Speech.............................................................79 Starting a Speech Strongly...............................................................................83 Starting a Speech: No Apologies......................................................................91 Structure and Signposts (and Hinges)..............................................................95 Finishing a Speech Strongly...........................................................................101 Humor.............................................................................................................109 Nice Speech—Where’s the Definitive Version?...............................................115 10

CONTENTS 5. What’s the Message?..........................................................................120 Presidents Clinton and Chirac in Sarajevo.....................................................121 Vladimir Putin Addresses Poland...................................................................127 President Obama in Cairo and Moscow.........................................................131 President Obama in Israel..............................................................................139 Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI..............................................................141 Diana, Princess of Wales................................................................................145 Disappointment and Impatience....................................................................147 Public Apology................................................................................................153 Movie Speeches...............................................................................................157 6. Nuts and Bolts.....................................................................................162 Historical and Cultural Allusions....................................................................163 Proverbs and Sayings.....................................................................................169 Mixed Metaphors.............................................................................................171 Musty, Needy Speeches..................................................................................175 More Mistakes.................................................................................................181 Punctuation....................................................................................................185 PowerPoint......................................................................................................193 7. Conclusion: Authenticity and Leadership..............................198 Appendix: Foreign Office Cables and Famous Speeches..........207 Pope John Paul II (Sarajevo, April 1997).......................................................208 President Clinton (Sarajevo, December 1997)..............................................211 French/German Foreign Ministers (Sarajevo, December 1997)....................214 President Chirac (Sarajevo, April 1998)........................................................216 Speeches at Auschwitz Commemoration (January 2005) .........................219 Pope Benedict XVI (Auschwitz, May 2006)...................................................222

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Preface

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n a chilly November evening in 2011, Poland’s foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, stood before the German Society of Foreign Affairs in Berlin and delivered one of the best speeches of his career.

At the time, the eurozone appeared on the brink of an existential crisis. Sikorski, no stranger to controversy, ventured an idea his more staid colleagues never would have dreamed of suggesting. He called upon Germany, Poland’s traditional antagonist, to awaken from its slumber and lead Europe out of decline. “There is nothing inevitable about Europe’s decline,” Sikorski said: But we are standing on the edge of a precipice. This is the scariest moment of my ministerial life but therefore also the most sublime. I demand of Germany that, for your own sake and for ours, you help [the eurozone] survive and prosper. You know full well that nobody else can do it. I will probably be the first Polish foreign minister in history to say so, but here it is: I fear German power less than I am beginning to fear German inactivity.

The speech made headlines around the world. The Financial Times newspaper ran excerpts as an op-ed article, and Edward Lucas, an editor with the Economist magazine and one of the foremost experts on Central and Eastern Europe, went even so far as to say that it “marked a crucial turning point in European history.”

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What was it that made Sikorski’s speech so impactful? John Richardson, a senior fellow with the German Marshall Fund in Brussels, explained it in these words: “This was the speech of a politician who knows his history, does not want to repeat its mistakes, and has the strength and the clarity of mind to formulate a convincing message of hope for the future based on mutual trust between the European nations, which the crisis has so far called into question.”

But there was more to it than this. As Richardson pointed out, Sikorski’s speech also displayed something painfully absent amid the deepening troubles crippling the eurozone: it was “a demonstration of authority, personality, and charisma.” In other words, it showed leadership.

Leadership is at the heart of effective speechwriting, and it is the subject of this book. The reader should not be surprised to learn that Sikorski, in crafting his speech, consulted Charles Crawford, a fellow Oxonian and Britain’s former ambassador to Poland (2003-07), on matters of style.

While Crawford is quick to acknowledge that the final speech was “very much Sikorski’s own work,” it is clear that the principles it embodies and exemplifies are those described in the pages that follow.

Crawford himself is no stranger to an unconventional but highly effective diplomatic style. During his tenure as Britain’s ambassador to Belgrade, for example, he once borrowed a kangaroo to enliven a commercial reception. But he is also an accomplished master who understands that the key to good speechwriting for leaders lies in a simple maxim—that it is “not what the speaker says, but what the audience hears” that matters.

This book belongs to a long and rich tradition. From the earliest beginnings of civilization, humankind has placed a high value on public speaking. At first learned by practice and example, the art of public speaking (oratory, as the ancients called it) emerged and flourished as a formal discipline in classical Greece as early as Homer in the eighth century B.C. But it was not until the fifth century that the craft of speechwriting began to develop, possibly after Antiphon, an Athenian statesman and one of the ten Attic orators, started writing out speeches for others to memorize and deliver. Since then, countless books on rhetoric have been written to help guide public speakers (and writers) in finding the most effective ways to express themselves and persuade or motivate their audience.

The present work differs from the long list of academic books on the subject. In the first place, it is not simply another guide to rhetorical devices, dryly rehearsing the patterns and figures of speech identified and studied by the Greeks and Romans. This should be evident from the general title Crawford chose for the book: Speeches for Leaders. “Leader” is the operative word, and Crawford examines “how speechwriters help leaders convey (or fail to convey) engaging, memorable messages, and to avoid 2

mistakes that sometimes can be very subtle.” Crawford illustrates his theme with examples drawn from personal experience, and by observations sharpened by three decades in the practice of diplomacy and highlevel public speaking.

In the second place, this book was written with a view to trends in the new millennium toward brevity, personal interchange, and global connectedness. It explores the new challenges (and opportunities) for public speakers that have emerged with the advent of Twitter and social media networking.

The result is a lively, shrewd, and, above all, engrossing practical guide to speechwriting for today’s top-level leaders in all fields—from politics and diplomacy to business and academia. This book is based on the first guide to speechwriting prepared for internal use in the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office. That guide, of course, was authored by Charles Crawford in the late 1980s. Also for the first time, this book makes public numerous Foreign Office cables, obtained under the U.K. Freedom of Information Act, which not only help to illustrate the book’s theme but also shed light on Western diplomacy in Eastern Europe after the Cold War. It is with pleasure that Diplomatic Courier is able to present to you with Speeches for Leaders as part of its diplomatic books series. While this short volume is intended to reward those who read it from start to finish, it is also designed to be used as a reference afterwards. We hope you find the pages that follow as helpful and enjoyable as we do.

Paul Nash Editor

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INTRODUCTION

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n 1984 I returned to London from my first posting in communist Yugoslavia to lead the U.K. Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s (FCO) section dealing with bilateral air services agreements. After a year of this I was summoned to the FCO Personnel Operations Department and asked to consider a new job as official FCO speechwriter. I pointed out that I had never written a speech. Might that not be a disadvantage? “No. Just get on with it. You’ll do fine.”

I duly spent two years as speechwriter for Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe. In the days before word processors, draft speeches would be typed and retyped and retyped. Messengers trundled them to and fro on squeaky blue trolleys to colleagues around the Foreign Office. The FCO Tube Room propelled the drafts to other government departments in compressed-air-powered cylinders that whistled through pipes below Whitehall’s streets.

All this ponderous communication had scarcely changed since the Second World War, or even the First World War. It meant that much FCO speechwriting was all about timing the physical production of new drafts to coincide with the Foreign Secretary’s diary. I worked out that to write a 20-minute speech cast in short sentences of some 12 words each, each sentence would take me 20 minutes to write and process. Happy days.

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Sir Geoffrey Howe was the anti-spin doctor. A speech’s every word had to follow logically from the previous word, with every redundancy cut out.

If drafting the final, perfect version went beyond deadlines needed to get the best lines quoted in the newspapers, too bad. This was frustrating.

One of the few joys for a speechwriter is seeing one’s clever words as used by the leader picked up by the media. And so I learned how to squish maximum meaning into the smallest number of words.

I left the FCO Planning Staff in mid-1987 for Pretoria, in what turned out to be the final years of South Africa’s apartheid regime. I used my final months in London to draft the first-ever FCO Guide to Speechwriting. This guide has gone through changes over the years, not least to remove laborious advice on how to finish a speech on time: golfball typewriters and trolleys have given way to email. Yet core ideas and some passages from the original guide are still in use at the FCO, over 25 years later.

The Guide started with this: A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver (Proverbs 25:11) Great thoughts are not incompatible with simple language. On the contrary, they demand it.

Great speeches convey powerful ideas. They are memorable— and convincing—because they are easy to follow.

Almost none of us can expect to get through life without having to write or deliver a speech or presentation, at work or outside it. But speeches are different from most other writing we do. They are not for reading but for speaking. They are usually not about subtle distinctions. They are about delivering a clear message and a persuasive argument.

Not all speeches are heavyweight policy productions. But any speech must be clear and easily sayable for the leader, and coherent and interesting for the audience. No speech should be boring.

So speechwriting does present a challenge. It requires styles of drafting and thinking not normally used.

That is not a reason to fear or dislike drafting speeches. Speechwriting allows the drafter to float new ideas at the highest level; to distil wisdom from piles of knowledge; to move forward policy. In short, an unusual opportunity to be bold.

To dismay stuffy colleagues, I included praise for the terse drafting style of editorials in the U.K. tabloid newspaper The Sun. I also used gruesome 6

examples from draft speeches prepared by other British diplomats, sometimes much more senior than myself, who thought that a good speech needed florid language to the point of unabashed weirdness: The three countries, Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania, are closely linked by geography, by language, and by history. And it is geography that binds East African countries together.

There is an acceptance that fundamental rethinks in management and government attitudes are possible to achieve.

Czechoslovakia lies on the crossroads of Europe. That is her role.

This must be a turning point in relations between the Islamic world and the West. If we don’t grasp it, there will be the risk of sliding back from what has already been achieved. [Mixed metaphor: you can’t grasp a turning point.]

A country’s foreign policy is only as good as its industry.

In its day this was a groundbreaking piece of work. It seems primitive now: too much focus on drafting tips, rather than what makes a speech a success or a flop on the day. If I were writing it again today, I would include far more on how to convey different subtle messages to specific audiences. That is what leaders aim to do. It’s the focus of this book.

That was the only time in my life when I wrote speeches and very little else. I won an in-house reputation for my feisty approach. During the rest of my FCO career I occasionally was called in to sort out top-level speeches when the system had not delivered something good enough. When in September 1994 British prime minister John Major made the first top U.K. political visit to South Africa after apartheid ended, his speech to Parliament in Cape Town had plenty of input from me. Number 10 quietly asked me to help with this one from my faraway vantage point in the British Embassy in Moscow.

My speechwriting skills moved to a different level when I became British ambassador in (successively) Sarajevo, Belgrade, and Warsaw. I had to prepare keynote speeches for myself and organize events at which British or other ministers or members of the royal family were to speak.

I grasped, as if for the first time, the loneliness of the long-distance leader. A leader gets out of the car at an unfamiliar venue glumly wondering what is going to happen next. She or he is at the mercy of the organizers’ skill (or lack of it) in organizing the event successfully. All the best planning can crash in a moment of exhaustion or stupidity by anyone involved, up to and including the leader who lands in Peru during a hectic tour of South America and publicly proclaims his or her delight at returning to Bolivia.

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*** Every year in November, the FCO holds a memorial ceremony at the Main Staircase for British diplomats who have died in active service. One name engraved on the wall is Charles Morpeth. Charles was a skilful young British diplomat who died in a helicopter crash on a remote mountainside in Bosnia on September 17, 1997; senior German, French, and Polish colleagues from the Office of the High Representative and U.N. Mission to Bosnia and Herzegovina were also lost.

I was ambassador to Sarajevo then. I knew Charles as a fine, trustworthy colleague. The hardest thing I did in my whole diplomatic career was write and then deliver a tribute to Charles at a packed memorial service in Sarajevo Cathedral, with Charles’ parents and wife Helen sitting in the congregation right in front of me.

German Foreign Minister Kinkel gave a powerful speech recalling the contribution of Deputy High Representative Gerd Wagner and the other Germans who had died. I cast my own address to be short and direct. I wanted to send a message of the deepest respect to the Morpeths and all the other bereaved families, but also send a message of principled resolve for all international officials working on Bosnia’s difficult peace-building mission, and indeed for Bosnia’s leaders sitting there in the cathedral: May I add a personal word? I knew only two of the victims.

At a meeting last week I heard yet another ingenious idea for solving this country’s problems. Gerd Wagner insisted that this idea was not consistent with the Bosnian constitution. Gerd wanted this to be a normal law-abiding country. He accepted no shortcuts for the sake of a quick fix. Gerd set us the highest standards.

We dare not let him down.

Charles Morpeth was a British Foreign Office colleague with OHR. He had all the best qualities: he was loyal, perceptive, hardworking, generous, with a wily British sense of humor. Charles and I had discussed how he could bring his wife Helen and daughter Anna to be with him in Sarajevo. Charles, like Gerd and all the others, wanted to give this job 100 percent.

Sometimes our Bosnian friends feel disappointed with international efforts. We too sometimes feel disappointed. But nothing like this has been tried before.

We are doing our best. Now, once again, we have given our best. ***

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I left the Foreign Office in 2007 to start a new private consultancy career, selling my public speaking skills to anyone willing to buy them.

I have taken part in public speaking processes for leaders from all angles and altitudes. I have written speeches for leaders; given keynote speeches myself; and helped organize significant international speaking occasions at high levels of global protocol. I have drafted media versions of speeches and talking points for leaders to use with journalists. I have worked on ambitious policy presentation strategies. More recently, I have given specialist masterclasses in public speaking technique to private and public sector clients around the world.

This book pulls together over 30 years of hard-won operational experience. It draws on examples of speeches given by political, diplomatic, and corporate leaders, many of which I watched. The Appendix includes some of my original Foreign Office cables reporting important speeches. Where I have contributed in one way or another to a speech by a leader mentioned in the text, I make this clear.

Much of what I cover gets into unobvious points of technique. Sometimes pernickety micro-technique. But as one happy customer said to me after I helped her quickly prepare and deliver a nerve-wracking 45-minute keynote address to 300 professional colleagues, “I really like the fact that you are so intolerant on points of detail.”

She was right. I am intolerant on points of detail. I have learned the hard way over many years that all the hard work that goes into completing a speech is as naught if on the day someone gets something wrong.

Speeches are like jigsaws. It’s awful to complete a jigsaw and a couple of pieces are missing. The ugly holes in the jigsaw are what people first notice, and perhaps remember, about all your diligent work.

This is a book about leadership: how leaders use speeches to communicate. In it you’ll find high-level speeches crashing because someone ignored points of detail. You’ll see how clever or imaginative attention to detail helped make a speech special. It’s obvious on the day that a speech has met success or disaster. It’s often not obvious why precisely some speeches work and others go wrong. This book gives answers.

I have not cluttered the text by giving too many references to original versions of speeches quoted in the book. It is rarely clear how far any such text, authorized or official or otherwise, coincides with what the leader actually said in the speech on the day. Versions of the speeches I mention are available via Internet searches.

Anyone who is already a leader or working in any leadership role, or hoping to move onwards and upwards into leadership, will find plenty new here. So will professional speechwriters and people working in a leader’s 9

office. Likewise, that much wider group of people called upon to draft a speech or PowerPoint presentation for their boss. And people worrying about getting up in front of an audience to give a speech themselves— yes, people preparing for job interviews or for nerve-wracking speeches at weddings. Plenty for everyone.

Charles Crawford Oxfordshire, England Summer 2015

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1. MORE, Please

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A Public Speaking Horror Story

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n this book I endorse and aim to build on the message of the fine book by Frank Luntz on speechwriting and public messaging, Words that Work: It’s Not What You Say—It’s What People Hear.

Leaders want an audience to leave with a glow of satisfaction or inspiration: That person was good. I’ll be pleased to listen to him or her again. As well as the explicit message in the speech they have heard something subliminal: More, please.

Horrible failures are always more interesting than triumphs, in public speaking as in everything else. Forget More, please. You want an example of an audience going home thinking: Awful! Never again! Seek no further.

We are in the Sarajevo Holiday Inn in late 1997, two years after the Dayton peace accords. This hotel had been built for the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympic Games. Its bright yellow and brown facade and gruesome purple furnishings are high communist kitsch, an unmissable target for the Bosnian Serbs besieging the city during the Bosnian conflict a decade later.

As 1997 ends and Sarajevo recovers from war, those aesthetic glories of Yugoslav socialist self-management are being meticulously restored.

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Several hundred senior Bosnian figures and international officials are gathered in the main hotel reception room, waiting for the two guest leaders. France’s foreign minister, Hubert Védrine, and Germany’s foreign minister, Klaus Kinkel, are paying a joint visit to Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Kinkel and Védrine mean to use this occasion to urge Bosnian leaders to set aside their vexing political differences and unite to rebuild the country, using generous support from European Union taxpayers. France and Germany went through a devastating war, yet now work closely in friendship. Let this example shine for the Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats of Bosnia!

Verily this joint visit culminating in the ministers’ keynote speeches epitomizes reconciliation and partnership in modern Europe!

What can go wrong? Everything.

The audience arrives in good time to find that people are expected to hear the leaders’ speeches standing, not sitting. Drinks are served. Noisy, good-humored conversation gathers pace. The two leaders arrive. A more or less respectful silence descends. It has been decided (no doubt for cost and other practical reasons) not to give such a large audience headphones for simultaneous interpreting. Instead, the speeches will be interpreted consecutively: the leader speaks, then the interpreter interprets.

Minister Védrine is introduced. He starts to speak in French. He and his adjacent interpreter each have a microphone, but the podium is not pronounced. The room is large and bland: difficult for the leader to dominate.

Védrine and his team have given no thought to how to deliver this speech through consecutive interpreting to a big audience that is standing up and, for the most part, does not understand French. His speech is not too long. Maybe 10 minutes. But with interpreting that stretches to 20 minutes. He aims to inspire the audience towards modern European cooperation and new post-war optimism, but he delivers his speech in dull, long French paragraphs. The interpreter does well to remember and convey in no less dull, long Bosnian paragraphs everything he has said.

Védrine’s speech meanders on. It is not long before some people at the back of the room conclude, not unreasonably, that Védrine and the interpreter are saying nothing to interest them. They resume chatting quietly among themselves. This has a disconcerting effect. Those standing immediately in front of the two leaders pretend to listen politely. But as more and more people at the back of the room ignore Védrine and start whispering to each other, the large group in the middle feel uncomfortable. As does Herr Kinkel, watching in dismay as the worthy European message of his distinguished French colleague is ignored by a small but growing part of the audience.

After a painful 20 minutes or so, Védrine’s speech ends to fitful ap14

plause. Herr Kinkel takes over. His speech, too, is delivered in lengthy German passages followed by lengthy translations in Bosnian from the interpreter. This way of doing it destroys any sense of conversation between leader and audience.

By now the massed Bosnians at the back of the room are openly talking and ignoring the leader. Kinkel can not but take their chattering as Balkan disrespect for munificent Modern Europe. He starts to sound angry, raising his voice, straining to command attention. But Bosnians have long memories of Nazi atrocities during the Second World War. They are unimpressed when Germans speak loudly at them.

An appalling sonic arms race ensues. Kinkel is determined to drown out the insolent Bosnians. The bored Bosnians are no less keen to drown out that annoying German man at the other end of the room who is spoiling the reception by making such a noise. My subsequent telegram to the Foreign Office in London recorded this amazing scene: It also is striking how diplomatically ineffective our main European partners seem here. The Védrine/Kinkel visit here last week seemed to sum things up, in presentational terms at least.

At the large Holiday Inn reception for the visitors with a toplevel turnout of Bosnian, Serb, and Croat leaders, Védrine’s tame speech was the normal Dayton platitudes. Kinkel delivered an energetic address on the general lines of “We have done a lot for you!

You shall be grateful! And cooperate!”

Stirring stuff, but not enough to enthuse the Bosnian audience, many of whom rudely carried on talking among themselves while it was delivered.1 A grimly instructive diplomatic fiasco. But where precisely did the two countries’ leaders and their support teams of supposedly clever diplomats get things wrong?

It’s obvious. Before their visit, the intelligent effort had been devoted to crafting the words of the speeches. The ministers and their respective offices and embassies in Sarajevo had thought about themselves, not about the audience. They had ignored the core question: how will these speeches work for that audience in that room on that day?

What makes a leader’s speech work on the day is not only the words and messages themselves, but also the way in which the words reach the audience. It’s courteous to give a standing audience a short, punchy 1.

See the Appendix for my FCO cable reporting this episode.

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speech. An audience sitting down is more comfortable. It can cope with something longer and thoughtful.

Remember, a 10-minute speech becomes a 20-minute or even longer speech when delivered through an interpreter. Two 10-minute speeches plus consecutive interpreting are a miserable 40-minute slog. This is a very long time for people to stand and listen and try to absorb the words when, for precisely half the time, they do not know what is being said, and when the substance is fairly trite anyway.

Could Kinkel and VĂŠdrine have done this event successfully, conveying memorable messages and showing their own moral and political leadership? Yes, in two ways.

First, they should have told their teams to write and format the two speeches so that on the day they would deliver them through the interpreter mostly sentence by sentence. This would create a direct sense of conversation with the audience, whose minds would have stayed engaged on the leader, not on the discomfort of standing to listen. (More about this in the chapter on Interpreting.)

Second, the two leaders needed to coordinate their contributions to keep them short, sharp, and mutually coherent. Why not be bold and have only one speech, with the two leaders taking turns to deliver sections of it in their two languages? Delivering one speech in this novel shared way would keep the audience interested and alert. And it would, itself, symbolize high-level cooperation and trust. The problem? Writing and choreographing a speech in that way requires a lot of extra work, plus a creative self-awareness conspicuously absent in the high chancelleries of Europe (and, as far as I can see, almost everywhere else).

In all public speaking, it’s not what you say, it’s what they hear that matters. In war-weary Sarajevo in 1997, the Bosnian elite did not hear these two European leaders give an inspiring message of united purpose.

They heard disjointedness, discomfort, and tedium. They heard irrelevance, even patronizing discourtesy. An expensive and embarrassing missed opportunity.

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A leader’s basic message: more please

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eaders and their teams can get bogged down in the detailed drafting of a speech and the cleverness of its ideas. Yes, the words matter. But what matters far more is the mood the words create for the occasion concerned, and how that mood is captured and remembered. If the leader sums up in one word the emotional message that he or she wants the audience to take from the speech, what word might that be? Optimism. Somber. Thoughtful.

Questioning. Determined. Bold. Courage. Radical. Stop–Enough! Change.

Hope.

When in doubt about the right emotional message and how to create it, a smart leader falls back on the default message that any audience should take away from any speech: More, please. Leader. The world’s greatest speeches (Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” or Ronald Reagan’s “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”) were great precisely because they captured something simple but emotionally powerful. They projected unambiguous leadership.

Barack Obama’s first presidential election campaign in 2008 created 17

overwhelming momentum around the idea that he himself represented Hope! And Change! The sheer human simplicity of these words opened endless options for conveying subtle subtexts to different sections of the electorate simultaneously. Even the grammar of Hope and Change is craftily ambiguous. Nouns? Or verbs? Does anyone remember the campaign slogan of his Republican rival John McCain? Did he have one?

A typical business or political or NGO event features a succession of more or less forgettable speeches and presentations. Those speeches that stand out are are different. They do something unexpected, or otherwise catch the audience’s attention. They leave the audience feeling positive about the speaker. They leave the audience wanting more. It’s a fine result for a rising political leader when a speech wins a standing ovation and then catches the headlines with pundits opining on some new ideas or new emphasis. Voters hear “At last – someone saying what we think! She/ he gets my vote. More, please.”

It’s a good result for a business leader when the audience is impressed with his or her presentation of the company’s latest results and gives it warm applause. The best result has that applause plus key journalists making a note to get the leader to an early quiet lunch, and wily headhunters in the audience placing that executive high on their list for the next top appointment. That is more likely to happen if the speech pushes detail and knowledge to one side and focuses instead on sharing wisdom.

Managers know things. Leaders understand things: Today I’m not going to waste your time telling you what my company does, or how it does it. Or how good we are.

You know most of this already. And it’s on the Internet.

Instead I’m going to look inwards, and I’m going to look outwards.

I’m going to give you two reasons why we are doing so well.

And two reasons why we plan to make some big changes because we are doing so well.

Leaders (and especially speechwriters) often overestimate the capacity of an audience to remember and understand facts and details as delivered in a closely turned argument. How many times have we heard the weather forecast on radio or TV and at the end of minutes of extended blather found ourselves wondering: But is it going to rain tomorrow?

A sobering self-discipline for a leader is to find a member of the audience a little while after a speech is given and ask what that person remembers from it. More often than not, the reply is a blank look. If something specific is remembered (and remembered accurately) it usually has an obvious human interest of some sort: the real-life story, the vivid exam18

ple, an item the leader held up for the audience to see. Insofar as people remember a major point made in the speech, they typically remember it in the context of the tone the leader used in making it.

The cruel fact is that most people tune out during dull speeches and presentations. This explains why so many PowerPoint-type presentations are deemed to be awful. The presenters overload the presentation with information, and then become its prisoners: too many words and arrows and zany animation effects and flow-charts, but not enough striking pictures or simple ideas. Information overwhelms insight.

Armed to the teeth with books about speechwriting that point out that audiences have only a limited capacity to absorb and remember information, leaders and speechwriters over-steer and swerve off the other side of the road. They produce dumbed-down material that treats the audience as halfwits.

U.K. Labor Party leader Ed Miliband’s 2011 party conference speech mentioned the words value and values a staggering 40 times. Yes, in case we were wondering, he wanted to give us a message about the Labor Party and its values. But doesn’t a speech that repeats the word “values” like a parrot on autopilot in fact become—how shall we say—valueless?

By contrast, read the legendary “I have a dream” speech by Martin Luther King. It soared to greatness because it eschewed trivial language (and because the “I have a dream” peroration in fact was improvised on the day). People have searched this speech for the secret of its motive power.

The pounding repetitions and alliterations, the imagery, the abrupt leaps of language: We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now.

This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off, or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.

Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice.

What an unsettling phrase: “the fierce urgency of now.”

It’s easy to find in this speech plentiful examples of tricks of rhetoric that the ancient Greeks categorized so exhaustively. Forget them. They flow naturally with intelligent speech. What’s more interesting is the heaviness of much of the language: In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check.

When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of 19

the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.”

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we’ve come to cash this check—a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice…

The words are difficult, even cumbersome (“in a sense,” “fall heir,” “default,” “promissory note,” “insofar,” “vaults,” “insufficient”). Would any speechwriter today write something like that to open a front-rank address before a vast audience?

No. The emphasis now is on simplicity and accessibility: being understood, especially by focus groups. (Quick, check on the latest fancy readability parameters how my draft speech measures up to the comprehension of the average teenager.)

This speech-of-speeches shows a man standing before a mass of people, many of whom are far less educated and less articulate than he is.

He is, above all, authentic. He takes responsibility for his words. He knows and loves words, and he is comfortable using complex imagery and language to build his argument. He speaks as himself, not dumbing down his language in a patronizing way, even at the cost of not being fully understood at each phrase: You asked me to speak to you. Well, here I am, long words and all!

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Leaders’ Speeches: Risk and Responsibility

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ublic speaking for leaders is different. Why? Because it pushes issues of risk and responsibility right to the fore.

When I am asked to coach someone to improve public speaking technique or prepare a significant speech I ask two questions. First: I’ve watched some of your speeches on YouTube. Do you want me to be honest with you in saying what I think? [They of course answer in the affirmative.]

The second question, much harder than the first, is: How good do you want to get? Do you want to be the best speaker on the day? Or the best in your organization? Or an industry thought-leader? Or one of the best speakers in the world, a TED Talks star performer?

This second question prompts a long pause. It’s one thing listening 21

privately to someone being honest with you. It’s quite another thing to be honest about yourself.

How far do you really want to stand out from the crowd? What if your close colleagues and best friends start to think you’re showing off? What if you try something new and risky but it fails and leaves you embarrassed?

What if you try something risky and it works triumphantly, so that you get offered that top position—are you ready for that new responsibility?

These are genuinely difficult questions for anyone. They go right to the heart of a person and his or her private risk-taking instincts, ambitions, and hopes.

Many prominent leaders are risk averse. Did anyone mention Hillary Clinton? They aim patiently to build up a credible public persona that offers as few as possible new areas of attack. A few bland but positive headlines are far better than negative stories and awkward photographs presenting words or gestures in a speech as inappropriate, even if in the room on the day they worked pretty well for the audience concerned.

Let’s look at four speeches that deliberately took risks, and succeeded.

Ronald Reagan “Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

As audacious messages in modern political speeches go, that one from President Ronald Reagan at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate on June 12, 1987 stands alone. Yet, amazing as it may seem now, plenty of people, up towards the very top of the Reagan administration, warned against these words and offered language that was less confrontational or provocative.

The gripping story of how the speech came to be delivered in its final version has been told by Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson.2 Here he describes a rival passage sent by the U.S. embassy in Berlin: The draft the diplomat in Berlin submitted, for example, contained the line, “One day, this ugly wall will disappear.” If the diplomat’s line was acceptable, I wondered at first, what was wrong with mine?

Then I looked at the diplomat’s line once again. “One day?” One day the lion would lie down with the lamb, too, but you wouldn’t want to hold your breath. “This ugly wall will disappear?” What did Peter Robinson. “‘Tear Down This Wall’: How Top Advisers Opposed Reagan’s Challenge to Gorbachev—But Lost.” Prologue 39.2 (2007).

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that mean? That the wall would just get up and slink off of its own accord? The wall would disappear only when the Soviets knocked it down or let somebody else knock it down for them, but “this ugly wall will disappear” ignored the question of human agency altogether.

What State and the NSC were saying, in effect, was that the President could go ahead and issue a call for the destruction of the wall—but only if he employed language so vague and euphemistic that everybody could see right away he didn’t mean it….

[W]hen the State Department and National Security Council tried to block my draft by submitting alternate drafts, they weakened their own case. Their speeches were drab. They were bureaucratic. They lacked conviction.

What? Draft speeches from officials sounding drab, bureaucratic, and lacking conviction?

There is an absolutely central leadership point here. A speech belongs to the leader, not to the speechwriter and flocks of clucking officials. The leader is paid to use judgment on how and when to be bold and take risks.

Maybe this is in fact the greatest weight of leadership: getting such calculations of risk right, time and again.

President Reagan thought long and hard. Then he took personal responsibility for what he was going to say: Reagan asked Duberstein’s advice. Duberstein replied that he thought the line about tearing down the wall sounded good. “But I told him, ‘You’re President, so you get to decide’.”

“And then,” Duberstein recalls, “he got that wonderful, knowing smile on his face, and he said, ‘Let’s leave it in.’”

And the speech made history.

Radek Sikorski These days, few speeches by European foreign ministers make headlines round the world. Most of what they have to say is over-processed and predictable, aimed not to inspire an audience but rather to keep in step with other European capitals. Plus, senior diplomats and politicians are reluctant to use speeches to give other countries unpopular or unwelcome messages. If this has to be done, much better to do it privately in small high-level meetings: avoid unseemly controversy that might make a difficult situation worse. We know this in our own lives. It’s much easier 23

to accept frank criticism in private than in front of others.

The speech by Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski in Berlin in November 2011 about the troubles in the eurozone was a mighty exception.3 It achieved global coverage because it was lively and thought provoking, and because it had powerful and uncompromising messages. It was different.

Radek Sikorski spoke directly to the German government and people in Berlin. He told his audience that the situation facing the eurozone required everyone to move to a higher level of seriousness, and that this meant frank speaking. A subliminal message here was respect for the audience: We are all grown-ups facing grown-up problems. Let’s talk like grown-ups for a change. This thought was conveyed using a not-quite-so-subliminal message: The eurozone needs you Germans to accept the burden of paying a lot more of your money into helping out less disciplined eurozone countries.

Here is the key passage: What, as Poland’s foreign minister, do I regard as the biggest threat to the security and prosperity of Poland today, on 28th November 2011?

It’s not terrorism, it’s not the Taliban, and it’s certainly not German tanks. It’s not even Russian missiles, which President Medvedev has just threatened to deploy on the E.U.’s border.

The biggest threat to the security and prosperity of Poland would be the collapse of the eurozone.

And I demand of Germany that, for your own sake and for ours, you help it survive and prosper. You know full well that nobody else can do it.

“I demand of Germany…” Note how such a giddy touch gives the passage and what follows all the more impact: I will probably be the first Polish foreign minister in history to say so, but here it is: I fear German power less than I am beginning to fear German inactivity.

You have become Europe’s indispensable nation. You may not fail to lead. Not dominate, but to lead in reform.

Provided you include us in decision-making, Poland will support you.

I supported Sikorski’s team in working on the language and structure of this speech. The final version was very much his own.

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The world’s media quoted the superb sentence about fearing German inactivity rather than German power, but usually ignored the policy sting in the tail: “Provided you include us in decision-making, Poland will support you.”

Here Sikorski is reminding his domestic Polish audience (and Berlin) that in all this highfalutin eurozone talk he has not lost sight of Poland’s core strategic goal: if Poland is to support strategic decisions affecting Poland and Europe, Warsaw must be at or very close to the top table when those decisions are taken.

Sikorski likewise used this speech in Berlin to send sharp words to London: Which brings me to the issue of whether an important member, Britain, can support reform.

You have given the Union its common language. The Single Market was largely your brilliant idea. A British commissioner runs our diplomacy. You could lead Europe on defense. You are an indispensable link across the Atlantic.

On the other hand, the eurozone’s collapse would hugely harm your economy. Also, your total sovereign, corporate and household debt exceeds 400 percent of GDP. Are you sure markets will always favor you?

We would prefer you in, but if you can’t join, please allow us to forge ahead.

And please start explaining to your people that European decisions are not Brussels’ diktats but results of agreements in which you freely participate.

These passages worked because they emerged fluently from the rest of the speech. By steadily building a strong, frank pro-European argument as the speech unfolded, Sikorski created the right intellectual and emotional space to use unconventional, ‘undiplomatic’ language.

This speech is also notable for its obvious personal touches that show how Sikorski himself crafted the speech and fine-tuned the political risks it involved. “I demand of Germany!” A mere foreign minister does not get more audacious or even arrogant and insolent than that.

The concluding passage had a strange, self-indulgent phrase: But we are standing on the edge of a precipice. This is the scariest moment of my ministerial life, but therefore also the most sublime.

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Future generations will judge us by what we do, or fail to do.

Whether we lay the foundations for decades of greatness, or shirk our responsibility and acquiesce in decline.

As a Pole and a European, here in Berlin, I say: the time to act is now.

What did this speech achieve? It shifted the tone of the eurozone debate. Precisely because the speech was written and delivered in such unusually blunt terms, it was quoted round the world. It was also attacked.

Many Germans thought it more than annoying that Sikorski had used a prominent occasion in their own capital to tell Germany about its responsibilities to spend German taxpayers’ money to bail out feckless foreigners. Back in Poland Sikorski’s political opponents (and even some political allies) complained that such a forthright speech should not have been given without greater consultation within the Polish government.

One way or the other, this speech took risks. It therefore showed leadership—by Sikorski and by Poland. Sikorski duly joined the list of Foreign Policy magazine’s Top 100 Global Thinkers in 2012.

George Soros The problems of the eurozone give speechwriting specialists many fascinating opportunities, as the range of problems is so vast: technical, political, generational, moral, existential. Fixing the eurozone requires decisions about the very nature of money itself. This takes us back to first principles of economics and politics—if we can agree what those principles are.

The eurozone speech in April 2013 by George Soros was another masterful example of how to send tough messages to different audiences, but (again) above all to Germany. The rhetorical skill of this speech lay in how he made his preferred conclusion seem calm and reasonable, by whittling down the arguments against it. He even threw in the heresy that maybe Germany should leave the eurozone and allow the remaining countries to issue eurobonds.

The emotional heart of the speech is here: I reflected long and hard whether I should present my case now or wait until after the elections. In the end I decided to go ahead, based on two considerations.

One is that events have their own dynamics and the crisis is likely to become more acute even before the elections. The Cyprus rescue proved me right.

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The other is that my interpretation of events is so radically different from the one that prevails in Germany that it will take time for it to sink in and the sooner I start the better.

He concluded in a generous, reaching-out way that allowed those in Germany who might utterly disagree with him to change their minds graciously: But I may be too rational in my analysis.

The European Union is conflated with the euro not only in popular narratives but also in law. Consequently the European Union may not survive Germany leaving the euro. In that case we must all do what we can to persuade the German public to abandon some of its most ingrained prejudices and misconceptions and accept eurobonds.

I should like to end by emphasizing how important the European Union is not only for Europe, but for the world.

The E.U. was meant to be the embodiment of the principles of open society. That means that perfect knowledge is unattainable.

Nobody is free of prejudices and misconceptions; nobody should be blamed for having made mistakes.

The blame or Schuld begins only when a mistake or misconception is identified but not corrected. That is when the principles on which the European Union was built are betrayed.

It is in that spirit that Germany should agree to eurobonds and save the European Union.

Emma Watson In 2014 British actor Emma Watson gave a short speech at the United Nations on gender issues, which made headlines around the world.

She started by saying something stark and uncompromising about feminism that most people in the audience (and also many feminists who later watched or read the speech) were definitely not expecting, and maybe did not like at all: Today we are launching a campaign called for “HeForShe.�

I am reaching out to you because we need your help. We want to end gender inequality—and to do this, we need everyone involved.

This is the first campaign of its kind at the U.N. We want to try 27

and galvanize as many men and boys as possible to be advocates for change. And we don’t just want to talk about it. We want to try and make sure that it’s tangible.

I was appointed as Goodwill Ambassador for U.N. Women six months ago and the more I spoke about feminism, the more I realized that fighting for women’s rights has too often become synonymous with man-hating.

If there is one thing I know for certain, it is that this has to stop.

She also finished strongly, ‘owning’ possible criticism of herself as a mere young film star and using it to reinforce her message. Note the power of finishing with a question: You might be thinking, “Who is this Harry Potter girl, and what is she doing speaking at the U.N.?” And it’s a really good question.

I’ve been asking myself the same thing…

In my nervousness for this speech and in my moments of doubt I’ve told myself firmly, “If not me, who? If not now, when?”

If you have similar doubts when opportunities are presented to you, I hope those words will be helpful.

Because the reality is that if we do nothing, it will take 75 years, or for me to be nearly a hundred, before women can expect to be paid the same as men for the same work. 15.5 million girls will be married in the next 16 years as children. And at current rates it won’t be until 2086 before all rural African girls can have a secondary education.

If you believe in equality, you might be one of those inadvertent feminists that I spoke of earlier. And for this, I applaud you.

We are struggling for a uniting word, but the good news is we have a uniting movement. It is called HeForShe. I am inviting you to step forward, to be seen, and to ask yourself, “If not me, who? If not now, when?”

Thank you very, very much. *** These four outstanding speeches, in their different ways, come across as unusually personal. In each case, the speaker gave an explicit commitment to a strong, unqualified policy position that many smart people if not close colleagues would find annoying or just plain wrong. But that’s 28

what gave these speeches their power. By talking frankly from both heart and head, and taking huge reputational risks in doing so, the speaker showed leadership, as though saying: I want you to be quite clear on one thing. I feel so strongly about this issue that I’m putting my own reputation on the line by making this speech.

My sense of personal responsibility gives me no choice here.

Deal with it.

Speeches of this magnitude soar above the pay-grade of the typical speechwriting team. Yes, words can be served up and fine-tuned to what the leader wants. But there comes a point when the leader has to own the product, and the risk. The leader is probably the only person in the speech-production chain who knows top colleagues around the world, and so can judge how best to finesse the language for key target individuals.

Indeed, the leader may be agreeing to deliver such a speech as part of an esoteric understanding with other leaders.

Likewise, the leader might run one or two of the boldest passages privately past key colleagues, or at least alert them to the fact that a punchy speech is about to be delivered that may put them under public pressure to respond. Leaders can put up with almost anything said by other leaders, even when it is directly disobliging. What infuriates them is hearing these disobliging messages for the first time through the media, rather than from someone they thought was a trusted colleague or even a friend.

They feel let down or betrayed.

Note that at the levels of top diplomatic technique one leader can send another a clear if implicit message by not sharing in advance key elements of a controversial speech: Angela, usually we warn each other about a speech that may cause problems. This time I deliberately did not do so. I know that you’ll feel let down, and that we’re going to have a bumpy patch for a while.

How all this works in practice depends on how far the leader trusts and works with her or his own team. Basically, the tougher the public message and the more risky it is for a leader to deliver it, the more closely any leader will hold it before striding to the public platform.

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2. Leadership and tone

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Getting the Right Tone

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t’s not what you say—it’s what they hear. An audience hears the subliminal tone of the occasion, and the way the leader deals with it, including any mishaps.

Audiences can’t (and don’t) disentangle the intellectual message of a speech from the emotional impact the leader makes on the day.

The supreme art of a fine speech or presentation lies in making sure that everything fits like a jigsaw: words, audience, occasion, context, message, and, last but not least, the emotional tone.

Speeches tend to fall flat or even end up being disastrous failures when the speaker misreads the tone of an occasion, causing offense or just sheer bewilderment. The speaker perhaps is trying to be solemn but sounds flippant, attempting to be too serious when the occasion requires light touch, or making an effort to be amusing but fails (e.g., telling smutty or otherwise insensitive jokes at a wedding or funeral). The speaker may be abusing a private function to say obnoxious things that he or she would not say in public. Or perhaps the speaker may be reaching the truly ruin31

ous point of sounding callous or self-absorbed when the audience wants to hear that you care.

As the later chapter on Humor describes, we British have some strict cultural norms. One of them has it that after-dinner speeches need to be, above all, amusing. They need jokes. Serious points are welcome, as long as they are delivered with dashes of light amusement and if possible wit.

A speech that says all the right things in policy terms but is not funny will be received politely enough, but inwardly the audience will shed a bitter tear of disappointment. An opportunity to make a true leadership impact will be missed.

I watched Radek Sikorski give a keynote speech at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, a grand setting for his after-dinner black-tie address to an international audience of some 600 senior professional experts from all walks of life.4 His speech was written to press the case for the United Kingdom staying within the European Union as a full, enthusiastic member. He structured it by setting up and demolishing a series of British Euro-myths.

All nicely done.

Alas, the speech did not rise to the occasion when it came to the jokes and humor. He did not get the large audience roaring with laughter and willing him on. I had the impression that his support team had not wanted to take risks, or had steered him in that direction. The result was that the speech won some good headlines in British and European newspapers, but on the night it was disconcertingly flat, despite its rather provocative message.

In the following question-and-answer session no one asked about the speech, but instead people raised wider international security issues. Mr. Sikorski then captured their full attention, replying with his usual sardonic insight and unexpected turns of phrase and so winning warmer applause.

It was as if the audience sensed that, in the speech itself, he had been talking mainly for the record, not for them.

In short, tone is tricky. Some subliminal messages concerning tone and the speaker’s response to it may be beyond the leader’s ready ability to control. Some can be changed. Margaret Thatcher used professional voice trainers to change her public speaking style, in particular to lower a little the pitch of her voice. By sounding (as some people thought, perhaps betraying their own sexist instincts) less ‘shrill’ and ‘bossy’, she subtly reframed the way she came across to the public.

Note that in practice it often doesn’t matter much if a speech has significant failings, as long as it gets the tone more or less right. Most 4.

I contributed some language to Mr. Sikorski’s team for this speech, including jokes (which were not used).

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speeches aren’t perfect. Many are awful. Yet life goes on. Audiences listening to speeches by political, religious, or business leaders tend to be passively tolerant. They want to feel part of a distinguished occasion, so they are not over-critical.

A specialist audience may need to hear that the leader has respected their expertise by engaging with them at the highest professional level, even if they disagree with the arguments the leader uses. Likewise, a banal or inept speech may be scarcely noticed by the audience if the leader is sufficiently famous and uses dreary material with charm, energy, and humor. Spin-doctors hover with the media to talk up the key passages and to sniff out any criticisms, neutralising them immediately if possible.

Cynical chatterati and people like me may find plenty of things wrong with the speech, once it is out on the Internet. But who in the immediate audience cares, if the leader has made a couple of good jokes or told a touching story?

That said, leaders don’t want to annoy an audience and provoke sharp criticism from smart analysts by using stupid words, or saying stupid things, or making a subtly disappointing impression on intelligent people.

They know that the key aim of a speech is not to transmit information, but rather to work with the tone of an event and, perhaps, redefine it on their terms. *** The finest example I ever saw of a speaker working with the tone of an occasion to fine effect was in 1988, in the gloomy setting of South Africa’s apartheid-era Supreme Court in Bloemfontein. The case of the Sharpeville Six (six South Africans sentenced to death for the “common purpose” murder of a local township official) had reached the top of the apartheid legal system. The case was attracting global indignation.

As a U.K. diplomat (and barrister manqué) I attended the Supreme Court hearing to watch the proceedings. Sir Sydney Kentridge Q.C. had taken on the task of representing the accused. How, I wondered, would he tackle this one? Every anti-apartheid activist on earth wanted him to give a merciless rhetorical demolition of the apartheid regime.

What Sydney Kentridge did that day on behalf of his clients was powerfully subtle. He rose to speak. In a few dramatic sentences he mastered the courtroom. Not by attacking apartheid. He did not mention the word.

Rather, he described in understated, horrifying, and heart-wrenching detail what had happened to Mr. Dlamini as he was beaten then burned alive by that Sharpeville crowd.

He established his personal credibility in the courtroom by showing full respect for the court, by explicitly acknowledging the ghastly crime 33

for what it was. Sydney Kentridge then began to spread questions and doubts about the legitimacy of those six death sentences. Like the priest in an Orthodox church swinging the incense jar to and fro, he steadily produced puffs of doubt on the facts and their interpretation.

Sydney Kentridge aimed not to deliver a knockout argument in favor of acquittal (as on the legal merits under the former South African system there wasn’t one these judges would find convincing), but rather to create a strong sense that to uphold the convictions would be just plain wrong. He did not rail against the perniciousness of apartheid: this was not an occasion for that. He focused instead on working with the tone of the occasion to make the best possible legal case on behalf of his clients. The court listened carefully but turned down the appeal, ingeniously though the case for the accused had been made. President P.W. Botha promptly rescinded the death penalties. The six received long prison sentences instead.

What do we learn from this superb example to help our public-speaking technique match the tone of the occasion? One of my favorite lessons: less is more. *** Two examples showing how not to do it.

In 2010 the U.K.’s Lord Mandelson, as secretary of state for business, innovation, and skills, visited India and delivered a keynote speech intended to praise India’s fast-growing ‘emerging’ economy: For a couple of years up until about the middle of last year there was a debate going on in the financial services sector and in the financial media over the extent to which the emerging economies—including India, of course—had ‘decoupled’ from the developed world. …I welcome the fact that the Indian government remains so committed to liberalization of its financial, legal, and accountancy sectors, which will be an important contributor to attracting the foreign investment it wants for its large infrastructure projects.

The Indian knowledge economy has ambitions to cater for a global market. The expansion of Indian manufacturing, which the government rightly sees as central to defining India’s future place in global value chains, will be built on the further opening up of the Indian market to industrial imports.

Hmm. This sort of thing is really hard to do without sounding subtly, 34

or not so subtly, patronizing. Loftily “welcoming” what other countries or cultures believe, or are committed to, or see as their ambitions, almost invariably leaves a leader sounding like a benevolent but tedious schoolteacher handing out small candies to children for good work. The audience, in this case a senior Indian audience listening with intense attention to anything that might sound patronizing from a high politician from the former colonial power, instinctively heard condescending—go away!

After Lord Mandelson departed, a senior Indian leader soon had the audience laughing as he mocked Mandelson’s patronizing style and banal substance: We look at the U.K. and see it as a sub-merging economy! *** For a top-end case study in getting tone and substance completely wrong, it’s hard to beat the bizarre address by President Putin in 2005 at the ceremony to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

He used his speech to press sundry post-Soviet hardline talking-points: Auschwitz does not just appeal to our memory, it appeals to our reason. Here, on this earth, soaked in blood and the ashes of victims of Nazism, we can truly see the future that fascism was preparing for Europe…

And here, on this tortured earth, we must say clearly and simply: any attempts to rewrite history, to put victims and executioners, liberators and occupiers on the same level, are immoral and incompatible with the thinking of people who consider themselves Europeans.

His message here? Despite the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the sheer scale of the horror committed by the Nazi and Soviet regimes, it’s immoral to compare Nazi concentration camps with Soviet gulags, or Nazism with Communism. Most normal people believe that it’s immoral not to compare them.

On he went: We pay tribute to the courage of Soviet soldiers, 600,000 of whom gave their lives for the liberation of Poland. And we will never forget that the Soviet Union paid the most terrible, impossibly high price for this victory—27 million lives!

Ridiculous propaganda. Poland was not “liberated” by the Red Army. It was subjugated for over 40 years.

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He concluded on an inappropriate, irrelevant note: But today we must not just remember the past, but recognize all the threats of the modern world, one of which is terrorism…

Thousands of innocent people have already become its victims.

Just as there could not be good or bad Nazis, so there cannot be good or bad terrorists. Double standards are not only unacceptable here. They are deadly dangerous for civilization.

Weary Soviet-style sophistry.

Leaders: If you’re making a speech at Auschwitz when elderly concentration camp survivors are sitting a few yards away in the icy cold, it’s never about you.5

See the Appendix for my FCO cable reporting the Auschwitz ceremony and speeches.

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A Speech is a Conversation, Not a Lecture

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speech is not a lecture. Who wants to listen to a human fax machine emitting a prepared text? Or, even worse, watch someone staring at a screen and reading out dull PowerPoint slides?

Nor is a speech acting, where the leader rehearses every line and nuance and gesture in advance.

In 2010 I gave a TEDx presentation in Krakow on the Physics of Diplomacy. It’s on YouTube. It went well enough, despite some strangled opening lines in Polish. Afterwards, someone asked me how often I rehearsed such presentations. She was startled when I said that not only did I not rehearse, I found it hard to imagine how anyone could rehearse. Would orating mightily to oneself in front of the bathroom mirror really help?

The audience wants to listen to you being yourself on the day as best you can, not to someone pretending to be you, or to you pretending to be someone else. A successful speech is not an exercise in acting. Watch 37

some acclaimed TEDx talks. It’s easy to spot where a speaker is giving a tightly rehearsed performance: acting, instead of talking to the audience.

I’m now a hardened public speaking pro. Many people feel queasy at the thought of getting up in front of even a small crowd. The answer to that is some quiet public speaking coaching to master the basics and help work up good content, but not to rehearse in a mechanical sense. Above all, you need to be confident in the substance and message of the speech or presentation. Rehearsing in this sense—mastering strong content and thinking hard about how to deliver it to best effect—is essential. You want the audience to hear your confidence.

In short, a good speech is a conversation between leader and audience that is interesting and accessible on a human level. Only speaking naturally achieves that. For the most part, the leader is the only one actually talking during that conversation. But as the speech unfolds, the audience replies in all sorts of non-verbal ways: laughter, smiles, applause, frowns, puzzled looks, boos, snores, texting, Tweeting. Adding some real-life experiences or telling a story to illustrate the theme helps; the speaker is familiar enough with the story not to need detailed notes. A leader rarely goes wrong by introducing a human touch.

Thus the plight of the leader’s speeches team. The best conversation is engaging because it has spontaneity, and a sense of surprise and interest. A pre-prepared written speech is by definition not a conversation. The more a speech is scripted in advance, even if it is written in a folksy style, the less space the leader has for spontaneity on the day.

A blight of modern leadership is that too many speeches are indeed written, and then used by a leader on the day as the main source of words.

In most speeches it does not matter if the leader departs from a prepared text. In fact, the speech might well make the most impact precisely when the leader goes off script. But it’s painful to watch a leader with a prepared text have a new thought during a speech and come to life as a person, talking strongly to an audience straight from heart or brain, then slump back into the turgid prepared text.

Emotional engagement is achieved—and then abruptly ebbs away.

The audience hears the leader’s unhappiness, and their own.

Top speechwriters, such as those working for President Obama, have learned how to serve up words on the page that seem to flow spontaneously from the leader’s lips. They may deploy one or more teleprompters to help the leader deliver in a conversational style, with lots of audience eye contact. Which is fine, until it isn’t. (See the chapter Death by Teleprompter.)

Most leaders don’t use teleprompters regularly, or aren’t good enough speakers to use even the best-written text fluently to create that subtle 38

sense of conversation. More often than not, a leader reads from a prepared script. The words have been chosen with care, not just for the people in the room but also for a far wider audience and for the record. Significant political speeches fall into this category, as do speeches delivered at Davos gatherings or any major corporation’s AGM. The leader steers clear of risky improvisation.

In the first-ever speech by a serving head of MI6, Sir John Sawers in 2010 opted to tackle some public policy issues of front-rank sensitivity.6 Sir John spoke from a tightly prepared script: he had to choose his words with unerring precision. But he achieved at least some sense of conversation by speaking with unexpected frankness about moral and personal dilemmas facing secret intelligence officers in a democracy: You, and millions of people like you, go about your business in our cities and towns free of fear because the British government works tirelessly, out of the public eye, to stop terrorists and wouldbe terrorists in their tracks.

The most draining aspect of my job is reading, every day, intelligence reports describing the plotting of terrorists who are bent on maiming and murdering people in this country.

It’s an enormous tribute to the men and women of our intelligence and security agencies, and to our cooperation with partner services around the world, that so few of these appalling plots develop into real terrorist attacks.

After he left MI6, Sir John delivered in 2015 a wide-ranging speech at King’s College London.7 Again, he used the occasion to spell out in blunt terms some of the hardest foreign policy dilemmas now facing Western leaders. This passage was widely quoted in the media.

But we deal with the Russia we have, not the Russia we’d like to have.

We could take on Moscow, stepping up our response. Provide weapons to Ukraine so it can defend itself. More stringent sanctions But how would Mr Putin respond?

As long as Mr Putin sees the issue in terms of Russia’s own security he will be prepared to go further than us. So he would respond with further escalation on the ground. Perhaps cyber attacks against us 6.

7.

I helped Sir John on the structure of this speech.

I worked with Sir John on this speech.

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We have thousands of deaths in Ukraine. We could start to get tens of thousands. Then what?

The test for any policy option is not so much “Is this the right next step?”

The more important test is: “Where will we be in two year’s time if we follow this path?”

Policies can be strong, principled, honourable. But they also need to be wise.

A supreme modern example of a leader achieving conversation with an audience was Barack Obama in his speech accepting his victory as president-elect in November 2008. He used the motif “Yes we can” to project inexorable optimism and momentum, repeating the words to encourage the audience to chant them back: This election had many firsts and many stories that will be told for generations. But one that’s on my mind tonight is about a woman who cast her ballot in Atlanta. She’s a lot like the millions of others who stood in line to make their voice heard in this election except for one thing. Ann Nixon Cooper is 106 years old.

She was born just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky; when someone like her couldn’t vote for two reasons: because she was a woman, and because of the color of her skin.

And tonight, I think about all that she’s seen throughout her century in America. The heartache and the hope; the struggle and the progress; the times we were told that we can’t, and the people who pressed on with that American creed: Yes we can.

At a time when women’s voices were silenced and their hopes dismissed, she lived to see them stand up and speak out and reach for the ballot. Yes we can.

When there was despair in the dust bowl and depression across the land, she saw a nation conquer fear itself with a New Deal, new jobs and a new sense of common purpose. Yes we can.

When the bombs fell on our harbor and tyranny threatened the world, she was there to witness a generation rise to greatness and a democracy was saved. Yes we can.

She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who 40

told a people that “We Shall Overcome.” Yes we can.

A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination.

And this year, in this election, she touched her finger to a screen, and cast her vote, because after 106 years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change. Yes we can.

Go to YouTube. Marvel at Barack Obama delivering this unsurpassed passage. Watch and listen closely as he uses voice inflections, pauses, accelerations, rising and falling tone, lists, contrasts, questions, and other simple techniques to weave into his list of historical episodes that personal story of one elderly voter and thereby tackle far bigger themes. This speech did not fail to inspire. It achieved a direct conversation with the audience, who chanted back his message: Yes we can.

A very different example of a leader achieving conversation with an audience came in Rawalpindi on December 27, 2007. Pakistan leader Benazir Bhutto addressed a vast election rally. This was not an occasion for policy nuance. She wanted to rouse her voting base. She concluded by explicitly linking her own fate to that of her political movement: That is why I have returned home; I have come to you to say that your sister needs those who are brave; who are courageous and who are faithful to the national flag; the flag of our motherland and the flag of the Pakistan People’s Party.

I need your support in the work for the security and integrity of Pakistan. Let us join hands to steer the country out of the crisis, and rid the country from those who have endangered its security.

Go and spread my message that I have returned to serve masses and the country. The People’s Party candidates will serve the people.

Now my brethren you also raise your hands, and hold out a promise with me that you vote for your sister, the symbol of the arrow…

[The entire gathering raised their voice: “Yes, yes, yes”] Soon after finishing this rousing speech, Benazir Bhutto was assassinated as she waved to crowds of supporters from her campaign car.

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Supporting a Leader’s Speech

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leader’s public-speaking team has two existential problems.

The first is drafting speeches for someone much more senior and well-known—trying to find words that person might say naturally and convincingly.

The second is writing words that need to be spoken, ideally with a sense of spontaneity—something awkward in itself. *** Writing and preparing speeches, especially in an international context, is a congenial job. It gives the speechwriter good access to senior people and big ideas (and the delicious opportunity to strike out clumsy work done by people much higher up the organizational hierarchy). On the other hand, the speechwriter is trapped by the personality and profile of the leader, and by the leader’s entourage who want to control closely what the leader says. It’s miserable to serve up a lively text that is dulled 43

down on the way through the system. But that’s how things work. A leader’s close team insists on tight control. Its members are gatekeepers for the many things a leader won’t or can’t say, or won’t be credible or comfortable saying.

Worst of all, the leader may not be much of a speaker.

How to be a poor speaker? Let’s count the ways. Looking uneasy or pompous or disengaged. Having a monotonous delivery. Getting words, tone, voice, and hand gestures slightly out of synch. Getting bogged down in detail. Coming across as someone concerned more with demonstrating iron seniority than with saying something engaging.

Leadership in international organizations is especially tricky. People at all levels in such organizations usually have career backgrounds in formality and process, in hierarchy and high-mindedness. Working environments and default house-style seethe with linguistic, gender, and cultural sensitivities. Leaders of such organizations are chosen through protracted international haggling that may have little if anything to do with the requirements of the job itself. Practical leadership skills, including strong public speaking, are not high on the list of core competences, if they feature at all.

Brave if not demoted is the speechwriter who despairs at the sheer ghastliness of the typical final product emitted by the director-general, and who bluntly urges the suspicious cabinet that some coaching for the director-general in public speaking and basic presentation style might, ahem, be a good investment.

A wider problem is the general communication culture of the organization concerned. A good, bold speech for a global audience posted on a dull, confused website disappears without trace. If the processes for getting the speech out to a wider audience are lifeless, anything sent out through those filters comes across as lifeless.

All this reminds me of the joke about how many New York psychoanalysts are needed to change a light bulb: One. But the light bulb really has to want to change.

It does not matter if the speechwriting team sees clearly how the leader and the wider processes and house-style can be transformed for the better. Only when the organization as a whole, led by the people at the top, accept and insist on the need to change do serious improvements start to happen. *** It’s not hopeless. A good speechwriter can nudge things in the right direction.

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If this is not part of the job description, a speechwriter should maneuver into a solid role in the speech-production process as a whole. One way to do that is to press to set up a Speech Strategy as the heart of the organization’s public communication strategy. The leader and key team members (and, of course, the wily speechwriter as volunteer note-taker) sit down together every six months or so. They look ahead to see what key messages need to get out, and which occasions might work well.

Sometimes a natural anniversary or keynote conference is coming up and in the diary. Existing speaking invitations might lend themselves to an especially big production. In discussion on how to pace speeches over the coming period, it might be decided quietly to prompt an invitation to speak from a certain organization to make sure that the timing, venue, and occasion are just right.

All this matters. It’s not enough to produce one good speech that works well on the day. That speech needs to be consistent with other speeches: to be part of a bloc of coherent, interesting speeches that explain and advance policies systematically.

The wily speechwriter exploits the fact that most people in any organization or corporation are terrified of any task with the word “speech” in it, and will be pathetically grateful if the speechwriter takes the lead. By controlling the process, the speechwriter becomes operationally indispensable, exerting influence on the way speeches are prepared and what they say.

This control can then be infiltrated into other areas, such as how the speech is presented on the website or otherwise made publicly available.

Creating a strong house-style for the organization’s key speeches on the website is a good way to show that other changes in corporate presentation need modernizing.

One other thing. The speechwriter needs to press to be there when speeches are delivered. This has two advantages.

First, it gets the speechwriter close to the leader, in the car or on the plane heading to the venue. The speechwriter sees at close quarters how the leader thinks and acts. This helps work up draft speeches that fit the leader’s own style. And it fends off footling objections to the speechwriter’s work from inside the organization. No one can argue with this: “I was on the plane with the Director-General last week. She told me that this is just how she wants these arguments presented.”

Second, the speechwriter needs to see what exactly happens to the speech-words as used on the day. How did the opening courtesies and closing message work? What sections allowed the leader to improvise successfully? Which words looked good on paper but were hard to pronounce? Where did the speech have energy? What went flat? What raised 45

a laugh or won applause from this audience? What was expected to raise a laugh or win applause but didn’t? Did anything go wrong with the practical arrangements, and if so, what should be done next time? Above all, did the leader and the words match the tone of the occasion and get key messages across convincingly?

Armed with such first-hand insight, the speechwriter becomes the source of authoritative guidance for the whole organization on every aspect of the leader’s public speaking agenda. And also, perhaps, wins the personal confidence of the leader and the leader’s inner team, to the point where frank private suggestions can be offered to the leader on how the leader’s speaking style might be improved, without the speechwriter being sent packing for impertinence.

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Business Speeches

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olitical leaders face elections every few years, if they face them at all. Business leaders face elections every day or even every minute: who’s voting for my company’s products by buying them?

Corporate leaders therefore have special risk and tone issues. When gaffes and blunders flash round the planet in seconds, tight reputation and brand management are vital. An unguarded or unwise comment or inaccurate figures can have rapid, calamitous consequences. Maybe even a time in jail, if during a presentation a business leader lets slip key information about a company’s plans and thereby provokes merciless insider trading investigations.

Corporate lawyers duly pore over draft speeches, striking out anything that might be interpreted as too risky. Letting lawyers loose on a speech may be wise in share-price terms, but the ensuing speech is rarely more interesting. Yet a speech that plays it too safe and blandly emphasizes the positives of a company’s record may go down as unconvincing or boring.

The acme of catastrophic business speeches was emitted in 1991 by Gerald Ratner. Ratner ran a successful jewelry business of over 2,000 47

stores in the United Kingdom and United States, with annual sales pushing towards $2 billion. He had built up this business by bringing an unambiguously popular approach to the staid jewelry sector: “pop music playing, garish colors, and bright lights.”

In his keynote speech at the prestigious Institute of Directors in London, Ratner made smirky attempts at self-deprecating humor that raised a laugh on the day but thereafter did not work out quite as he had expected: A prawn sandwich will probably last longer than some of our earrings!

We also do cut-glass sherry decanters complete with six glasses on a silver-plated tray that your butler can serve you drinks on, all for £4.95.

People say, “How can you sell this for such a low price?” I say, “Because it’s total crap!”

The ensuing furore quickly wiped hundreds of millions of pounds from the value of his companies, and eventually he was forced to resign.

His key mistake? So many to choose from. The worst was the most banal blunder any business leader can make: publicly sneering at one’s own customers. *** Business speeches fall into various categories. Each has its own intellectual and emotional tone, and a speech needs to be prepared with that firmly in mind Annual General Meetings Ostensibly, these speeches are straightforward. The chair of the company explains to the shareholders and industry analysts in broad terms what has gone well, what factors have worked against success, and where new effort will be focused in the coming period.

These speeches tend to be formal, formulaic, and stolid, emphasizing the positive. Some content flows from company law: the chair has a legal duty to convey certain key facts in an accurate and unambiguous way.

This works heavily against spontaneity and risk-taking. If you’re keen to see what happens when you make a serious error of judgment or toss in one crudely phrased ad-libbed comment, the AGM speech is not the place to experiment.

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Business leaders preparing such a major speech to shareholders or a thought-leader conference (see below) nonetheless think hard about how their words might affect their company’s reputation, and their own reputation. Especially at AGMs they want their audience to hear trustworthiness, confidence, and value: Yes, this company and this person are running this business well and doing something valuable. That’s why we trust and invest in this company, by owning its shares or buying its products.

Increasingly, audiences at such events want to know not only what a company is doing successfully; they also want to hear how the company is getting those results. They want to hear both value and values.

Many corporate speeches, including AGM speeches as the definitive current statement of a company and its thinking, now duly feature explicit ethical themes: integrity, diversity, social, responsibility, and sustainability. But do they mean it? Or are they just cynically ticking these boxes to show they are up with current buzzwords?

The audience hears value and values through hearing sincerity. These all must coincide in the speech itself, and be attached firmly to real life.

Gerald Ratner was unusually confident and impeccably sincere. That was the problem. He crashed on the shabby values that he himself said he and his business represented. *** If tough questions or even protests are expected at an AGM from publicity-seeking shareholder activists, the wise business leader will anticipate this by including a firm but open-sounding passage addressing their concerns in the speech and any prepared talking-points. Why? It’s much better to take the initiative and acknowledge criticism, rather than react defensively. The business leader shows that the company is alert to concerns about its performance, and open to sensible discussion of them. The leader keeps control of the occasion. The audience and wider public hear confidence, flexibility, listening. They hear good values.

The smart business leader is never defensive or evasive or grumpy.

That sends exactly the wrong message, namely that the company’s real value and self-confidence perhaps are not as high as the markets currently think they are.

Important Announcements The lavishly choreographed events by Apple and other top technology firms show how to reach a global audience. They convey a tone of excite49

ment and innovation, while also getting out in carefully managed ways gobbets of intriguing information about what these shiny new gadgets do and why they far surpass earlier iterations.

The more complex and ambitious the event, the more it is vital to nail down every detail: people round the planet are poised to seize on any blunders or miscalculations. In 2014 when it launched the new iPhone Six, Apple thought it was doing its iTunes customers a favor by sending them a free U2 album. To Apple’s chagrin, customers did not hear cool or generous: they heard annoying, arrogant, intrusive. Their gesture met howls of e-protest: Hey Apple! Cool new phones. But we choose what music goes on our iPhones—you don’t!

A leader at an event such as this has, in principle, a fairly easy time.

The event is about announcing something new. The audience has come specifically for that. The speech does not have to strain to achieve surprise: surprise is built into the event itself. The speech has to deliver the announcement in a lively way and deal confidently with expected questions or concerns. To mess this up the company will combine unusual public speaking ineptitude coupled with bad organization, clumsy misjudgment or simple technical mishap.

Conference Speeches This sort of speech done well rises above the ordinary round of corporate information and has a bold, horizon-scanning tone. What’s the big picture affecting our industry, and what are we all doing? What needs to change? Where are the new opportunities and new dangers? The skill of the business leader here lies in being interesting and persuasive on the day, while giving industry analysts and fellow executives something juicy to chew on.

Here the tone of the speech and numbers quoted need to complement each other. While some element of surprise in a speech is always interesting, it’s thought to be unwise to make the analysts uneasy by sounding as if the company is going to be hitting results or launching new products well beyond market expectations.

The main problem for any business leader at an industry event is how far to try to stand out from the crowd. When every other speech at an event is going to and fro over familiar and often highly technical ground, often supported by grindingly boring PowerPoint slides, it’s a challenge to be both engaging and interesting. A business leader might be uneasy about being too good, too different. It’s one thing to be a good leader, but it’s another to come across to one’s industry peers as arrogant.

There’s no magic formula for the right balance. By following the advice 50

in this book, a business leader can achieve a good result at any event by giving a speech intelligent structure, human examples, a powerful opening and ending, and by playing with different forms of surprise. Speeches with those elements always do well. They create a buzz in the room.

Someone sidles over to you in the bar afterwards to ask if you’ll speak at a forthcoming top conference in Dubai. The head-hunters make quiet, positive notes. More, please.

Business Thought Leaders Different corporate house-styles vary wildly: some companies encourage their executives to engage in such ambitious intellectual outreach; others prefer them to focus on the company’s key objectives. Many corporations nowadays push their top executives right out there into the wider public space, to win thought leader acclaim.

This means having good original thoughts, and being a good leader.

The executive needs (a) to have thoughts that are sufficiently ambitious and different from run-of-the-mill thoughts to deserve wider attention, then (b) to deliver these thoughts in a memorable way. The executive also needs to show leadership above and beyond the immediate ambitions of the executive’s home corporation. Neither is easy to achieve in a business context. And did I mention getting the draft speech past the lawyers?

Genuinely radical or innovative thinking requires radical honesty and self-awareness, which are not easy to reconcile with the need to keep the share price up, and to avoid giving out commercially sensitive information at the wrong time. The tone and substance of a thought leader’s public speeches must chime precisely with the corporation’s own branding, but also come across as unexpectedly challenging those limits.

Such speeches are an opportunity for a top executive to move up from representing his or her corporation and become someone known for addressing wider audiences—a thought leader. Someone who leads an audience, and perhaps the wider industry sector and general public opinion, into uncharted territory. Someone who projects confidence and authority.

It can be done. A good speech in the thought leader category enhances the leader’s brand and company’s brand alike by doing two things: answering the company’s strategic questions, and addressing customers’ strategic questions. A thought leader need not have—and can’t have—all the answers. Asking different questions in a different way to get people thinking is often enough to show big-scale confidence and authority. Less is more.

Frank and personal examples of challenges and mistakes that might seem banal to a specialist audience go down well here. Different ways to 51

structure the speech to surprise and intrigue the audience can be tried; for example, by taking unexpected cases and drawing wider conclusions from them. Small to big. Big to small. Small to big to small. What I did and what I learned. Knowledge to wisdom. And so on.

These days any business leader winning a reputation for delivering a powerful and confident TED talk is hitting lots of those More, please buttons. And is preparing for a jump to a bigger and better job when the time is ripe.

After-Dinner Speeches After-dinner speeches are the hardest speeches to do well, for business leaders as for everyone else. Above all other speeches they need to fit the tone of the event, striking a deft balance between courtesy, affable good humor, and a few sharp but relevant messages cast mainly in a nontechnical way.

After-dinner speeches are all about warmth, even a certain intimacy.

Where possible the leader needs to create scope for spontaneity and ‘conversation’ with the audience: flatly reading out a prepared text is unlikely to be a triumph.

The very fact that these speeches require the leader to hit a particular relaxed tone with humor and warmth makes them potentially risky for business leaders. The unscripted jocular remark that comes across as sexist (or intolerant, cynical, dismissive, or just obnoxious) pops out all too easily after a fine dinner and plenty of wine. Even worse, the business leader may let slip to a private audience something interesting but market sensitive that ought not to have been said at such an event.

A solid way to build up expertise in after-dinner speeches is to keep them simple. These are usually not speeches from which anyone wants or expects significant new information, unless the dinner speech has been billed as such. Focus on wisdom and insight. Work the speech around a couple of lively or (again) unexpected examples or stories that get the audience thinking, and then draw wider conclusions from them. Tell personal stories to help make a bigger point. You alone know these stories, so you don’t need to rely on many notes. You can add improvised touches of obvious exaggeration to add amusement.

Because the occasion requires warmth and a sense of intimacy, it’s easier to play with structure. Why start a story at the beginning, then work through to the end? That’s what people expect. So do the opposite.

Start the speech right at the key point in the story, then go back to show how you ended up in this predicament before moving into some 52

business-specific points. End the speech by returning to the story to tell the audience what in fact happened, and what you learned. Playing with time and sequencing in this way brings out intrinsic humor, by cranking up audience anticipation right from the start: it helps you keep control.

An after-dinner audience above all wants to have a good time. This is how to give it to them. More, please.

Crisis Speeches Nothing tests top executives like a crisis involving their corporation.

All their usual risk and reputation management mechanisms may have collapsed; it is a crisis because they have collapsed. Speeches and statements need to come across as doing several difficult things simultaneously. Showing that the company’s top executives are true leaders, tackling these urgent new problems fast and effectively. Reassuring the public and shareholders that all the right things are being done to get the business back on track, and that lessons will be learned to try to stop anything like this happening again. Trickiest of all, sending public and private messages of sympathy and support to people who have lost out through the crisis, while not admitting legal liability.

While they are grappling with all that, top executives may well be under fire from “heads must roll” clamor racing like wildfire across the Internet. In a first-class crisis, nothing is safe any more. Not even one’s own office. Do some colleagues down the corridor have an eye on moving up to fill top vacancies caused by an eventual purge if this is not gripped quickly? Who to trust in this shambles?

The top BP response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill crisis in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010 is often cited as a superb catalog of corporate errors. It shows just how difficult it is to choose the right words under intense pressure when facing a major disaster. In May BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward responded to a media question by sending a public message to Gulf Coast residents in a way intended to sound human and sympathetic: We’re sorry for the massive disruption it’s caused to their lives…

There’s no one who wants this thing over more than I do. I’d like my life back!

Watch the clip of Tony Hayward saying this. It’s a bit glib and cheery, but it doesn’t sound too bad. It proved ruinous. Hayward and through him BP as a corporation were denounced around the world as absurd and selfish. Powerful images of dead people and dead wildlife proliferated: Excuse us BP, can we have our lives back too?

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It’s in these darkest crisis moments that business leaders earn their salaries by protecting their company’s value. They do that by conveying the right values, in the right tone. These leaders need top tough-love support including brutal honesty from their immediate teams, to help them get the words and tone just right. Beyond that they need iron self-discipline when they open their mouths.

Both Gerald Ratner and Tony Hayward made the trite yet all too human mistake of adding a homely personal spontaneous touch that seemed to many people to evince almost reckless misjudgment of the tone that the situation required. When you’re a business leader grappling with a massive corporate image problem during a crisis, never forget one thing. It’s never about you or your company. *** Conclusion?

Business leaders face public-speaking problems that political or nongovernmental leaders do not face. Business leaders are paid lots of money to solve such problems.

That said, two pieces of advice.

Keep those corporate lawyers on a tight rein: avoiding risks in a speech does not mean sounding impossibly boring. Any business speech, including a staid AGM speech, can be pepped up, by playing with lively examples, dynamic structure, simple jargon-free language, and elements of surprise.

And don’t publicly revile your customers. They don’t like it.

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3. Event and Audience

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What’s this Event About?

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ou’re a leader. How do you start to prepare a speech?

Look at the process as a whole. Don’t start working on a speech until you know what you’re dealing with. Begin right at the very beginning: the actual invitation, the letter or email asking you to address the audience concerned. Then look at the end: what will happen on the day itself and what is your role in it?

A smart speechwriting team starts by getting a trustworthy copy of the original invitation and any supporting documents. The invitation and the inviting organization’s contact person can tell you important things the leader needs to know to make the speech work on the day.

Occasion What’s the occasion and its significance? Who’s the host? What time of day will the speech take place?

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Audience Sitting or standing? How many people? Any notable people in the audience who might expect to be acknowledged, including from one’s own organization?

Speaking What level of formality or informality? Other leaders present? What’s the order of speaking? Who has the best slots? Will there be interpreting?

Room How will the room be laid out? Will the leader be at one end of the room or in the middle of it? How will eye contact work with the audience? Will there be a roving microphone so the leader can move around, or a fixed microphone attached to a podium? PowerPoint or other presentational facilities available? Sound for video playbacks if needed?

Are any of these arrangements negotiable?

Why do these intolerant details matter?

A speech by a leader to 50 people, where the leader has easy eye contact with everyone in the audience, will not work like a speech to 800 people, where the leader is well away from most people in the auditorium.

The opening speech of a conference is different from the closing speech.

The last speech before lunch is not the first speech after lunch. A speech after lunch is not the same as a speech after dinner (or after breakfast).

Basically, before starting to write a speech one needs to be 100 percent clear what precisely is going to happen on the day, what the occasion represents, and how the leader’s message and personality best fit into all that. As we saw in the calamity that befell the French and German foreign ministers in Sarajevo in 1997, you ignore these details at your peril.

It is of course possible to get everything just right in preparing a good speech, but the leader then somehow messes things up on the day. Here’s a lively example of a leader doing just that, but then nimbly plucking success from the slavering maw of diplomatic scandal.

Poland has high diplomatic traditions. One is the annual speech of greeting to the diplomatic corps by the president. The ambassadors are greeted by the president, who then gives a speech rehearsing in formal terms Poland’s global diplomatic activities over the preceding twelve months.

The fascination of such formulaic speeches for the assembled ambassadors in Warsaw lies in trying to spot subtle messages for specific coun58

tries. Which countries this year are mentioned first and last? Where do Poland’s key European partners find themselves? Lawks! Last year we were mentioned second after Germany, but this year we have plummeted to fourth place, behind Germany and France and even Italy! Must try harder next year.

Every year the keenest interest comes when the president’s words turn to Poland’s relations with Russia and Ukraine, a subject fraught with interest down the centuries. In this passage the president’s words, tone of voice, and warmth (or lack thereof) are chosen with extra care. The fact that the Russian and Ukrainian ambassadors are present, listening closely to every nuance, makes this moment all the more intriguing for the rest of the diplomatic corps.

While in Warsaw, I watched two Polish presidents deliver these annual speeches. President Kwaśniewski invariably read out his address, but he did his best to make it less boring. His successor, President Kaczyński, was made of sterner stuff. He learned his speech off by heart. No easy task to cover every continent, and to remember the correct phrases for the long list of countries he mentioned by name.

One year, as he concluded his speech, Kaczyński received a quick whisper from his alert head of protocol: he had delivered the whole speech from memory perfectly, apart from the fact that he had forgotten to mention Russia. Kaczyński recovered superbly. Scarcely losing a beat, he delivered some warm words about Warsaw’s relations with Moscow.

The diplomatic corps had noticed what had happened, and the president noticed that the diplomatic corps had noticed. To compensate for his slip, he had no choice but to say impromptu positive things about PolishRussian relations, probably a notch beyond what he would have said had he not forgotten to use the original passage on Russia. The Russian ambassador beamed at this droll turn of events.

In 2014 in England, Labor Party leader Ed Miliband did the world of oratory a favor by showing in a spectacular way what happens when a leader attempts to memorize a keynote speech but does not get it right on the day. At his final party conference speech before the 2015 U.K. general election he delivered his speech without notes, and duly forgot a key passage on the economy. The Labor media team duly whirred away, issuing the speech with that passage included.

Result? Fiasco. The substance of the speech was not the story. Instead, Ed Miliband attracted high-profile derision as someone unable to remember his own key policies.

He tried to make the best of it the following day:

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It’s not really about memorizing the speech. What I try and do is I try and write a speech and then I use it as the basis for what I want to say to the country. I could just stand there and read out a speech that’s been prepared earlier. I like it as a way of engaging with people. And, of course, it’s one of the perils of it that there are bits that get left out, bits that get added in. It sort of comes with the territory.

He had a point. It is better to speak freely to an audience and create that sense of conversation. However, that brings risks. Under the pressure of wider events he and his team had not grasped that this pre-election conference speech needed to project unqualified professionalism and above all authority. Unforced errors would be calamitous, as Miliband himself realized as soon as he left the stage: Miliband knew the story of his “forgetting the deficit” would prove devastating. “He was really upset,” the speechwriter recalled.

“He pushes himself very hard—he was very, very angry with himself even before he knew it was going to be the main story out of the speech. We tried to cheer him up, but even then he was too upset. He did not come to the celebratory party, he just did not want to come out of his room.”8 The Labor audience in the hall but above all the British public needed to hear from this speech leader—yes, this man is up to the task. Instead, they heard loser—get a grip.

8.

Patrick Wintour. “The undoing of Ed Miliband—and how Labor lost the election.”

The Guardian, June 3, 2015.

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Interpreting

A

s we saw in the doomful visit to Sarajevo by the French and German foreign ministers, it does not matter what the speech says if the practical arrangements are misconceived. This applies in spades if the speech has to be interpreted for the audience. Many people in the audience do not have the faintest idea what is being said. They are not listening to the leader. They are listening to the interpreter.

Sometimes organizers have the money to set up simultaneous interpretation through headphones for those who need it. If this has been done, the speech can be drafted and delivered more or less normally. But even the best simultaneous interpreting is not simultaneous.

A wise leader is alert to the fact that people in the audience listening through headphones are always a few seconds behind what has been said, and behind others in the audience who can follow the speech without interpreting. The leader might slow the delivery and include rather more pauses and bold signposts than usual, to allow interpreters and everyone in the audience to keep up. Jokes need special care: it’s not good (perhaps even discourteous) if half the audience quickly gets a joke while the other half is baffled by an interpreter’s vain attempt to convey the joke in their language.

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The smart speechwriting team adds to the final draft speech a covering note for the leader explaining these interpreting points, and suggesting ways in which the speaker can compensate for interpreting time-lags.

If possible, the interpreters should be sent an advance copy of the speech, so they can be ready for tricky passages that need extra thought to get the interpreted words and accompanying tone just right on the day. If the speaker is likely to improvise, it is a good move to alert the interpreters about that too.

When consecutive interpreting has to be used, the leader speaks then the interpreter interprets. This creates a quite different ‘feel’ for any speech: it’s all the harder to get any sense of conversation.

A Western company organizing a prestige presentation of its new office in China asked me to help with the CEO’s keynote speech. My first question was about interpreting. I urged them to invest in the best possible local interpreter, not the sassy young Chinese person from their office.

The senior Shanghai audience would know the best local interpreters, and note with inward satisfaction that the best person had been chosen. This apparently unimportant technical choice would show the company signaling respect to the audience, by hiring the best available person to help launch this new initiative.

Thus the next question. If consecutive interpreting is to be used, how should the speech be drafted and delivered? In sizeable, paragraph-length chunks? Or sentence by sentence, with the interpreter translating accordingly? If you ask people this question, they usually reply that it is better to deliver the speech in longer passages. It seems less fussy and, they think, helps the audience follow the leader’s arguments.

The correct answer is to break down the speech into very short sentences, and have one or two sentences interpreted as they come. This staccato-style interpreting does sacrifice flow of argument. But what is lost in flow is regained in an unusually direct sense of conversation with the audience. The audience can follow what the leader is saying, rather than drifting off during a longer incomprehensible passage, then trying to tune back in when the interpreter takes over. Shorter sentences promptly translated help the audience grasp and remember the leader’s core messages. The speaker comes across as talking directly to them.

In short, when leader and audience come from different countries and interpreting is being used, there is inevitably some sort of awkward cultural and emotional distance between them. On such occasions, it matters less what the leader is saying than how the leader is saying it. A leader gets by far the best result on the day if the foreign audience hears respect.

More, please.

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Culture, Protocol, and Opening Formalities

C

ultural and associated protocol traditions play a huge part in the way public speaking plays out. Of all my different international public speaking experiences, I have found those in Poland to be much the most noteworthy from this point of view. Serbia is not in the same league for formal protocol, but the Serbian intelligentsia does have a high tolerance for prolonged nonsense.

When I was U.K. Ambassador in Belgrade, I once had the misfortune to accept an invitation to a presentation of a local artist’s paintings. I arrived expecting a gallop round the exhibition followed by a bracing slug of šljivovica and polite departure.

The paintings were jejune post-communist pseudo-surrealism (e.g., a simplified forest under a portentous blank eye staring from the sky).

Imagine my horror when I was led to a seat in the front row for a long (in fact very long) panel discussion about these works of art. The panel threw themselves into analyzing in considerable detail how such masterpieces contrasted “the impenetrability of paradox with the paradox of impenetrability.” I was trapped.

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Some cultures seem content if a leader says nothing at all, but says it in a way that ticks all the boxes of florid, long-winded local courtesies.

Likewise, in many parts of the world a leader who is verbose or condescending or aloof (or ideally all these at once) is often considered educated. If the audience can’t follow or understand what is being said, that shows just how far above the audience the wise leader soars. The audience is humbly grateful merely to be in the presence of such manifest superiority. ‘Western’ public speaking these days is usually about reducing the emotional distance between speaker and audience. Elsewhere in the world a senior speaker may want to use a speech to emphasise such distance and the speaker’s own iron power.

Cultural and protocol issues appear right at the start of a speech, in the introductory courtesies. In Poland and many other places these extend to what Americans, Australians, and Britons might see as dizzying tedium and pretentiousness. I recall with pain the opening speeches and ceremonies of the 2005 Chopin Competition gala concert in Warsaw. The rough sequence was this. The deputy competition director introduced the mayor, who introduced the deputy culture minister, who introduced the culture minister. These introductions dragged on, saying nothing at all, until finally Poland’s President Kwaśniewski was introduced. He made a solid, jovial speech, saying what everyone else had already said—though with some badly needed light touch—before the concert finally started.

All this extended formality would have provoked ribald calls of “get on with it” at a gala concert in London. The British public likes to see appropriate protocol politely acknowledged but then the main business started quickly. The British royal family heartily approves of this. They send firm signals to event organizers to keep speeches short, sharp, and to the point.

Such national house-style, led right from the top, is highly influential. *** Another good reason for keeping opening formalities to a minimum is that warm-up speakers risk detracting in a discourteous way from the guest of honor. I once attended the opening of an exhibition overseas by a member of the British royal family. The senior organizer of the exhibition (herself British and who should have known better) had the task of introducing the prince.

Alas, she rambled on for much too long about the merits and goals of the event before finally inviting the prince to speak. The prince had prepared a good, simple, gracious speech covering much the same ground that she had covered. In an acid tone he said only that everything that he had been going to say had already been said, and proclaimed the event open.

In working on her own short speech the British organizer made a dis64

courteous professional blunder. She lost sight of her main role at this occasion: to introduce the guest of honor, and not much else. *** Speechwriters and leaders preparing for an event need to give hard thought to these introductory courtesies. They should include words of acknowledgement for senior or notable people present at the event who might appreciate being acknowledged, or indeed expect it. When in doubt, err on the side of more acknowledgements than rather fewer. You don’t want anyone of some seniority to feel offended, even if they may be too self-important for your liking. For people brought up in the Anglo-Saxon pragmatic and democratic tradition, this approach might seem to be unduly generous to vanity. That is not how others see it.

In 2004 the ambassadorial corps in Warsaw was invited to a diplomatic ball hosted by the foreign ministry, the first such diplomatic gala in Poland in seven decades. The form on such occasions in Poland is for the most senior guests to be welcomed by name and title: a formal, often lengthy process. This time, the chief of state protocol as master of ceremonies duly worked his way down the list. But somehow he omitted to mention the foreign minister himself who was also present.

The minister of course spotted this, even though few, if any, diplomatic guests had noticed or cared about the omission. To the amazement of the assembled diplomats, the minister threw up his arms, uttered an audible imprecation, and angrily walked out. Did he think that the omission was so unforgiveable as to merit this show of rage? Or did he think that the slight had been deliberate, a plot to undermine him from within his own ranks?

One way or the other, this intemperate departure by the foreign minister from an event hosted by his own ministry ruined the evening. It sent a baffling message from the minister to the diplomatic corps audience: You’re my official guests on this famous state occasion, but my selfesteem is far more important to me than you are!

What might a British foreign minister do as the victim of a similar affront? Options include: •

Do nothing. In the great scheme of world disasters, this one ranks fairly low.

•

Do nothing, but next day give the protocol chief a stern private talking-to, or even evict said chief from his or her job. Making an open fuss at the gala itself draws an absurd level of attention to the error, and detracts from one’s guests’ enjoyment.

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•

Wait for the protocol chief to finish, then walk to the front, take the microphone, and welcome the guests with a few words as if nothing had happened. Perhaps add a wry but pointed joke wondering whether the protocol chief was trying to make the minister’s presence here a surprise?

Any of these options is better than crossly and ostentatiously marching out, not to return. If you do that, two hundred senior foreign representatives hear (and see) that you are not in control of the occasion, your temper, or your own ministry. Light touch never fails. *** Another, quite different, example. In 2006 I flew from Warsaw to New York to attend a conference on the Internet and politics, at which key experts from the Democratic and Republican presidential campaigns and other senior gurus were speaking.

The contrast between the American and Polish way of doing things could not have been starker. A similar event in Warsaw would have had an extended session of vapid self-congratulatory introductory courtesies.

The chairperson of this New York event did little more than say “Thank you sponsors! Welcome important people!” and then got the conference started with the first presentation.

In the United States a deep democratic impulse is in play. Senior politicians are understood to be in power by and for the people. Leaders owe a duty of respect to citizens. By contrast, in most of the rest of the world senior politicians and grand local people seem to believe that citizens owe them a duty, with citizens meekly accepting that top-down state of affairs. *** Serious protocol or cultural mistakes on the public stage are widely noticed both by locals and by the leader’s own people back home. And by YouTube. A blatant protocol mistake by a leader or her or his team means that people are hearing carelessness or disrespect. That obliterates all the good work invested in preparing a speech.

Disaster can strike even before a keynote speech looms into view. In 2009 then-U.K. Foreign Secretary David Miliband had an unhappy visit to India where he reportedly upset senior Indian interlocutors by addressing them in over-familiar, first-name terms, even though they were notably older than he was. He made the mistake of not bothering to learn about local protocol, or (far worse) learning about it then breezily ignoring it, as if mere youthful post-modern socialist charm would create rapport by blowing aside old stuffy protocol cobwebs. India heard condescending.

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*** An important practical tip. A speechwriting team far removed from what is happening on the day at the venue of a speech should not overengineer these opening protocol passages: the leader personally owns the final responsibility for getting things right on the day.

A leader will look ridiculous by relying on a text prepared well in advance that acknowledges people who obviously aren’t present, but misses key people who obviously are. Only the leader and closest aides present on the day can confirm with the organizers and with their own eyes, just before the speech starts, who is there and what basic protocol standards, by way of greeting and acknowledgement, are expected.

How to approach this as a speechwriter? Simply write “Introductory Courtesies” at the top of the draft speech, with a covering note steering the leader and immediate team to find out who and what needs to be publicly acknowledged. These details might include suggestions on how the leader behaves (and is seen by others to behave) with other senior people there on the day—when is bowing or nodding or shaking hands required (or not).

In short, in preparing a speech for a foreign audience, both the smart speechwriters and wise leader must do their homework on local protocol and cultural expectations. That’s common sense courtesy, conveying respect. Some leaders may think that it is not their job to take such a close interest in protocol minutiae. Fine. They thereby shoulder the risk of looking ridiculous if something goes spectacularly wrong for lack of attention to detail, or because they were not ready for a mistake when it happens.

In 2011 President Obama featured in embarrassing protocol confusion during the state banquet at Buckingham Palace. Proposing a toast to HM The Queen, he used words to start his toast that prompted the military band to start playing the British national anthem. He found himself awkwardly talking through the music as the band played.

Watch the ghastly moment on YouTube. How did it happen? At some point in all the meticulous preparation for this visit stretching over many months, someone had not precisely pinned down the sequence of words and ceremony in a way that ruled out blunders by anyone, up to and including the president himself.

The world’s great protocol mishaps could fill a book.

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68

Death by Teleprompter

H

ow does a leader keep good eye contact with the audience to make a speech an exercise in communication, not talking?

The best way is to give a speech from short notes, or no notes at all. The leader knows the message, and gives it.

That requires skill and confidence, and a willingness to take risks. Something unwise or annoying might be said inadvertently, a joke might go awry and cause offense, or something vital might be left out to horrible embarrassment. Today’s leaders don’t like risks. They know that their mistakes or gaffes can race round the world on YouTube or Twitter before the speech is even finished.

So they fake it. They try to create a sense of engagement with the audience by using gadgets to avoid the appearance of talking from a written script. A teleprompter is a glass screen in front of the leader on which the words of the speech scroll down. The leader sees the scrolling words, but the audience doesn’t.

President Obama often uses two teleprompters. This gives him maximum options for having sustained eye contact with people across the 69

audience to help make a point impactful. Less distinguished speakers congratulate themselves for having their own portable teleprompter: an iPad with an app that automatically scrolls the speech down the screen.

The idea seems sound. The leader maintains far better eye contact with the audience instead of repeatedly looking down at notes. However, what the teleprompter (or iPad) giveth in enhanced eye contact, it taketh away in the form of hugely reduced spontaneity and conversation. By using a teleprompter, a leader is trapped with the words served up as they scroll down the small screen. The leader is reading out a speech, not speaking directly to an audience from the heart.

If the leader starts any improvising, departing from the prepared script, a mess can quickly ensue. Once it all gets out of synch, it’s difficult for the teleprompter operator and leader to re-find the right place, quickly and together, and get the speech back on track. While that is happening, the leader is horribly exposed like a fish gasping for air. This is all the more obvious if the speaker is fiddling with a scrolling iPad screen. Long seconds spent peering down at the screen to get the text back to the right place are seconds not spent engaging with the audience. The audience suddenly finds itself ignoring the speech and enjoying the mess: everyone likes to see an important person making a fool of themselves. Any hope the leader has of controlling the room accordingly frays or collapses, and perhaps is never recovered.

YouTube has vivid examples of President Obama and other leaders getting in an embarrassing tangle to the point of grinding to a total halt when faced with abrupt teleprompter dis-synchronization. These malfunctions can get far more widely noticed than the substance of the speech itself.

Even if the leader personally has done nothing wrong and is the victim of a technical glitch, it is easy for opponents to gloat that she or he is accidentprone or somehow just incompetent. Nothing hurts like derision.

In January 2013 I listened on the car radio with some dismay to U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron giving a much-anticipated speech on the U.K.’s relations with the European Union. In policy terms it was a good effort. It read well on paper and had plenty of sharp sound bites. Yet it was easy to tell that the prime minister was reading it out from a teleprompter.

His speechwriters did him few favors, serving up predictable phrasing and over-listy structure. Plus, for political management reasons, the event itself was a tightly choreographed occasion with an audience of invited experts and journalists, not the wider public.

All these effects combined to make the delivery artificial. Some cynics attacked it as being more an extended press release than a speech. They had a point. But this speech addressed many different audiences, to do many different jobs. The full written text and its many E.U. policy nuances were exactly what other European leaders wanted.

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That’s modern European Union politics, where politicians’ language gets put through the strainer of anonymous focus groups and is riddled with Euro-jargon. Leaders too often use speeches to talk to each other, rather than to the hapless audience there on the day or the wider public.

They lose spontaneity and sparkle. Emotional warmth and human touch?

Too risky, or not even relevant.

Hence the growing popularity of different species of populist Eurosceptics, who score points by saying exactly what they think in the most vivid language. YouTube has funny and not unimpressive clips of the leader of the U.K. Independence Party, Nigel Farage, in the European Parliament. He talks from brief notes to leave himself space for improvising, rudely swiping at senior E.U. personalities present in the hall, who look suitably uncomfortable.

In short, teleprompters work only at the highest levels where the leader has speechwriters who craft conversational speeches that work with this technology, and operators who know the material and are expert in using the technology flawlessly and naturally. If the leader doesn’t come armed with this support, it’s best not to use teleprompters.

I watched a live Internet feed of a leader giving a speech I had helped prepare. The leader was using a teleprompter. I was struck by how dead the words sounded. The leader lost all his usual liveliness as he trudged through the text, with no hope of friendly improvisation to tune his words to the audience and occasion. It’s not what you say—it’s what they hear.

The audience heard a curiously flat leader trapped into reading out a speech, not communicating.

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E-Heckling

L

eaders these days face a problem that has never ever existed before: the vanishing difference between the audience in the room and everyone else on the planet.

Speechwriting gurus, including myself, advise anyone drafting a speech to think about the many different audiences the speech engages. The people in the room on the day. Experts: the academics and analysts who study the text for professional reasons. Journalists looking for an angle. The leader’s friends and enemies—especially enemies—keen to know what’s said. Posterity: the audience of history, looking at this speech in five or ten or fifty years’ time. A speech needs to be written with all these audiences in mind. But modern information technology makes the leader’s relationship with all of them fluid and uncontrollable.

Some events make a virtue of interactive technology. Screens round the walls of the auditorium carry live Tweets or other e-comments responding to the leader as the speech is being delivered. These Tweets and comments may have been posted on the Internet by people sitting in the room itself, or by people on the other side of the planet following the speech via a live feed.

In other words, thanks to information technology leaders today may 73

get a different sort of conversation with the audience in the room and beyond it, whether they like it or not. A leader making a speech needs to cope with these flickering distractions. If a leader’s team have done their homework, they will know whether live Twitter-screens will be in the room and have briefed the boss to try to keep an eye on them to check what is being said.

Random e-heckling can be devastatingly disruptive. Some women leaders have found themselves embarrassed and rattled by sexist comments scrolling across conference screens while they’re speaking. Or a leader giving a speech might spot that a belligerent Twitter follower is posting for a large e-audience, including people in the room, sarcastic abuse denouncing the leader’s words within seconds of those words being uttered.

It gets worse. Imagine a woman leader giving a serious, substantive speech about global inequalities but not realising that the screens in the room are carrying a caustic stream of live e-demolitions of those very words. The Tweets undermining the leader may be sexist or racist, or sharp and quite funny, or utterly untrue, or all of these and more at the same time in fewer than 140 characters: HAHAHA hot socialist black babe lectures us on world poverty but wears a FAT ROLEX COSTING $10K!!!!

LOL #hypocrite #stringemup #sexylegs The audience starts tittering at the incongruity of this situation: Those stupid Tweets are a lot more interesting than this speech! And by the way what sort of watch does she have? The leader thinks that the audience is laughing with the speech, not at the leader’s plight, and adjusts her words accordingly. This produces more e-banter and more audience hilarity. The leader and speech spiral out of control, but the leader does not know why.

Horrendous.

To add insult to injury, this unfolding calamity is captured on a smartphone video camera by someone in the audience and posted almost live on YouTube. A disobliging news story blows up from nowhere around this alone. The speech becomes known for this e-debacle, not for anything the leader said.

Note that this phenomenon is nothing like normal heckling. The speaker knows where the heckling is coming from, and can even have a go at a clever verbal exchange with that person to try to reinforce the speaker’s core point. A physical heckler who gets too disruptive can be thrown out of an event. The e-heckler berating a live speech before the leader’s aghast eyes might not be in the room, or even on the same continent. The Internet is a tumultuous, anarchic, cynical force for cutting leaders and every74

one else down to size in the twinkling of an eye.

I myself tried live e-commenting at a conference on European security in Latvia in 2012.

The conference started with a session on the eurozone and its problems, featuring the Latvian and Lithuanian prime ministers and Estonia’s feisty President Ilves, complete with sardonic American accent and snazzy bow tie. These leaders argued in unambiguously positive terms that the euro was a strong currency backed by unwavering European resolve. The three Baltic states needed to join the eurozone, as outside it they were vulnerable to economic shocks.

The conference organizers had up a live #RigaConf Twitter feed showing on screens in the conference hall. I decided to join the fun and tweeted: “Eurozone crisis? What eurozone crisis?” say Baltic leaders #RigaConf This contribution was promptly retweeted by various Twitterati following me or the event.

President Ilves saw these tweets appearing on the screens, and he did not like what he saw. He crossly interjected that this was not what he had said: people needed to be accurate in reflecting the leaders’ words and message!

Apologies, Mr. President, you’re wrong. It’s a free country, or at least (for now) a free Internet. People on Twitter and in real life say what they darn well choose. They’re only as accurate as they feel like being. And in any case, it’s not what you say—it’s what they hear! I heard your message as being unduly optimistic. So I chipped in with a comment of my own, as the organizers invited me to do.

President Ilves’ tetchy reaction was all wrong. He showed himself getting rattled over a footling tweet. He projected loss of control.

Calling world leaders! There are hundreds of millions of us out here on Twitter! Guess what? Some of us might disagree with you, or not bother to listen carefully to what you say. Be cool about it.

President Ilves would have done better graciously to turn the situation to his advantage by using the offending tweet to have a conversation with the tweeter and with the wider audience. Thus he could have thanked the world for engaging with his presentation through such tweets, saying that this tweet gave him an excellent opportunity to correct possible misconceptions about his eurozone message.

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Then I could have tweeted something like: Good response from #PresidentIlves on #eurozone. Thanks for engaging! #RigaConf The President turns an annoying tweet into an elegant Twictory. The global Twitter audience and people in the room hear confident—leader. *** So, details!

A leader needs to find out in advance if the event organizers plan to have potentially disruptive Twitter-feeds screened in the auditorium during the speeches themselves. If the leader is not able to insist that all Twitter feed screens be turned off during the speeches, he or she at least can be ready for this added complication by deploying amusing or self-deprecating lines should things start getting messy during the speech itself.

And note that the version of the speech prepared for the leader on the podium on the day needs to be formatted to allow the leader easily to find his or her place and get back on track after seeing off a pesky tweet.

Light touch? Rarely fails.

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4. preparing a leader’s speech

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Don’t Write a Speech, Speak a Speech

D

uring my Drafting Technique masterclasses, I tease participants with this simple question: Why do you write an email or a letter to someone?

They typically reply that writing to someone creates a record of what has been said, or allows them to copy the same work to many people quickly. All good answers, but not the right one. I press again: Why do you write it? After the usual unhappy silence I give them the answer: You write to someone because that person is not there with you to hear what you have to say.

Imagine you are a U.K. diplomat dealing with transatlantic air services issues. You are wearily reading the latest U.S.-U.K. squabblings over sixthfreedom, sum-of-sector, double-disagreement, behind-gateway airfares.

The telephone rings. You get a horrible shock.

You are summoned to the minister’s office. The minister is meeting the U.S. commerce secretary later today, and the Americans have just asked that the two leaders have a word about these new air services disagreements. You are the ministry’s only expert on the detail. You need to tell the 79

minister in person what the issues are, and what your side wants. There is no time for the minister to read a brief, even if there were time to write one. You’re needed down here. Now. There is one sure thing in our uncertain world. It is that the words you use to explain these issues to the minister in person will bear no relationship whatsoever to what you might have written in the usual briefing note.

The language, the style, the level of formality, the energy displayed in an oral briefing will be quite different to the way the issues are conveyed on a page. What’s more, the oral briefing is likely to be more than effective at communicating in a memorable way the detail and substance of the policy disagreement: Basically, Minister, the Americans are trying to wipe out competition from our airlines on these six key transatlantic routes.

The problem’s simple. Their airlines draw in transatlantic passengers from computer bookings for their huge network of routes crossing the United States. But ours can’t. The American airlines won’t let them! So their airlines enjoy quite different economies of scale. The business opportunities for their airlines and ours are totally asymmetrical.

Nothing new in this. They’re just trying it on again, like they did last year. Their annual civil aviation mega-conference is next week in Dallas. The U.S. Commerce Secretary is giving a keynote speech. She needs to say that she’s mercilessly squeezed us on these issues, but without getting a breakthrough for liberalization on U.S. terms!

The best way to see them off—and she won’t be surprised if you say it more in sorrow than anger—is to whack the ball into the long grass. Tell her straight that we are open to looking at these latest disagreements in a wider context of radical bilateral air services liberalization that gives our airlines at least some decent access to internal U.S. routes.

She’ll probably nod and change the subject. She knows that the American carriers want her to bang on about freedom to compete as far as that suits American carriers. But no further!

This sort of language, reinforced with the usual conversational intensity (eye contact, tone and pitch of voice, hand gestures), explains the underlying politics and power plays in a way the minister can grasp, remember, and use to advance the agreed national position.

A good written brief covers the same ground, but it will be written in 80

much less lively language and cover the material very differently. To get to the minister via the chain of command it will be laid out and written with different readers and operational purposes in mind. It will try to keep the machine as a whole happy, and end up with an instinct for caution. It is by far the second-best option.

It’s the same with a leader using a speechwriter. The whole business is unnatural. Person A is writing words for Person B to use when speaking to a large group of people. Even if a Person A is a genius speechwriter, Person B loses spontaneity and authenticity in using Person A’s words verbatim.

How, then, do you produce words on a page that make sense for a leader trying to make a natural impression? My answer: when you get the chance, don’t write a speech—speak a speech.

Modern voice recognition technology gives a speechwriter striking new options for producing work, not least by getting huge amounts of words into written form at great speed. I have dictated much of this book straight into my computer. This way of doing things has one vast advantage. Spoken words are more direct and leader-friendly than anything you usually write. A text created by someone talking has a subtle energy and rhythm all its own.

My argument for using voice-recognition technology to draft speeches was picked up by U.S. speechwriting experts Inkwell Strategies: The crux of Crawford’s argument is that leaders and their audiences value authenticity above all else. The best way to achieve that, he says, is to craft a speech in a way that conforms to the natural rhythm and flow of [the] spoken word by speaking it in the first place…

Crawford’s biggest false assumption is that writing a speech instead of crafting it out loud necessarily diminishes the leader’s authenticity. No matter how a speechwriter produces a speech, he or she must collaborate effectively with the leader to create a message he or she can say with credibility and authority. For many, writing is the best way to express that message clearly.

Still, his principles are solid. Whatever method a speechwriter uses should in no way resemble traditional writing techniques. In this profession, sounding good always trumps writing well.

My “biggest” false assumption? How many others were there? I posted a comment on their website: You’re right that writing a draft speech (as opposed to dictating it to a stenographer or a computer) need not diminish the leader’s 81

eventual authenticity.

I’m saying something subtly different. That first dictating a speech to text is likely to produce words that somehow sound better—more direct and energetic—because those very words have been spoken in the first place.

Voice recognition technology does not solve the speechwriter’s existential problem with producing spoken words written on a page. But it gives quite new tools for setting about the job.9

9.

See the chapter on Punctuation for more on voice recognition technology and speechwriting.

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Starting a Speech Strongly

M

ost people hate giving speeches. They don’t even know how to begin. They unhappily scour the Internet for help. There is no one best answer. It comes down to personal style, and having a clear sense of what is likely to work at the occasion concerned. But there is one key principle: start strongly.

Strongly does not always mean loudly or stridently or assertively, although they are all fine if done well. It means catching the audience’s attention. U.S. speechwriter John Shosky puts it this way: Audiences decide if they like you, and if you are a person of character, in between eight and 20 seconds of the start. They give you only about 30 seconds of attentive listening before you begin to lose some of them.

In other words, the audience will listen carefully to what you have to say for about a half a minute. Then, with each second, more people start to fade away.10 10.

John Shosky. “Seven great ways to start a speech.” Total Politics, December 20, 2008.

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He gives examples: That is why I applaud any speech that starts with the heart of the matter, such as Boris Yeltsin’s speech at the burial of Tsar Nicholas Romanov’s family in St. Petersburg in 1998: It’s an historic day for Russia. Eighty years have passed since the slaying of the last Russian emperor and his family. We have long been silent about this monstrous crime.

We must say the truth: the Yekaterinburg massacre has become one of the most shameful pages of our history.

Now that is the way to start: bold, direct, concise, clear, and quotable.

This reminds me of a piano concert I attended in the Royal Palace in Warsaw where President Kwaśniewski was in the audience. We all sat quietly chatting, waiting for the performance to begin.

Almost without our noticing, the pianist strode in unannounced. He sat down and thumped his fingers on to the keys. Crash. Rousing, brutal chords. Everyone jumped. He swung into the performance. He had our full attention, taking control by doing the far opposite of the usual start of a recital (pianist walks to the fore, bows, adjusts clothes, fiddles with the height of the seat, wiggles fingers, stretches legs, stares meaningfully into space. Hush descends. The music starts).

John Shosky is right. There’s no time to lose. Within literally a few seconds the audience is saying to itself one of two things: This one sounds quite interesting. I’ll listen.

I’ll pass on this one, thanks. Where’s my iPhone? I can do some emails while this one drones on. *** How do you achieve that strong start in a speech?

For a speechwriter it’s mainly about words. But a leader engages an audience on many different levels simultaneously: eyes, ears, mind, mood, instinct. By using these levels, a leader can get a speech quickly up to top speed.

At a TEDx event, I watched a woman give a large audience a weak presentation about the merits of local organic food. She looked nervous and started feebly by apologizing for her poor English and never recovered. But her finish did have an incompetent attempt at dramatic impact: she produced from a bag a packet of cheap sliced bread and a delicious84

looking crispy baguette, held them up, won a desultory clap from the bemused audience, then wandered off the stage.

Think how she could have transformed her presentation by using these props to start her speech without saying a word.

She might have pre-arranged for a small table and chair to be on the stage. She enters with her shopping bag and sits down facing the audience. She takes from her bag two plates and a knife. Then she produces the two loaves. Very deliberately, and with dramatic if not comic exaggeration, she unwraps the sliced bread. She holds up and slowly scrutinizes a dangling, limp slice of processed bread. She lets it fall plop on to the plate.

She cuts it into small, sad portions.

Then she unwraps the crusty baguette. She noisily cracks it open, and breaks it into pieces.

She carries the two plates across to the audience and offers the bread to the people she can reach. The crispy baguette pieces are much favored, the processed bread reviled. Once this mini-performance is over to noisy acclaim, she starts to explain the issues.

This is a powerful start, the more so for being unexpected. She is talking directly to the audience, but not using words. *** Another way to start a speech strongly: jump straight to a direct conversation with the audience.

I once faced an audience of 400 people to give a presentation on diplomatic spy scandals. I plunged in by abruptly asking a question: “Who here has secrets?”

Long pause. I repeated it in a quieter voice. “Who here has secrets?”

Then I stopped again. An uneasy extended silence ensued. I pressed on.

“Who have the best secrets? Men? Or women?”

Everyone has secrets. Everyone knows that everyone else has secrets.

Why are our own secrets so interesting? Because they’re secret! Why is he asking? What does he want to know about me?

By pretending to open up deep personal issues inside the head of everyone present, I seized control of the occasion. Then I let silence do some of the talking for me, building a mood of expectation. Everyone was listening intently. That made it easy to move from brief discussion of why secrets are important for you and me to why governments have secrets, and why they try to steal other governments’ secrets.

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Or the speaker can begin by going straight into a story of some sort.

You know, something strange happened this morning, just as I was setting off to come here to talk to you.

This can be combined with a question for extra conversational effect: Do you know who telephoned me this morning, just as I was setting off to come here to talk to you?

Contrast these two ways of opening a speech about health issues.

First this: My speech here today is all about health issues and how our society deals with them. Let me tell you two stories that explain the problems.

Then this: Has anyone here ever had an embarrassing health problem?

[Pause] Has anyone here NOT had an embarrassing health problem?

[Long pause while the audience mulls over those ghastly questions] Let me tell you two stories about health issues‌ The second one is far more direct and engaging. It has emotional energy.

Americans do these story-starts to speeches well, almost naturally; informal, democratic folksiness is in the tap water. Snootier, hierarchical Europeans or people from other regions typically see that sort of thing as frivolous and unleaderly, but they enjoy it when American or British leaders do it. *** A leader needs opening material that is interesting and emotionally engaging. But what will work? Is there scope maybe for an interesting visual effect, like the TEDx bread example above?

In 2015 Tom Fletcher, the U.K.’s ambassador to Lebanon, showed how a leader can take risks to start a speech to huge acclaim. Opening a tech conference in a marquee, he made an opening joke about the venue then pretended that he had lost his speech: could anyone help? To the audience’s amazement and delight a drone appeared at the back of the tent and flew above the audience to drop his speech into his outstretched 86

hands, before whirring back and out again. Wild applause!

Watch this on YouTube. Note what this opening accomplished. It symbolized the message of the conference: the power of new technology to do things dramatically differently. And it gave the speaker status as someone ambitious and clever, even powerful—leader. With a start like that his speech was bound to be a storming success: everyone was having a good time by feeling part of something uniquely unusual.

All of which said, this was a physically risky ploy requiring plenty of nervous rehearsal and meticulous attention to detail. The mind boggles at the scale of the PR horror and consequent litigation had the drone malfunctioned and crashed down onto the face of someone in the audience, knocking an eye out.

So this sort of thing is not for everyone. Above all the leader needs to own any risks associated with such a gamble, and be ready to resign on the spot if it fails disastrously. But when it works, it is spectacularly effective.

Speakers need to be careful in other ways too when they use physical props. It’s one thing to hold up an illustrative object at a seminar. It doesn’t work for a large audience. If people towards the back of the room can’t work out what the leader is holding up to start a speech to the amusement of people at the front, the first thing they hear from the leader is their own disappointment and annoyance.

Some politicians (including famously British politician Paddy Ashdown in the House of Commons) have held up a newspaper front page and talked to its glaring headline. This can be effective if the whole audience can immediately see the headline and grasp the point being made. *** The address in 2013 by young Malala Yousafzai at the United Nations in New York made a wide impact for many reasons, above all her own story of being shot by the Taliban and left for dead after campaigning for the rights of girls to have a decent education.

Malala started strongly. She linked her story in an intimate yet highly visual way to the fate of Pakistan leader Benazir Bhutto, murdered after speaking at a political rally: Being here with such honorable people is a great moment in my life, and it is an honor for me that today I am wearing a shawl of the late Benazir Bhutto.

Malala then started her speech by saying that she did not know how to start: 87

I don’t know where to begin my speech.

I don’t know what people would be expecting me to say, but first of all thank you to God for whom we all are equal and thank you to every person who has prayed for my fast recovery and new life.

I cannot believe how much love people have shown me. I have received thousands of good-wish cards and gifts from all over the world.

Thank you to all of them. Thank you to the children whose innocent words encouraged me. Thank you to my elders whose prayers strengthened me.

She finished no less powerfully: Dear brothers and sisters, we must not forget that millions of people are suffering from poverty and injustice and ignorance.

We must not forget that millions of children are out of their schools. We must not forget that our sisters and brothers are waiting for a bright, peaceful future.

So let us wage a glorious struggle against illiteracy, poverty, and terrorism; let us pick up our books and our pens, they are the most powerful weapons.

One child, one teacher, one book, and one pen can change the world.

Education is the only solution. Education first. Thank you. *** One final, towering example. Back in 1976, in Finchley, North London, Margaret Thatcher started a speech to the local Conservative Party using words that came to define her around the world. She seized on a Soviet sneer from Moscow and appropriated it as her own: I stand before you tonight in my Red Star chiffon evening gown [Laughter, applause], my face softly made up, and my fair hair gently waved [Laughter], the Iron Lady of the Western world.

A cold war warrior, an amazon philistine, even a Peking plotter.

Well, am I any of these things? [No!] Well yes, if that’s how they… [Laughter] Yes I am an Iron Lady. After all it wasn’t a bad thing to be an Iron Duke.

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Yes, if that’s how they wish to interpret my defense of values and freedoms fundamental to our way of life‌ *** John Shosky gets the final word: In an age where audiences have a very short attention span, you have to get right to the point. No dawdling, no setting the stage, no easing in and getting comfortable, no joke and jive prelude: right to the point.

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90

Starting a Speech: No Apologies

A

rookie error made by far too many leaders (and even some seasoned leaders on a bad day) is to start a speech by apologizing. You know the sort of thing:

I’m delighted to be here in Norway for the first time.

But please excuse me if I speak in English—I don’t know any Norwegian. ***

Wow, what a big audience. I’m not used to speaking to such a large crowd, so be gentle with me! *** This is the first time in my life I’ve made a speech—I’m sooo nervous. *** Good morning. This is a really complicated policy issue and I only have time to cover the very basics in the time available, so forgive me if I don’t cover everything.

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This sort of thing is meant to come across to the audience as endearingly self-deprecating. But in fact it usually sounds weak. It is subliminally annoying.

People are there taking time out from their busy lives to listen to what this leader has to say. After such a lame introduction, the audience hears disrespect—why am I wasting my time sitting here listening to this, if the leader herself says right at the start that it may not be much good?

In my public speaking classes, clients deliver short speeches. When I ask them afterwards how they felt giving their speech, they often say that they were really nervous: “I could feel my knees shaking!” I then ask the audience what they thought. Did the speaker look nervous? Not really. Did anyone notice her or his knees shaking? No! The point is simple. The audience does not care if a speaker is nervous or skilled in languages, or a good or bad speaker. Basically, an audience wants to know that the speaker is being respectful, giving them a speech that represents the speaker’s best shot and not wasting their time. When you start talking, the audience is not interested in your knees or your clothes or hairstyle. However, the audience may become keenly interested in your knees or clothes or hairstyle if you are giving them a dull or silly speech, and their minds start wandering.

Being self-deprecating during a speech is fine in teensy doses. It does add a personal touch, and can help a leader engage with an audience, if done well. But not at the start of a speech. Look how the examples above take on a quite different energy when done without the uneasy or apologetic tone. The leader instead is deliberately positive, direct, and assertive: Norwegians are the most honest people in the world. Everyone knows that.

So let me be completely honest with you! I now have a complete mastery of Norwegian!

I learned it on the plane to Oslo yesterday from the in-flight magazine.

The theme of my speech today is this [moves into exaggerated strangled pseudo-Norwegian]: Blind hǿne kann og finna eit konn. [Even a blind pig may occasionally pick up an acorn.]

And there’s more: Dei er inkje alle tjuvar, som hunden gjoyr paa. [All are 92

not thieves that dogs bark at.]

The good news is that there are international conventions against torture. You have suffered enough. So whether you like it or not, I’m going to continue in English… *** When I told my partner that I would be addressing this society tonight, he warned me to expect a big audience: “Why, there will be at least 20 people!”

Something here has gone badly wrong. I can see over a hundred people.

Am I in the wrong meeting?

Thank you all for coming. Let’s start… *** I have made literally hundreds of long, powerful speeches before. Every one of them in my bathroom. So I’m not nervous one single bit!

When you hear a frantic rattling sound it’s definitely not my knees. It’s someone I’ve planted among you with invisible Spanish castanets… *** Good morning. We all know this is a huge subject. So I’m going to ignore almost all of it!

Instead, I’m going to talk today about just two things. Just two things. [Pause]. The two things that really matter…

I’m sorry. No apologizing.

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94

Structure and Signposts (and Hinges)

T

here is a vast literature on the art of speechwriting.

My view? It boils down to three things:

Message Structure Signposts

Much of this book is about messages. Let’s look at structure and signposts.

Without robust structure any speech is difficult to follow, even a speech only a few minutes long. That structure should be simple and obvious: Bad news → good news What’s gone wrong → what we’ve learned → what to do differently next time Story → moral Knowledge → wisdom Two questions: What are we doing? Can you trust us?

Once an underlying structure is established, the speech needs to stick with it, using signposts to show the audience clearly when the leader is 95

moving from one part to another. The leader keeps control and avoids any impression of confusion.

Within the strategic structure of the speech all sorts of tactical devices advance the argument, including those Ancient Greek rhetorical figures of speech. Lists. Contrasts. Surprise. Repetition. Paradox. Questions and answers. Antanaclasis. Epanalepsis. Paraprosdokian. Parrhesia. Synchysis.

The more the merrier.

Good speeches play with all these and more, running the changes like a Bach cantata sparkling up and down the arpeggios. But they all rest on thematic structure.

In her famous speech in 1995 at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, Hillary Clinton showed what can be done by delivering structure through the obvious rhetorical devices of lists and repetition— and by using uncompromisingly painful words—to set up a message quoted round the world: It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, or drowned, or suffocated, or have their spines broken, simply because they are born girls.

It is a violation of human rights when women and girls are sold into the slavery of prostitution.

It is a violation of human rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on fire, and burned to death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small.

It is a violation of human rights when individual women are raped in their own communities and when thousands of women are subjected to rape as a tactic or prize of war.

It is a violation of human rights when a leading cause of death worldwide among women ages 14 to 44 is the violence they are subjected to in their own homes.

It is a violation of human rights when young girls are brutalized by the painful and degrading practice of genital mutilation.

It is a violation of human rights when women are denied the right to plan their own families, and that includes being forced to have abortions or being sterilized against their will.

If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, it is that human rights are women’s rights. And women’s rights are human rights.

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One other rather less prominent example.

Ms. Jones wanted to start a new career as a local councilor. She asked me for private coaching in public speaking. She bravely endured the indignity of standing in her own front room giving me short speeches on a range of topics.

I asked her to prepare a short speech opening a human resources seminar for some thirty people on “How and Why to Sack Someone.” She delivered the following story (here simplified): We needed a new colleague to help analyze several different business sectors. We hired a young man who seemed to be exactly what we wanted. He was energetic, cheerful, and positive. He knew his stuff.

We enjoyed having him around. He was excellent at meeting people at conferences and making new useful contacts. But the problem came when he had to do the paperwork required to follow up his contacts and take forward the analytical part of the job.

At first, he told us that it was all in hand. Then it did not arrive.

We asked him what was happening, and he promised to get on top of the issue very quickly.

Alas, he didn’t. We had constant delays, well beyond the point of things becoming annoying.

Eventually, we concluded that despite his charm and good work in many areas, it just wouldn’t do if he didn’t keep up with the paperwork and the key analytical tasks at the heart of his job.

Despite a final warning, he did not improve. So in the end we had to sack him.

A more than adequate story for the task in hand. Yet her delivery lacked rhetorical punch. Where did she go wrong?

This is a fine example of the way structure and signposts, and message and delivery, click together jigsaw-style. The speech she gave is a story with a simple but powerful underlying structure, based on a contrast fraught with tragic human interest: [we thought he was] good [but it turned out he was] bad.

What, then, is the key moment in the speech?

It’s when the leader takes the audience from good to bad. It’s the simple, tiny word “but.” Here “but” is the hinge of the whole speech. It takes 97

the audience in a quite different, rhetorical, and emotional direction.

A speaker giving this speech needs to tell the audience that such a hinge-point has arrived. This can be done in different ways: raising the pitch or volume of one’s voice. Or holding an extended silence, and then repeating “but” with exaggerated, quiet intensity and a deliberate pause or two.

The signpost/hinge is bold and clear. The audience hears that the story is moving into the key, interesting phase, and wants to know what went wrong. The leader and audience are having a conversation: You now want to know what happened next, right?

Yes please!

I asked Ms. Jones to give the speech again, this time making the signpost/hinge moment unambiguously strong. She did so, to fine effect. It was remarkable how this simple device transformed the energy and impact of her words. Because the content was better, she was better. Because she was better, the content came to life. A powerful virtuous spiral.

The public speaking point here is simple. The leader knows what she or he is going to say next. The audience does not. So on the day the leader has to help the audience through the speech by making it clear when it changes direction or theme. This is accomplished by emphasizing, in one way or the other, those vital signpost-hinge moments that bring the audience along from one part of the structure to the next. *** Attention-grabbing techniques for starting a speech strongly and giving it structure come down to surprise. The audience is expecting one thing. The leader does another. So a speaker might remind the audience that it is gathered to look at subject X, then swing off to something that seems utterly different: The subject we’re looking at today is European foreign policy.

But let’s not waste time on that. It’s usually too boring!

So instead I’ll amaze you by talking about … cigarettes.

[Hold up a packet of cheap cigarettes from Ukraine.]

Not any cigarettes, mind you. The cheapest, nastiest, tarpacked, evil, death-dealing cigarettes you can inflict upon your revolting wheezing lungs…

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[Say how many billions of dollars are lost through cigarette smuggling.

Give an outline of cigarette smuggling in Eastern Europe, and how E.U. member states are tackling border-controls with nonE.U. former Soviet republics.

Then talk about how E.U. measures are dealing with cigarette smuggling, in close partnership with Ukraine.

Attack the foreign policy theme of cooperation by looking at one highly practical but unexpected issue, then move on to the wider principles concerned.]

This speech structure is interesting for being unexpected. It moves engagingly from particular to general, tiny to enormous. From what’s happening to what it means. Knowledge to wisdom. The leader gets and keeps control. *** Another way to give a speech unusual structure is to play with time and sequence (again using surprise).

No doubt many readers have seen Pulp Fiction. That trailblazing movie plays imaginatively with structure: several stories intertwine, but episodes from them are presented out of sequence, albeit in a way that comes together and makes sense at the end.

Speeches can do that too, within limits.

During a masterclass a diplomat gave a short speech describing his most difficult professional decision. He explained his theme through a gripping story. He had been sitting minding his own business in the embassy when a call came from the police. One of his country’s citizens was high on a building-site roof, threatening to commit suicide by jumping off.

He was in despair because his girlfriend had left him. Help!

The diplomat described how he had raced to the roof and eventually talked this person into coming down safely. He concluded by saying what he had learned from this drastic episode in his life.

His speech had two great themes that open the way to success: Love and Death. It also had a logical structure: What I did → What I learned (or story) → Moral.

We talked about how he might have lifted this speech from good to superb. Why start the speech at the beginning of the story? Instead plunge in right at the moment of crisis? Thus: 99

It’s a Friday afternoon in January. Getting dark.

It’s freezing cold. Minus 6. Snow’s starting to fall.

I’m on a high roof, eight stories up, near the ledge.

Almost within touching distance is a young man from my country He’s screaming. Crying. Ranting and shouting that he’s about to jump. His girlfriend has left him. He has nothing to live for.

How did I get here?

The advantage of a start like this is that the audience is taken straight into the action at its tensest moment. His first version had a smooth if steep take-off for the speech, like a modern airliner leaving the runway. In this second version the speech shots upwards like a rocket to a high point of tension, right at the start. Having grasped the audience’s attention, the speaker can then play with other parts of the speech in novel ways. He then might even tease the audience by describing how he ended up on the roof, before sharing the general lessons he learned from this harrowing experience and sitting down.

But … but … you haven’t told us! Did he jump?!

Oh. Sorry. Of course not!

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Finishing a Speech Strongly

J

ust as a leader needs to start a speech strongly, a speech needs to end strongly. Finishing passages have to be clear, bold, positive, and engaging.

Some examples.

The 2014 Scottish independence referendum produced manifold examples of oratory. Elsewhere in this book are examples of former U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown vanishing into a morass of mixed metaphors and unhappy images. His already famous speech as voting day in Scotland approached saw him speaking with power and authority in favor of the Union continuing.

Up to then, the Yes (to independence) campaigners had led comfortably in projecting confidence in their idea of “Hope and Change” through “Divorce.” Gordon Brown (a tough Scot himself) snatched the banner of confidence from their hands, and carried it across to the No camp with thumping repetitious effect: Be confident!

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Let us have confidence that our values are indeed the values of the majority of the people of Scotland. That our principles of sharing and co-operation are far better and mean more to them than separation and splitting apart.

Have confidence that people know that our Scottish Parliament and its new powers give people the powers they need and meet the aspirations of the Scottish people.

Have confidence, stand up and be counted tomorrow.

Have confidence, have confidence tomorrow and have confidence enough to say with all our friends: we’ve had no answers. They do not know what they are doing. They are leading us into a trap.

Have confidence and say to our friends: for reasons of solidarity, sharing, justice, pride in Scotland, the only answer for Scotland’s sake and for Scotland’s future is vote No. More than impressive: be confident to tell the other side “You don’t know what you’re doing!” By reframing the core argument in this blunt, bold way as a top Scot, he swayed many Scots into voting for the U.K. option.

Here’s how U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron ended his historic statement outside Downing Street on the morning of September 18, 2014, after the referendum, when it was clear that Scotland had voted decisively to stay in the United Kingdom: This referendum has been hard fought. It has stirred strong passions. It has electrified politics in Scotland, and caught the imagination of people across the whole of our United Kingdom.

It will be remembered as a powerful demonstration of the strength and vitality of our ancient democracy. Record numbers registered to vote, and record numbers cast their vote.

We can all be proud of that. It has reminded us how fortunate we are that we are able to settle these vital issues at the ballot box, peacefully and calmly.

Now we must look forward, and turn this into the moment when everyone—whichever way they voted—comes together to build that better, brighter future for our entire United Kingdom.

A good job by his speechwriting team, after probably no sleep. The prime minister explicitly helped Scots, English, Welsh, and Irish alike feel proud of both the outcome and the process, as part of a wider historic sweep of British democratic tradition. And he looked positively to a renewed shared future.

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*** At the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in August 2014, President Obama concluded his speech launching the event with the sort of words often used on such a senior but not especially dramatic occasion: So, in short, we are here not just to talk.

We are here to take action—concrete steps to build on Africa’s progress and forge the partnerships of equals that we seek; tangible steps to deliver more prosperity, more security, and more justice to our citizens.

So, to my fellow leaders, again, thank you so much for being here.

I look forward to our work together today.

The message comes through the familiar contrast: let’s stop talking and start doing. *** In June 2012 Aung San Suu Kyi at last gave her speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize that she had been awarded in 1991 when she was under house arrest in Burma. She gave a rather formal but gracious ending: When I joined the democracy movement in Burma it never occurred to me that I might ever be the recipient of any prize or honor.

The prize we were working for was a free, secure, and just society where our people might be able to realize their full potential. The honor lay in our endeavor. History had given us the opportunity to give of our best for a cause in which we believed.

When the Nobel Committee chose to honor me, the road I had chosen of my own free will became a less lonely path to follow.

For this I thank the Committee, the people of Norway, and peoples all over the world whose support has strengthened my faith in the common quest for peace.

Thank you. *** The temptation for a leader (and speechwriter) is to over-press for the perfect ending, looking for just the right words and weight. This can lead to a speech rambling into tedious pieties.

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The previous chapter quoted from Hillary Clinton’s 1995 speech in Beijing on women’s issues. She finished that speech in a too obvious faux-rhetorical way: Let this conference be our—and the world’s—call to action. Let us heed that call so we can create a world in which every woman is treated with respect and dignity, every boy and girl is loved and cared for equally, and every family has the hope of a strong and stable future.

That is the work before you. That is the work before all of us who have a vision of the world we want to see—for our children and our grandchildren.

The time is now. We must move beyond rhetoric. We must move beyond recognition of problems to working together, to have the common efforts to build that common ground we hope to see.

God’s blessing on you, your work, and all who will benefit from it.

The speech would have been even stronger on the day had she cut out all this padding, and instead finished by starkly repeating her key message: One message echoes forth from this conference.

Human rights are women’s rights. Women’s rights are human rights.

Are you listening, world? The army of women at this conference is talking to you!

One message echoes forth from this conference.

Human rights are women’s rights! Women’s rights are human rights!

After a rousing, headline-grabbing ending like this, there’s no need to add a final greeting or word of thanks. Just sit down. Control! Leadership! Much more, please! *** Sometimes the speechwriters can’t think of a ringing final phrase, so they throw in a famous quotation from someone else. That may look fine on the page and do a good enough job on the day, but nowadays an ending of that sort, unless done perfectly, is a lazy cliché. The speaker emits a feeble message: I’m not smart enough to finish with something interesting or original, so I have rummaged in a book of famous quotes and found this...

Lame. Best avoided. *** 104

A short but stupendous movie speech comes in Mars Attacks. Jack Nicholson as U.S. president makes one last (and, as it turns out, fatally flawed) attempt to persuade the invading Martians not to destroy Earth. He concludes famously, combining contrasts, repetitions, and lists: Why destroy…when you can create?

We can have it all, or we can smash it all.

Why can’t we…work out our differences?

Why can’t we…work things out?

Little people…

Why can’t we all just…get along?

As described earlier in this book, in a great speech everything fits like a jigsaw: words, emotional tone, audience, occasion, and message.

Here the words are magnificent, a soaring appeal to interplanetary partnership that leaves tears trickling down the Martian leader’s skeletal green cheeks.

Yet his appeal fails. The president’s words say mutual respect and equal partnership: that was what he wanted the Martians to hear. But subtle gestures he makes as he delivers the words, and immediately after them, leave them hearing something quite different: A final feeble desperate Earthling trick. Insincerity! No thanks! Die! Watch it for yourself to marvel at the speechwriting and public speaking technique alike. And see how Earth heroically repels the little green invaders.

Look how the end of that speech is crafted. It’s a series of short questions.

Another wonderful movie example of ending a speech with a question comes from the speech to his troops by ruthless grasshopper leader Hopper in A Bug’s Life, as he explains why they are going back to Ant Island to sort out the potentially rebellious ants: You let one ant stand up to us, then they all might stand up.

Those puny little ants outnumber us 100 to one, and if they ever figure that out, there goes our way of life.

It’s not about food. It’s about keeping those ants in line! That’s why we’re going back.

Does anybody else want to stay?

Take a break from reading this book. Watch that movie. See how Hopper (Kevin Spacey) finishes his brutal speech by combining this question with an abrupt change of voice and tone, softened to press home his complete psy105

chological control. Brilliant. *** To end a speech almost abruptly with a question or two has dramatic impact, and leaves the audience wanting more in the shape of answers.

This can be combined with repetition and voice effects to add extra punch.

Here’s how a political speech might end in a pseudo-emphatic but rather corny way: Ladies and Gentlemen, my final thought tonight.

I’ve given you three reasons why the current Middle East policy is going nowhere fast. And I’ve spelled out three proposals for a significant change of direction.

It’s always risky to change course. Sometimes it’s riskier not to do so!

Thank you.

This passage gets added emotional energy and engages the audience directly if the speaker instead uses questions that leave the key idea tantalizingly hanging. Rhetorical emphasis (added intensity, lowered tone, speaking slowly, pauses) can be thrown in by the leader on the day to heighten the effect: Ladies and Gentlemen, my final thought tonight.

I’ve given you three reasons why the current Middle East policy is going nowhere fast. And I’ve spelled out three proposals for a significant change of direction.

Isn’t it risky to change course? Isn’t it risky not to?

Isn’t it risky not to?

Thank you. *** There’s no one best way to end a speech. The public persona of some leaders is all about reassurance, so they’ll want the audience to hear that as their speech ends. Other leaders position themselves as people of action: they want the speech’s ending to convey energy, resourcefulness, teamwork, boldness.

When in doubt, a smart leader plays on surprise. Try to work out how the 106

audience might expect the speech to finish. Then go with something completely unlike that, to make them sit up and think.

If all else fails, make a short point through a terse question that plays up the key word the leader wants the audience to hear, then abruptly and confidently stop: Ladies and Gentlemen. This speech has been all about choices.

Hard, painful policy choices.

Tough choices require tough decisions. As we take those decisions, we need to be bold.

I’m ready to be bold. Are you?

Thank you.

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108

Humor

H

umor, jokes, and wit are the very hardest things in preparing a speech.

In some cultures a leader deliberately avoids jokes in a speech. Leaders are grand. They want to show that they are above and far beyond the audience. Why erode the importance of the leader and the occasion by inappropriate informality?

A joke may inadvertently cause offense to someone. It may not even be funny in itself, or fail when taken from one context to another. Not to forget that out there nowadays are hordes of professional grievance-mongers who find meaning in life from being ‘triggered’ then complaining stridently about the smallest supposed sleight, however unintentional. A Google search for “apologizes for jokes” yields over 700,000 results.

Jokes may not be easy for everyone in an audience to understand, especially if they are not told in the audience’s native language. It’s not good if half the audience is amused but the other half is peeved because it feels it is somehow missing out. Or a joke itself may be fine, but on the night the leader does not time it right and leaves people in the audience not quite sure what the point was, if any. They start wondering what the leader meant, and stop thinking about what the leader is saying. The speech wanders out of control.

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Interpreters are another obstacle to humor. Diplomatic lore has it that an interpreter has no idea why the speaker’s supposed joke is funny, so he tells the listening audience: She’s telling a story she thinks we’ll find amusing. It makes no sense to me! Please laugh heartily when I say so!

Leaders also need skill to work ad-libbed humor into a scripted speech.

It’s not good if the audience enjoys the joke but then feels glum as the leader reverts to the unamusing written text.

In short, jokes are difficult. They can be worse than difficult—they can be risky. *** Be all this as it may, in some cultures humor is essential as part of establishing that core idea of conversation with an audience. In American and British culture even funeral speeches come with a well-timed joke or amusing anecdote. In his eulogy in 2013 at the funeral of Lady Thatcher in St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Right Reverend Richard Chartres, Bishop of London, showed the world how it’s done on an occasion of the highest state solemnity: One thing that everyone has noted is the courtesy and personal kindness which [Lady Thatcher] showed to those who worked for her, as well as her capacity to reach out to the young, and often also to those who were not, in the world’s eyes, “important.”

The letter from a young boy early on in her time as prime minister is a typical example. Nine-year-old David wrote to say: “Last night when we were saying prayers, my daddy said everyone has done wrong things except Jesus, and I said I don’t think you have done bad things because you are the prime minister. Am I right or is my daddy?”

Now perhaps the most remarkable thing is that the prime minister replied in her own hand in a very straightforward letter, which took the question seriously. She said: “However good we try to be, we can never be as kind, gentle, and wise as Jesus. There will be times when we do or say something we wish we hadn’t done, and we shall be sorry and try not to do it again.”

She was always reaching out, she was trying to help in characteristically un-coded terms. I was once sitting next to her at some City function, and in the midst of describing how Hayek’s “Road to 110

Serfdom” had influenced her thinking, she suddenly grasped my wrist and said very emphatically: “Don’t touch the duck paté, bishop—it’s very fattening.”

Simple human anecdotes, whose humor lies in their sheer incongruity: our public-speaking best friend, surprise.

After-dinner speeches need extra humor. In Britain a goodly slice of an after-dinner speech has to be humor, perhaps even with some light risqué innuendo. Without this humorous element, the speech does not achieve what’s needed for that audience on that occasion, even if it is interesting and to the point.

To make matters worse, in an Anglosphere context humor may not be quite enough. Wit is needed for maximum impact. Even if they know and appreciate wit, few leaders have the talent to deliver in a speech wit’s spontaneity and paradox. Oscar Wilde set the bar a bit too high: Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.

The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.

Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.

Yet it can be done. I was at a lunchtime garden drinks gathering of neighbors in my small English rural community. The man who inspired the occasion welcomed the group by talking for a few minutes without any script. He did a beautiful job in conveying warmth, continuity, and change, using easy good humor and the slightest hint at rural naughtiness: As you know, we used to be so badly behaved that we needed two churches in the village.

These days I’m pleased to say that no funny business goes on. In fact, we’re so well behaved that we have only one church now! *** When I started speechwriting in 1985, jokes were hard to find. Nowadays rummaging around the Internet does the job. A speech to a medical convention? Run “doctor jokes” past the search engine. A convention of accountants or scientists? “Accountant jokes” and “science jokes” should yield something to work with.

Be careful. For a speech to a business conference in Africa, a search for “African jokes” may well not give you something appropriate. A joke-joke (namely a story leading up to a punch line) found on the Internet has to work 111

for the speaker on that occasion with that audience at that time of day, not for faraway speechwriters. A good way to decide is to use the tried and proven question: is the leader ready to use that joke or witticism and see it quoted in the media? Does it fit tight with the leader’s natural style and public image?

Or, when you stand back a few paces, is it not quite right? When in doubt, leave it out. A scripted joke is not spontaneous, and so lacks one of key element of humor.

A solid way to achieve some humorous touches in a speech is to work in a personal anecdote that helps make a point in a human way. The natural unscripted telling of a true, familiar story delivered with some improvised rhetorical exaggeration for comic effect usually does the job, the more so if linked to the theme of the speech.

Or, again, we call in our public speaking best friend: surprise. Humor is not just about jokes with punch lines and clever one-liners. Humor flows naturally from incongruity and the unexpected. What is this audience expecting?

Let’s think of how to give the exact opposite. A speech that ends up with the audience smiling at different places from strange juxtapositions or wildly exaggerated turns of phrase for dramatic effect has done a good job.

The British politician Boris Johnson shows how to do this: he deliberately plays with language, peppering his articles and speeches with provocative or outlandish words, constructions, and images: The Victorians were so vain as to believe that because they had managed to extend their dominions so far, and because the map was pink from east to west, that this must somehow reflect the reality of divine providence: that God saw a special virtue in the British people, and appointed them to rule the waves.

And because they had grown up reading such tosh the post-war establishment drew the logical but equally absurd conclusion that the shrinking of Britain must also represent a moral verdict on them all, but in this case the opposite. That we were now decadent, and that decline had set in with all the ineluctability of death watch beetle in the church tower.

Thatcher changed all that. She put a stop to the talk of decline and she made it possible for people to speak without complete embarrassment of putting the “great” back into Britain.

And she gave us a new idea—or revived an old one. That Britain was or could be an enterprising and free-booting sort of culture, with the salt breeze ruffling our hair. A buccaneering environment where there was no shame—quite the reverse—in getting rich.

Audiences weary of spin-doctors and speeches processed through focus 112

groups don’t know what to expect, and enjoy listening to Boris. In a world of far too many dull, ‘safe’ speeches, those leaders who embrace originality—and, yes, risk-taking—stand out. Audiences hear honesty, confidence … more please!

When all else fails, there’s always the absurd multi-role combat joke about international diversity and equal opportunities that can be hammed up or down and elaborated in all directions for different cultures and occasions: You know, a funny thing happened to us last week. Absolutely true.

My team needed to hire more office support, so we put out an ad: Office support needed. Must be proficient at IT, and bilingual. We are an equal opportunities employer.

A few days later along comes this little dog, and barks hard at the ad on the notice-board. [Barking noises] We start to realize that the dog wants this job. So we tell it that it can’t have the job: we need humans who are good at IT. Imagine our surprise! The dog jumps up on a chair and starts hammering away at a keyboard with its front paws: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, emails, the lot. It’s quite good. It even has its own Twitter account!

“Look, doggie. You’re really good at IT. We’d love to hire you, but we need humans here. This isn’t a place for dogs.”

The dog barks hard at the part of the ad that says, “We are an equal opportunities employer.”

“Look doggie, that’s true. But we need humans here. See, it says that the person doing this job must be bilingual!”

And the dog says [Long, long pause]…“Miaaaaooow!”

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114

Nice Speech. Where’s the Definitive Version?

A

leader makes a speech. What and where exactly is it?

In British practice, an “official” or “authorized” version of a set piece speech is prepared for handing out afterwards under the strong heading “Check Against Delivery.” This means that the text may not be the exact words used by the leader. If anyone wants to know what the leader in fact says, the only way to know is to be there when the speech is delivered.

Not that long ago, that was it. The audience would listen to a speech, take some notes, and rely on the check-against-delivery version to have the closest thing to a full text.

These days it’s far easier than ever to record precisely what a leader says during a speech. Even if event organizers specifically request that no video or sound recordings are made during a speech, members of the audience may surreptitiously do so anyway and stream the results on to the Internet almost instantaneously. Informal but complete recordings of a speech can appear years later, just when the speaker is relieved that one especially ill-conceived 115

passage has been lost forever because now his or her message is the exact opposite.

So the one authoritative version of any speech is an unedited live video or sound recording of it: good bits, bad bits, failed jokes, verbal stumbles, and all. The good news for leaders is that for all the new private gadgets that can record a speech live, almost no one has time to watch the full version of a speech unless it has major operational content, or something during the speech goes spectacularly wrong. People still prefer to read or watch only key extracts.

This opens the way for the leader’s team to create different versions of the same speech for different purposes and so manage the way messages are sent to different targets. As many as four versions of a speech can be needed.

The most important version is the one used by the leader on the day.

This version has to be laid out in big fonts and very (very) short paragraphs, with no sentence going over a page. It also may have private “stage directions” reminding the leader where special vocal or other emphasis might be needed. Leaders have their own preferences for how this personal version is prepared. Some prefer landscape layout on small cards. Others like portrait layout on paper.

Pro-tip for a leader’s team: tie the different pages or cards together using a stapler or treasury tag or whatever works best, in case the leader inadvertently knocks the notes off the podium.

In Warsaw I watched U.K. Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott experience just this disaster. With an extravagant hand-gesture he swiped his speakingnotes off the podium and on to the floor. He decided on the spot not to endure the extended indignity of bending down to pick his notes up, sort them back into the right order, and resume where he left off. Instead he abandoned his written speech altogether in favor of an impassioned impromptu oration about the heroic cooperation of Poland and the United Kingdom in defeating Hitleristic fascism. The unexpected if not manic energy of his words made up for his speech’s lack of logic and historical exactitude.

The next version is the one handed out before the speech to the media and (when this makes sense) members of the audience themselves.

This version typically has the prominent “Check Against Delivery” warning on the front page. This expression is hard to translate into some languages.

It means that the media are enjoying the advantage of seeing in advance what the leader is going to say, but that this version is not the final/definitive version: the definitive version is what the leader in fact actually says, so they need to check this written advance version against the exact words spoken.

This version is laid out in longer paragraphs with normal editing. It may 116

highlight key paragraphs or phrases in the speech to help steer media folk quickly to the core messages the leader wants to convey and wants to see quoted in the newspapers. It leaves out opening courtesies, jokes, and other passages that aren’t really necessary for media purposes. Those passages help make the speech work in the room on the day but can come across oddly when read later in a quite different context.

A version of this version can be distributed after the speech to the media, academic journals, or as courtesy copies to the offices of leaders in other capitals. This again will leave out jokes and opening courtesies, and be formatted differently to be easy to read on a computer screen or when printed out.

Finally, the leader’s organization may want to post the speech on its official website. If this adds value, the website version might be complemented by video clips of key passages to show the leader in action on the day.

Pro-tip for a leader’s inner team: make sure that the version posted to the website and any version sent round electronically to the media and others has been cleaned up by the best available techy person, to clear out 200 percent of all embedded electronic document properties and tracked changes.

You naively think you are distributing the text of a speech. In fact you are sending out to a cynical, nosey global readership both the text of the speech and all sorts of interesting (and potentially embarrassing) things about its history and authorship, invisible on the face of the text when printed off or read on the screen but embedded in the code of this e-document.

Get this wrong and the story abruptly swerves off course. It’s no longer about the leader’s lively, interesting speech, but instead about the expensive foreign consultants who helped draft it, and all the punchy passages the leader’s people deleted in favor of something safe. The media preen themselves on their daring detective work in disassembling this e-document quite lawfully.

This usually all works well enough in practice. Most media outlets are too busy or lazy to do anything other than accept the most quotable extracts from the official version they are given by the leader’s team. Anyone desperate to read the fullest possible version of what the leader actually said on the day, including goofs or confusions, is left to try to find someone with a full, unedited transcript or, failing that, a live recording of the whole speech.

Although even then it’s next to impossible for normal busy people to be sure that a supposedly full live recording has not been edited or electronically manipulated...

Far too often, an organization fails to grasp that these different versions of a single speech serve different purposes. Each version needs intelligent attention to make sure that it is doing the right job in the format chosen.

This applies especially to the version of the speech that appears on the or117

ganization’s own website. It’s one thing to draft a speech using snappy, short sentences to help the leader on the day. It’s another to post on the Internet an unedited version of the speech that looks like it was drafted by someone writing for a four-year old.

One particularly horrible example of this way of insulting readers of a speech is the website version of the speech of Labor Party leader Ed Miliband to the party conference in September 2011: Stock markets round the world falling.

The United States in difficulty.

The eurozone struggling.

And people in Britain losing their jobs.

Now is not the time for the same old answers.

From us, on the issues that lost us your trust.

From this Government, on the growth crisis we face.

You need to know that there is an alternative.

You need to know that it is credible.

Maybe this sounded good on the day to Labor loyalists. No one wants to read a speech laid out like this, dragging on page after scrolled page. It looks ridiculous and patronizing. Take this passage: Now there are hard lessons here for my party which some won’t like.

Some of what happened in the 1980s was right.

It was right to let people buy their council houses.

It was right to cut tax rates of 60, 70, 80 percent.

And it was right to change the rules on the closed shop, on strikes before ballots.

These changes were right, and we were wrong to oppose it [sic] at the time.

A reader on a website can more easily make sense of these thoughts as a whole (or use these words for subsequent cutting and pasting text) when the sentences are sensibly bunched together: 118

Now there are hard lessons here for my party which some won’t like. Some of what happened in the 1980s was right.

It was right to let people buy their council houses. It was right to cut tax rates of 60, 70, 80 percent. And it was right to change the rules on the closed shop, on strikes before ballots.

These changes were right, and we were wrong to oppose it at the time.

There is no one correct way to present the spoken word in written form.

Culture, tradition, and style vary according to context and personal preference. But the point here is simple. People take in information and ideas in different ways. Reading is not listening. A leader’s team will use the opportunities presented by different formats and contexts to make sure that key messages of any speech work for different audiences, and come through clear and strong all the time. *** As the leader’s team frets about these different versions of a single speech, it must not forget that the first responsibility of the leader and speechwriter alike is to the people listening as the speech is delivered. The audience is paying the leader the special respect of turning up to hear what he or she has to say. The leader in turn honors that respect by doing a strong job, showing commitment and respect.

Word gets around. The leader who consistently underperforms, or has little to say that is interesting, receives fewer invitations than the leader whose words are met with warm applause. Warm applause sends a signal to other audiences (above all the leader’s friends and enemies) beyond the room: Good grief. She keeps finding new ways to engage with people that go down really well!

What’s she saying and doing that hits the target so regularly?

What can we learn from this winning formula?

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5. what’s the message?

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Presidents Clinton and Chirac in Sarajevo

T

he message part of giving any speech is simple. If you don’t know the message(s) you want to convey in a speech, don’t stand up and start talking. You’re wasting your own time and (worse) wasting the audience’s time.

If you do prepare a speech beforehand but at the end of all this work you’re not quite sure what the basic message is, the audience may well take away from the speech something very different to what the leader meant to say. International diplomatic speechwriting is especially tricky in this sense. A leader is usually trying to send different messages (both open and subliminal) to different audiences for different purposes simultaneously. The headlines in the media at home might well not be what the leader wants to see in a specific country mentioned in the speech.

A good speechwriting team clears away all the fluff surrounding a message by starting at the end of the process: the ideal positive media headline that the speech aims to win. That headline will be written in language you’d use talking to an intelligent aunt or uncle who is not famil121

iar with policy detail, but can quickly grasp what an issue is all about. But beyond the headline message is the subliminal message that the speech tries to project: courage, resolve, hope and change, fairness, compromise, no compromise, leader, strength. Once the ideal headline has been identified, the work can start on building the speech to hit that target.

The message also has to work for the speaking occasion itself. Two examples from Bosnia.

Bosnia and Herzegovina was one of the six republics comprising the (Tito Communist) Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Its re-emergence in the 1990s as an independent state for the first time since the Middle Ages prompted a ghastly conflict with its neighboring republics, Serbia and Croatia. For several devastating years Bosnia came to symbolize the worst consequences of the end of European communism: horrible inter-communal fighting and atrocities.

The war ended with the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995. The task began of building a new country from the ruins. In the first years after the Dayton deal was signed, Sarajevo hosted top foreign political visitors keen to see how national reconciliation and rebuilding were going, not least because taxpayers from their respective countries were pouring funds into this work.

In late 1997 President Clinton came to Bosnia. The Bosnian issue had been a huge foreign policy problem for his first presidency. Deep divisions over how to tackle the Bosnia crisis (in particular disagreements over riskily committing troops on the ground) had left relations between Washington and the United States’ closest European allies reaching depths of acrimony not seen since the Second World War. President Clinton nonetheless had enjoyed a diplomatic triumph at Dayton. Now he wanted to visit Bosnia itself and strike an unambiguously generous note of reconciliation and reconstruction. He also had to send a message to Congress in Washington that the heavy U.S. military presence now on the ground in Bosnia was being successful and safe, and needed to be extended.

The centerpiece of his visit was his speech to an invited audience at the National Theater in Sarajevo. U.S. security was tight to (and well beyond) the point of obnoxiousness. The Sarajevo diplomatic corps, along with other guests, gloomily endured the ignominy of arriving several hours before the speech and then being locked in the theater with no refreshments. Still, it was worth the wait. The Americans knew what they were doing, and put on a show. They paid for a new large stage curtain as the backdrop for the president’s speech. And the Clintons finally entered with a gesture of high Bosnian political symbolism.

At that point in Bosnia’s post-war development the president of Republika Srpska (one of the two Bosnia entities agreed at Dayton) was Biljana 122

Plavsić. She was seen by the international community as representing progress and compromise, unlike other Bosnian Serb leaders close to war crimes indictee Radovan Karadzić, who was skulking in the mountains above Sarajevo. Mrs. Plavsić was, however, a figure hated by most Bosniaks (Muslims) for her role in the war; she had not been back in Sarajevo since the conflict started and was nervous about making the journey now, even for a U.S. president.

The front row of the audience included the top Bosniak leaders. Mrs. Plavsić was seated well away from them, at the end of the second row.

The Bosniak leadership looked more than unhappy as the Clintons entered the auditorium to warm applause, and Hillary Clinton (in a blatantly prearranged gesture) moved to give Mrs. Plavsić a warm hug as a sign of top U.S. political support for what Mrs. Plavsić (then) represented in Bosnia’s complex peace process.

Mrs. Plavsić subsequently was indicted for war crimes and surrendered herself to the Hague Tribunal. She pleaded guilty to various offenses and was sentenced to eleven years in prison. As Hillary Clinton now runs for U.S. president, is she wondering whether photographs of her fulsome embrace of Mrs. Plavsić the War Criminal will appear during her campaign?

The choreography of President Clinton’s speech itself was outstanding. He was introduced in a moving way by two young Bosnians, one in a wheelchair after being hit by a sniper bullet during the war. President Clinton’s speech was beautifully delivered and tuned perfectly for the occasion. He used it to send two inter-connected messages. One to Congress in Washington: Our Bosnia military commitment is working; let’s stick with it. The other to Bosnia’s leaders: Yes, we have committed American troops in Bosnia; we expect you to do your part by committing to peace and cooperation.

He addressed Bosnian leaders directly: Most of all, the leaders here, you owe it to your country to bring out the best in people, acting in concert, not conflict; overcoming obstacles, not creating them; rising above petty disputes, not fueling them.

In the end, leaders in a democracy must bring out the best in people. But in the end, they serve the people who send them to their positions…

The end of the speech was unexpected and, in its own way, magnificent. At just the right moment as he entered the concluding passages, the new theater curtain lifted. There behind President Clinton was the Sarajevo Orchestra, which, as we all knew, had lost several members during the siege of the city: 123

Well, they’re still here, and they’re still Muslims, Croats, and Serbs. And to tell you the truth, I know the tuba players from the violinists, but I can’t tell the Muslims from the Croats from the Serbs.

The harmony of their disparate voices—the harmony of their disparate voices—is what I hear. It reminds me of Bosnia’s best past and it should be the clarion call to your future.

Here at the dawn of the new millennium, let us recall that the century we are leaving began with the sound of gunfire in Sarajevo. And let us vow to start the new century with the music of peace in Sarajevo.

To the people of Bosnia I say, you have seen what war has wrought; now you know what peace can bring.

So seize the chance before you. You can do nothing to change the past; but if you can let it go, you can do everything to build a future.

The world is watching, and the world is with you. But the choice is yours. May you make the right one.

Corny? Clichéd? A cynical tugging of heart strings? Oh yes. But on the day there was tumultuous applause, and scarcely a dry eye in the house.

This was a world-class example of leader, words, tone, audience, venue, ambitious choreography, and wider context locking together jigsawstyle to deliver memorable messages. More, please. *** A few months later, in April 1998, France’s President Jacques Chirac visited Sarajevo. Surely he too would rise to the occasion? Hélas, non.

A European leader has two ways to follow a U.S. president into town.

One is to study closely what the Americans did, then do something as different as possible. The other is to try to repeat everything the Americans did, down to the smallest detail.

President Chirac’s team bafflingly chose the second option, including an absurd prolonged security lockdown for much of the Balkans and, yes, a speech in the National Theater to an invited audience. However, the French had neither the diplomatic resources nor showmanship to pull all this off. Their innovative idea to bring to Sarajevo for the speech a group of young Bosnian Serbs was thwarted by the Republika Srpska authorities for “security reasons.”

President Chirac’s speech in the theater itself inevitably covered much 124

the same ground as President Clinton’s. It urged Bosnians to bury their differences and build for the future, but set out the issues in European terms, calling for “an open and tolerant Islam on our continent.” President Clinton’s speech had not mentioned the European contribution to Bosnia’s rebuilding. Hopla! President Chirac hit back by not mentioning the Americans.

All in all, the occasion felt flat. It did not help that President Chirac’s earnest, long, and mainly humorless speech was in French, a language few in the theater understood. There was none of President Clinton’s relaxed, almost sexy style and sense of show. No one had a good time, or felt emotional engagement with either President Chirac or his message.

More, please? Zut alors! Once was more than enough.11

11.

See the Appendix for my cable to the FCO reporting this speech.

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126

Vladimir Putin Addresses Poland

R

ussian President Vladimir Putin is a cunning exponent of the art of sending different overt and subliminal messages to different audiences, playing on the fact that Western media outlets struggle to pick up sly historical or linguistic nuances that are easily spotted in those European capitals used to hard dealings with Moscow.

Back in 2009 Prime Minister Putin (as he then was) sent a Letter to the Poles giving his thoughts on the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact on the eve of a top gathering in Gdańsk, Poland, to commemorate the outbreak of the Second World War. This letter contained many noteworthy passages: The Soviet diplomacy was quite right at that time to consider it, at least, unwise to reject Germany’s proposal to sign the NonAggression Pact when U.S.S.R.’s potential allies in the West had already made similar agreements with the German Reich and did not want to cooperate with the Soviet Union, as well as to be confronted with the Nazi almighty military machine alone…

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While looking back at the past, it is necessary for all of us, both in Western and Eastern Europe, to remember what tragedies can result from cowardice, behind-the-scenes and armchair politics, as well as from seeking to ensure security and national interests at the expense of others. There cannot be reasonable and responsible politics without a moral and legal framework…

In my view, the moral aspect of policies pursued is particularly important. In this regard, I would like to remind you that our country’s parliament unambiguously assessed the immorality of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. This has not been the case so far in some other states, though they also made very controversial decisions in the 1930s.

Read this closely. Is Putin calling the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact immoral? No. On the contrary, he’s saying that Stalin made a wise decision to strike that deal with Hitler in the circumstances then prevailing.

The U.S.S.R. was only responding reasonably, nay morally, to what other powerful states had done. Yet many gullible Western media outlets took a completely different message from Kremlin spin-doctors and ran headlines saying, “Putin condemns ‘immoral’ Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact” and suchlike. A superb PR coup for Moscow.

Thus Poland, as the first victim of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, found itself at its own commemorative ceremony in Gdańsk sandwiched between Big Germany and Big Russia. They were represented that day by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, the former keen to achieve substantive reconciliation on modern European terms, the latter nodding stiffly in that direction but in practice offering only Russian/KGB-style terms.

How did Putin pull this one off? He did a nimble subliminal messaging judo-flip. His open letter deftly struck a reasonable, fair-minded overall tone, while conceding precisely nothing at all on the hard post-Soviet view of the Second World War. He cunningly linked the message to the occasion. He turned to Russia’s advantage the fact that Poland was making so much of this anniversary of Nazi-Soviet aggression. He knew that once the Poles had invited him to the Gdańsk ceremony, they would not be openly critical of what he said lest they come over as churlishly generating controversy at a solemn occasion of reconciliation.

What was Putin’s true message here? Peel away clever textual nuances.

You are left with something simple and ruthless: You see, Poland and Europe, I will come to your so-called commemorative ceremony. And I’ll assert my view of history, not yours.

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I’ll make some nice noises but concede nothing. Your sissy leaders and idiotic media will portray my message as a positive conciliatory gesture, and say that I have condemned the MolotovRibbentrop Pact as immoral when (as we both know) I have done no such thing.

You will have no choice in public but to accept my view, thereby legitimizing it for a long time to come.

In short? I have out-maneuvered you.

I am strong. You are weak.

Not a speech, although it easily could have been one. But subtly ambiguous, ruthless messaging of the highest level.

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President Obama in Cairo and Moscow

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s we have seen, the first election campaign of Barack Obama set new dizzy records for creating political momentum around a message of pure emotion. Hope! And Change!

President Obama’s election was greeted with jubilation, both in the United States and round the world. It seemed to represent a new start, a clean break with unpopular cowboy-style interventionist policies emanating from Washington, and above all a real chance to create a quite different relationship with the Middle East. The core message? You have had George W. Bush. That did not work out so well. I, Barack Obama, am the anti-Bush.

The Obama team worked tirelessly to present Obama as a new leader who would set the world an example for international consensus and dialog, not confrontation and conflict: ‌generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless.

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This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.

This was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth.12 Thus it was that after Obama was elected president, his team set up two huge speeches in the first few months of his presidency to advance this new agenda. One in Cairo, heralded as President Obama’s Message to the Muslim World, signalling a clean break with nasty neo-conservative American policies (Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran) and a new start based not on military might but rather on dialog. And another in Moscow, to set out the United States’ new approach to relations with Moscow and the post-Soviet space. Both speeches were to take place in universities for audiences of primarily younger people, to reinforce the hope/change motif.

The Cairo speech was amazingly long: over 6,050 words. Far too many. A speech that long squeezes in too much, and leaves too many openings for attack later.

After opening courtesies, President Obama started by making a strange mistake: I’m also proud to carry with me the goodwill of the American people, and a greeting of peace from Muslim communities in my country: Assalaamu alaykum. [Applause] What? Why is the president of the United States carrying a greeting of peace to Egyptians from U.S. Muslim communities and only from them?

What about a greeting of peace from Christian or Buddhist or indeed atheist communities? What does this opening say to non-Muslims in the U.S. and in the Middle East alike, and above all to Egypt’s Christian Copt communities who have good reason to feel uneasy about their future?

Then we saw this: I’ve come here to Cairo to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based on mutual interest and mutual respect, and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition…

Why put America and Islam in the same categories?

12.

Senator Obama’s nomination victory speech, June 3, 2008.

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President Obama noted the scientific triumphs of an earlier Islam. But there was something oddly patronizing here. Yes, centuries ago Islam achieved huge strides. But then what happened? The speech did not mention the ruinous civilizational consequences (analyzed by the United Nations in its landmark “Arab Human Development Report 2002”) of the systemic failure down the centuries to translate non-Islamic books into Arabic.

The passages on women’s rights were perverse: I reject the view of some in the West that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal, but I do believe that a woman who is denied an education is denied equality. [Applause] …Issues of women’s equality are by no means simply an issue for Islam. In Turkey, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, we’ve seen Muslim-majority countries elect a woman to lead. Meanwhile, the struggle for women’s equality continues in many aspects of American life, and in countries around the world.

Why not go on to say that a woman who is denied a free vote also is denied equality? And that so-called Islamic countries that deny men and women alike a free and fair vote are letting down themselves and humanity? No doubt because in undemocratic Egypt and in so many Arab autocracies that honest point would strike a jarring note.

President Obama of course dared not use this speech to point out that women in Egypt have one of the world’s highest levels of female genital mutilation (approaching a staggering 80 percent for women aged 15 to 19, according to W.H.O. statistics). Who can blame him? How to raise the issue in front of young Egyptian women and men? But by framing women’s rights in terms of headscarves and education and rambling cultural relativism, he ceded much of the rhetorical battlefield to Islamist extremists and Muslim cultural conservatives.

Other than some commendably direct passages that steered a studious “on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand” course on the Israel-Palestine question, President Obama’s cleverly emollient Cairo phrases merely moved U.S. policy back from President Bush’s ill-fated freedom agenda into a new version of an old bad habit.

For decades too long, Western capitals nodded deferentially at awful national socialistic and other autocratic regimes across the Middle East.

They found themselves caught between a pseudo-racist view that “Arabs can’t run a modern open society” and a fear of instability. President Obama’s Cairo speech so wanted to avoid causing offense that he avoided strong, confident points in favor of intelligent, modern pluralism and democratic change. His subliminal message was unlikely to perturb Islamist extremists: 133

Under my restrained, cautious leadership, the United States will respect and accept conservative forms of Islam. Even if Islamism gets too aggressive, we don’t plan to do much about it. And we may not be too active in supporting Muslim liberal trends either.

In short, steady as she goes.

And, by the way, I do hope you have noticed that I am not George W. Bush! *** The Moscow speech a month later followed a similar approach, though in a mere 4,200 words. In a lofty but oddly didactic style, President Obama laid out his ideas for the way the world should be run: You are the last generation born when the world was divided.

At that time, the American and Soviet armies were still massed in Europe, trained and ready to fight…

And then, within a few short years, the world as it was ceased to be. Now, make no mistake: this change did not come from any one nation. The Cold War reached a conclusion because of the actions of many nations over many years, and because the people of Russia and Eastern Europe stood up and decided that its end would be peaceful.

That’s one bland way of looking at it. But why not say at least something about the moral and political ruination caused by communism and the brutish Russian imperialism it represented? Why not spell out the generous efforts the United States and its NATO allies have been doing to help Russia through the ensuing transition, and say that many tough reforms still need to be done?

There is the 20th century view that the United States and Russia are destined to be antagonists, and that a strong Russia or a strong America can only assert themselves in opposition to one another.

And there is a 19th century view that we are destined to vie for spheres of influence, and that great powers must forge competing blocs to balance one another.

These assumptions are wrong. In 2009, a great power does not show strength by dominating or demonizing other countries.

The days when empires could treat sovereign states as pieces on a chessboard are over…

That’s why I have called for a “reset” in relations between the 134

United States and Russia … I believe that on the fundamental issues that will shape this century, Americans and Russians share common interests that form a basis for cooperation. It is not for me to define Russia’s national interests, but I can tell you about America’s national interests, and I believe that you will see that we share common ground…

State sovereignty must be a cornerstone of international order.

Just as all states should have the right to choose their leaders, states must have the right to borders that are secure, and to their own foreign policies. That is true for Russia, just as it is true for the United States. Any system that cedes those rights will lead to anarchy.

That’s why we must apply this principle to all nations, and that includes nations like Georgia and Ukraine. America will never impose a security arrangement on another country.

For any country to become a member of an organization like NATO, for example, a majority of its people must choose to; they must undertake reforms; they must be able to contribute to the Alliance’s mission.

And let me be clear: NATO should be seeking collaboration with Russia, not confrontation.

This is all too trite and pedantic for clever Russian ears. But what if it’s in fact wrong? What if under current management Russia does not accept this polite rules-based way of looking at the former Soviet space? What if Russia prefers a 19th century or even 18th century approach, and wants to grab back territory and influence lost when the Soviet Union collapsed?

Here we also have a striking example of the messaging problems involved in giving two set-piece foreign policy speeches on the same theme, in quick succession, in neighboring countries. In Kiev, two weeks later, Vice President Biden, after his meeting with then-Ukrainian President Yushchenko, was giving a necessarily different public emphasis: President Obama and I have stated clearly that if you [Ukraine] choose to be part of Euro-Atlantic integration—which I believe you have—we strongly support that. We do not recognize—and I want to reiterate it—any sphere of influence.

We do not recognize anyone else’s right to dictate to you or any other country what alliances you will seek to belong to or what relationships—bilateral relationships—you have. …President Obama made it clear in his visit to Moscow this month—the United States supports Ukraine’s sovereignty, inde135

pendence and freedom, and to make its own choices—its own choices—including what alliances they choose to belong.

That, translated into Russian, means “If Ukraine wants to join NATO, that’s none of Moscow’s damn’ business.”

In short, right from the start, the Obama Administration sent mixed messages to Moscow and Kiev. This was no accident. There was a real policy dilemma in play. How to help Ukraine and other former Soviet republics reform themselves when such reforms involve dismantling Sovietera structures and colossal corruption with links deep into the Kremlin?

In the light of what has happened since 2008/9, it’s hard not to conclude that in these early speeches concerning relations with Russia, both President Obama and Vice President Biden naively glossed over the real issues. Their attempt to strike an unfailingly new positive tone was not unworthy, or even unwise. But neither speech gave the Kremlin a frank, hard-headed look at what still needed to be done to work together to clean up Europe after the Cold War, or chart a clear practical course on how Russia’s and Ukraine’s legitimate security concerns might best be met. Above all, they did not bring home to Moscow that Washington would push back hard if Russian policy started to try to reverse the post-Cold War settlement in Europe.

It’s not what you say—it’s what they hear. President Obama and Vice President Biden believed that they were sending a clear message: Under Obama, Washington is not going to be confrontational like that awful Bush. So you Russians can relax a bit.

That said, let’s all now make a special effort to be reasonable.

Why waste time in old-fashioned ideological confrontation?

Sure, we all have important interests. But interests need to be limited, and differences in interests need to be sorted out nicely.

Places like Ukraine and Georgia should freely choose their own path, just as we both choose ours. That’s fair! O.K.?

Moscow heard something very different: Under Obama, Washington is pulling back. It does not care as much as it did about this part of the world.

Moscow duly reached a conclusion of its own: We smell U.S. weakness! New rich opportunities for creating Moscow-friendly “new realities” in Europe and the former Soviet space!

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*** Since these two speeches in Moscow and Kiev were given, relations between Moscow and Washington have deteriorated on all fronts as Moscow has pressed to counter what it sees as illegitimate Western influence in its front yard (notably Georgia and Ukraine). Russia has illegally annexed Crimea, part of Ukraine’s territory, and has been openly helping violent separatist extremists in eastern Ukraine. Western governments have united to impose sharp economic sanctions on Russia.

In short, we are now seeing much the most dangerous crisis in Europe since the end of the Cold War. Hillary Clinton, who for four years served as U.S. secretary of state under Obama and passed a hapless ungrammatical symbolic Reset Button to Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov13, now has the effrontery openly to attack Obama’s foreign policy as indecisive, if not dangerous: Great nations need organizing principles, and “Don’t do stupid stuff” is not an organizing principle.14 Indeed.

See below.

Hillary Clinton. Interview with Jeffrey Goldberg. “Hillary Clinton: ‘Failure’ to Help Syrian Rebels Led to the Rise of ISIS.” The Atlantic, August 10, 2014.

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14.

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President Obama in Israel

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eaders have different ways to send messages. Sometimes it is not the words of the speech that send the message, but the very fact that the leader concerned is making the speech in that venue. Or not. Speeches in or about the Middle East give many examples of the complexity of fine-tuning messages to different audiences simultaneously.

A senior political visit to Israel that does not include a visit to the Occupied Territories makes a statement, just as a visit to the Occupied Territories that does not include meetings with senior Israelis makes a statement. If a top foreign leader decides to visit both, speeches and statements made in each place will be compared and contrasted in intense detail to look for nuance revealing what was really being said.

President Obama made such a visit in March 2013. The contrast between his two major speeches was striking, less for what they said on the substance than for the warmth of his tone in Tel Aviv compared to the much more formal speech he subsequently gave to the Palestinian audience.

Here is President Obama at the state dinner hosted by Israeli President Peres: 139

A toast—ad me’ah ve’esrim. L’chaim! [Applause] Mmm, that’s good wine. [Laughter] Actually, we should probably get this out of the photograph. All these people will say I’m having too much fun in Israel. [Laughter] This is the informal warmth of a leader comfortable among friends.

President Obama then met President Abbas of the Palestinian Authority. They gave a joint press conference. There, Obama’s tone was very different: So one of my main messages today—the same message I’m conveying in Israel—is that we cannot give up. We cannot give up on the search for peace, no matter how hard it is.

As I said with Prime Minister Netanyahu yesterday, we will continue to look for steps that both Israelis and Palestinians can take to build the trust and the confidence upon which lasting peace will depend. And I very much appreciate hearing President Abbas’s ideas on what those steps could be.

The solid, carefully scripted language of international relations. Definitely not the words and wit shared between hard-headed senior colleagues who know that for all their ups and downs they are on the same emotional wavelength.

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Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI

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he words of a leader’s speech and its overt message have to chime with its subliminal and emotional message. But a speech’s various messages also should chime with common sense and reality, reaching out to the audience where it is.

In 1997 Pope John Paul II visited Sarajevo to hold an open-air mass in one of the stadiums used for the 1984 Sarajevo Olympic Games. It had been heavily damaged during the war and used as a mass graveyard. By this stage, the pope was already frail, but he received a warm welcome as he drove into the city for his mass at the Koševo Stadium. As my reporting telegram to London put it, “Three white doves of peace were released into the air; dark SFOR [NATO] helicopters of peace hovered over the surrounding hills.”15 The stadium was full with some 50,000 people, mainly Bosnian Croats who had traveled to Sarajevo in fleets of coaches, but with plenty of Bosniaks and the Bosniak political leadership also present. The dismal 15.

See the Appendix for my cable to the FCO reporting this speech.

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Bosnian Serb leaders lurked well away from this historic occasion, though they did join him separately for private meetings. The pope’s address to this huge crowd pressed the case for spiritual reconciliation. Europe had been a witness to Bosnia’s suffering, “but the question must be asked— was it a fully responsible witness?”

He drew on his famous message used in communist Poland and elsewhere to urge that all Bosnians search for the strength both to forgive and to ask for forgiveness: “Let us forgive, and let us ask for forgiveness.” If Christ is to be our advocate with the Father, we cannot fail to utter these words.

We cannot fail to undertake the difficult but necessary pilgrimage of forgiveness, which leads to a profound reconciliation.

Of course, forgiveness, far from precluding the search for truth, actually requires it, because an essential requisite for forgiveness and reconciliation is justice. But it still remains true that “asking and granting forgiveness is something profoundly worthy of man…”

In the political circumstances of Bosnia in 1997, and with Pope John Paul II’s faltering health, this long address to a huge crowd on a chilly April day achieved all that could be expected. It was solemn, brave, generous, and moving, and it touched the right uplifting tone for the many thousands of people there to hear it.

A papal speech that did not rise to the occasion in this sense was the address by Pope Benedict XVI when he visited the Auschwitz concentration camp in May 2006. I stood with the rest of the Warsaw diplomatic corps to watch the pope give it. Again, a solemn and touching occasion: a German pope who had lived through the Nazi period speaking at the site of the blackest crimes in human history. Yet on the most profound issues (who bore responsibility for the disaster, and what precisely that responsibility comprised) the pope’s words were, in my view, unconvincing: …a duty before God, for me to come here as the successor of Pope John Paul II and as a son of the German people—a son of that people over which a ring of criminals rose to power by false promises of future greatness and the recovery of the nation’s honor, prominence, and prosperity, but also through terror and intimidation, with the result that our people was used and abused as an instrument of their thirst for destruction and power.

This way of putting it portrayed the German people as bamboozled victims of a criminal gang, rather than people who, in their many millions, voted for Hitler, adored Hitler and his policies, and otherwise supported him for years on end. Not every German, to be sure. But it’s specious or 142

at best beside the point to assert that Germans en masse were “used and abused.” They brought their suffering on themselves, and set in motion untold suffering for countless millions of others.

Pope Benedict might have dealt with this in part by saying a word about his own connection with the Hitler Youth and the power of temptation, or otherwise addressing the moral labyrinths of each individual’s accountability. But he steered clear of anything so personal or frank. Perhaps even at a supreme public and moral moment like this, even a pope is unable to summon the strength to confess openly, or to explore private sins and weakness? And was that in fact Pope Benedict’s central, profound, painful message?16 *** A final word on these two important papal speeches.

In Sarajevo, the open-air mass saw persistent flurries of light snow until Pope John Paul II started to speak and wan sunlight appeared. At Auschwitz, a rainbow arced across the sky during the service. With such divine meteorological choreography in full support, the impact of any papal speech is all the more impressive.

16.

See the Appendix for my cable to the FCO reporting this speech.

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Diana, Princess of Wales

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n 1997 the late Diana, Princess of Wales, gave a keynote speech in London about her work campaigning against landmines. At this point in her life she was determined to establish her own role in humanitarian work separately from the British royal family.

She did a fine job of explaining in powerful, direct language how devastating landmines can be to civilians. This speech was widely and favorably quoted, and arguably helped shift U.K. government policy.

Her speech reads well years later. Note how she combined big-picture facts and figures and hard policy questions with a personal touch, in a way that did not fail to move anyone listening: For the mine is a stealthy killer. Long after conflict is ended, its innocent victims die or are wounded singly, in countries of which we hear little.

Their lonely fate is never reported. The world, with its many other preoccupations, remains largely unmoved by a death roll of something like 800 people every month—many of them women and children.

I was in Angola in January with the British Red Cross—a coun145

try where there are 15 million landmines in a population, Ladies and Gentlemen, of 10 million—with the desire of drawing world attention to this vital, but hitherto largely neglected issue. … I visited some of the mine victims who had survived, and saw their injuries. I am not going to describe them, because in my experience it turns too many people away from the subject.

Suffice to say, that when you look at the mangled bodies, some of them children, caught by these mines, you marvel at their survival. What is so cruel about these injuries, is that they are almost invariably suffered, where medical resources are scarce.

She finished with a strong contrast: This tracing and lifting of mines, as I saw in Angola, is a desperately slow business. So in my mind a central question remains.

Should we not do more to quicken the de-miners’ work, to help the injured back to some sort of life, to further our own contribution to aid and development?

The country is enriched by the work done by its overseas agencies and non-governmental organizations who work to help people in Africa and Asia to improve the quality of their lives.

Yet mines cast a constant shadow over so much of this work.

Resettlement of refugees is made more hazardous. Good land is put out of bounds. Recovery from war is delayed. Aid workers themselves are put at risk.

I would like to see more done for those living in this “no man’s land” which lies between the wrongs of yesterday and the urgent needs of today.

The sincerity and substance of her message touched policymakers and citizens around the world. Her audience heard seriousness and urgency, and through that her own moral leadership.

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Disappointment and Impatience

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ne way to send a public message of disapproval is to use the language of disappointment. This rarely works well. Why?

In 2013 U.S. Deputy Secretary of State William Burns announced that the Obama administration was “disappointed” that Chinese authorities had not cooperated with them by handing over Edward Snowden: We were disappointed with how the authorities in Beijing and Hong Kong handled the Snowden case, which undermined our effort to build the trust needed to manage difficult issues.

In response, Chinese state councillor Yang Jiechi said Hong Kong’s actions were in accordance with its law. “Its approach is beyond reproach.”17 What is happening here? Basically, the Obama administration was left looking weak after Beijing ignored their requests to hand over Snowden, 17.

“Edward Snowden Case: U.S. Rebukes China.” BBC, July 12, 2013.

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and felt that it needed to say something critical about this in public when Burns met the Chinese on other important business.

The Americans know that publicly rebuking the Chinese side about its behavior does not make much difference to the Chinese position (except to harden it). So instead, the Americans resorted to expressing “disappointment” that China had not been more cooperative. By referring to its own disappointed feelings about the matter, the American side conveyed the message that China had not lived up to U.S. expectations or mutual understandings. The criticism was there, but oblique.

Fine. But did this work? Not really. It hinted at weakness in a different way.

There is something paternalistic or patronizing about the language of disappointment. It’s the sort of thing a parent or teacher says to a naughty child, or a boss might say to a subordinate. It’s not the way two equal grown-ups talk to each other. It suggests that the relationship’s expectations are defined by the side expressing the disappointment, not by both parties together. And (worse) it betrays a curious lack of shrewd professional judgment: “I thought that you would be nicer to me than you are!”

This came up in London back in 2000. Burly Balkans negotiator Dick Holbrooke turned up for a meeting with the FCO. He unpacked his heavy briefcase and made an ostentatious cellphone call to the president of Nigeria as we sat there opposite him waiting for the discussion to start.

Holbrooke then began by expressing at some length his utterly heartfelt disappointment with the British over some footling disagreement on Bosnia. This clumsy but amusing psychological power play was designed to put the Brits on the defensive from the start. It did not completely succeed.

Had I been drafting Burns’ speaking notes, I would have done it differently and anticipated the specious Chinese excuse that they were only following their own law: You all know that we in Washington did not appreciate the fact that the Chinese side allowed Mr. Snowden to leave after he had done so much damage to U.S. interests.

China and Hong Kong chose to interpret their law in this way.

However, that way of doing business makes it much harder to build the confidence needed to work together to tackle other really important issues together. I have made this very clear to my Chinese partners today.

Even this approach suffers from the obvious problem that if Washington was so annoyed with Beijing, why is sensitive high-level dialog continuing as normal? They poke you hard in the eye, and you carry on talking?

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There’s no good answer to that. But at least the language tone is firm and not whiny. And it is based on something true: as far as the U.S. side is concerned, mutual confidence has been damaged by this Snowden episode. *** Soon after American disappointment with China we had American disappointment with Russia, when Moscow decided to give Snowden “temporary asylum.” President Obama called off his scheduled bilateral meeting with President Putin in Moscow before the G20 gathering in St. Petersburg, using an NBC Tonight Show interview to express his disappointment at the Russian decision: There have been times where they flip back in the Cold War thinking and in a Cold War mentality…

What I consistently say to them, and what I say to President Putin, is that’s the past, and we have to think about the future. And there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to co-operate more effectively than we do.

Hmm. No reason? Really?

President Obama also had something to say about Russia’s internal policies: I have no patience for countries that try to treat gays or lesbians or transgender persons in ways that intimidate them or are harmful to them.

To add to the fun, President Putin’s aide Yuri Ushakov hit back with Moscow’s own disappointment: We are disappointed by the U.S. administration’s decision to cancel the visit of President Obama to Moscow planned in early September…

It is clear that the decision is due to the situation around the former U.S. special services employee Snowden, which we did not create.18 What was going on in this publicly escalating mutual disappointment?

The public mood between national leaders sets the tone for what happens down the policy chain. If Presidents Obama and Putin are not in the mood for engaging substantively in person, their respective teams won’t 18.

Voice of Russia, August 7, 2013.

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push hard or take any risks. Such top-level frosty periods happen in diplomacy.

If the language of disappointment sounds weak, the language of impatience, as used by President Obama in this case, sounds condescending. Perhaps it goes down well enough with Obama’s domestic supporters and maybe U.S. opinion more generally. Yet while such a way of framing the issues sounds superficially tough (but not too tough), it has a worldweary, self-absorbed feel: Oh, you silly people are simply impossible to deal with. Please go away and shape up, so that we can continue properly.

Worst, it focuses attention less on the substance and more on the flickering dial of the Obama private patience-o-meter.

This sort of language is received in Russia with amused contempt.

President Putin will have been privately delighted that he elicited such a reaction from President Obama on the gay rights issue, a subject on which Russian opinion is overwhelmingly on Putin’s side.

Chto? Dark-skinned weedy Obama attacks bemuscled judo expert Putin on gay rights? Otlichno! Putin’s poll numbers jump!

In President Putin’s eyes, the way the Americans handled the Snowden problem made them look ridiculous. For the first time anyone can remember, an American citizen asks for political asylum in Russia. And to add to the glory of this situation from a Russian point of view, that someone is a preening IT expert with amazing U.S. secrets that can be sucked out of his laptop when he’s not looking.

Hand him back? No thanks. *** These awkward tones in Washington’s messages to Russia trace back to the unwise 2009 Obama-Clinton gimmick of producing a shiny new “reset” button to symbolize a post-Bush new start in U.S.-Russia relations. Not only did Hillary Clinton actually use the incorrect Russian word word for “reset” as she handed over this lugubrious trinket, a dire highprofile professional mistake. The psychological sense of the gesture was all wrong: Howdee! No more Bush! It’s us instead—your new best friend!

Whether you want a new best friend or not!

Russian leaders just do not think or act like that. Nor do they respect anyone who does.

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The point of diplomacy is to listen carefully to the other side, then work out skilfully where any common ground might be enlarged. Once you start emoting on your own state of mind, or start defining in public how you expect the other side to behave and what the relationship is all about, you lose authority. You look and sound oddly desperate.

How to draft speaking notes for President Obama on these subtle questions in a way that sounds firm and principled in both the United States and the Kremlin? This way: Snowden This episode has damaged our bilateral relationship, and is making it a lot harder for business to proceed as usual.

We are going to continue talking, of course. But not as closely as previously. Programs that benefit Russia will be scaled back or slowed down.

Gay rights Yes, Russia has a quite different tradition and attitude than we do on this subject. So do other countries.

But the Russians clearly have an awkward problem over the Sochi Winter Olympics. Sport is all about fairness. Many commentators and experts are saying that Russia isn’t treating people fairly, or living up to different human rights conventions Russia itself has signed. We’ll be making our position very clear to the Russian side.

Simple. Firm. Cast in neutral language. Stick to solid principles. Spell out where unwise actions will have consequences (but don’t make the mistake of announcing ‘red lines’ that you are not in fact ready to defend when an egregious opponent strolls across them). Then stop.

You want a speech to sound tough? Push the issue back on to the other side. Make it all about their problems, not your feelings.

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Public Apology

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nother form of difficult message for any leader is the public apology. Prime Minister David Cameron’s visit to India in 2013 gave an interesting example of the “political apology.”

In Punjab in 1919 public discontent with British colonial rule was growing. In Amritsar ruthless but stupid Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer ordered his troops to fire, at point-blank range, on a large crowd of Indian protesters. Hundreds died. This massacre was denounced in Parliament in London by Winston Churchill, then Secretary of State for War and no slouch as a public speaker: …An episode which appears to me to be without modern precedent or parallel in the modern history of the British Empire.

It is an event of an entirely different order from any of those tragic occurrences which take place when troops are brought into collision with the civil population. It is an extraordinary event, a monstrous event… …We ought to remember the words of Macaulay—“and then was seen what we believed to be the most frightful of all spectacles, the strength of civilization without its mercy.”

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Our reign in India or anywhere else has never stood on the basis of physical force alone, and it would be fatal to the British Empire if we were to try to base ourselves only upon it…

Prescient words. The massacre provoked outrage across India that helped set in motion the events leading to India’s independence.

Ninety-four years after the massacre, British Prime Minister David Cameron decided to visit the Golden Temple in Amritsar during a highprofile visit to India. He had to work out what to say about this episode.

Not a straightforward task, as his words had to reach multiple audiences: British public opinion, the U.K.’s sizeable Sikh community, Indian public opinion, and, perhaps most importantly, descendants of the victims of the massacre.

At the Golden Temple, Cameron went out of his way to pay respect, including walking barefoot and greeting pilgrims. In the book of condolence, he wrote the following: This was a deeply shameful event in British history—one that Winston Churchill rightly described at the time as “monstrous.”

We must never forget what happened here. And in remembering we must ensure that the United Kingdom stands up for the right to peaceful protest around the world.

That last sentence strikes a subtly jarring note? A superfluous, musty political sound bite spoiling an otherwise strong, simple message.

Explaining his remarks before he left Amritsar, the prime minister said this: We are dealing with something here that happened a good 40 years before I was even born, and which Winston Churchill described as “monstrous” at the time and the British government rightly condemned at the time. So I don’t think the right thing is to reach back into history and to seek out things you can apologize for.

That is why the words I used are right: to pay respect to those who lost their lives, to remember what happened, to learn the lessons, to reflect on the fact that those who were responsible were rightly criticized at the time, to learn from the bad and to cherish the good.

He had a point. Any British leader, and probably any leader anywhere, wants to avoid being dragged into the apology business. Where does it end? Why should people living now be expected to apologize for events that happened long before they were born, when attitudes and values were completely different?

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Plus, apology is a two-way street. Those to whom the apology is directed define its impact. Words that for some people fall short of apology may be seen by others as more than gracious. The most heartfelt words of apology can fall upon stony or derisive rejection. Clamor for an apology indeed may have been dishonest, made with a view to jeering at anything said, however well intentioned.

Cameron understood all this. He also understood that even if his words went down impressively well on the day with most people in Amritsar, the modern global media would find and quote at least one person insisting that the prime minister had just not gone far enough. This maybe explains why his visit did not include a private session with relatives or descendants of the victims of the Amritsar massacre to offer personal words of condolence. Even if this gesture would have been hugely appreciated by most of them, the media would have pounced on dissatisfaction or resentment expressed by any of them and frothed that up into the major story of the visit.

As it was, many British and international media headlines focused on implicitly critical or negative angles of the Amritsar visit: “David Cameron defends lack of apology for British massacre at Amritsar” (Guardian) “No Apology, Just Regret!” (IndiaTimes) “Does Cameron’s decision not to apologize for 1919 massacre really matter?” (Christian Science Monitor) “My pride in the British Empire, says David Cameron in India as he stops short of an apology for 1919 massacre at Amritsar” (Daily Mail) Much coverage nonetheless conceded that many Indians, including some relatives of the victims, had been pleased with Cameron’s approach and strong words. All in all, a good result in problematic circumstances. *** Conclusion? A leader mulling over options for words of regret or apology needs a wily but thoughtful pen. The speech needs to be drawn up with a clear idea of the visual and symbolic context in which the words are to be spoken, to give the best chance of conveying on the day, and to wider audiences and history, just the right message of substantive sincerity.

It’s not enough to be decent and right. You have to be convincing.

A nice challenge for whichever senior British person represents the nation in India in 2019 at the centenary commemoration of the Amritsar killings.

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Movie Speeches

A

s we have already seen, movies give us dramatic (if only imagined) public speaking situations in which leaders’ messages have to be delivered simply and powerfully, both for the audience within the film and the audience watching it. Famous examples aplenty. Movies also give us some fascinating compare-and-contrast speeches that illustrate specific public speaking techniques of the sort described in this book, in which you can see the different ways successive speakers try to win round an audience.

One excellent example comes in the film Other People’s Money. It is set against the background of a declining industrial company that has not moved with the times and faces a hostile takeover bid from a corporate raider played by Danny DeVito. He and the company boss (Gregory Peck) take it in turns to appeal to a crowded room of shareholders to make their case. Their respective impressive speeches are full of subtle technique points, in part because they they make very different arguments.

The company boss appeals to heart. The corporate raider focuses on head. And on wallet. ***

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Another place to find outstanding public speaking technique is in the parody gangster movie Black Dynamite. Here the heroine Gloria (Salli Richardson) is a militant community activist who tries to mobilize the local audience against its own corrupt leaders, including Congressman James (Tucker Smallwood), who is present and watching. Her speech is articulate and full of progressive political logic, but it lacks emotional resonance. Power to the People!

Congressman James easily sees her off and rouses the gathering to noisy applause. Note how he opens with a folksy question to get control, emphasizing his familiarity with the audience and their problems. He then uses vacuous rhyming couplets and bold contrasts to create that vital sense of conversation and shared ambition: With all due respect to the young sister here…You all know me [Yes we do] And young lady, these fine folks don’t need to be misled. All they want is a little bit of bread.

You can’t just stick it to The Man. You also got to have yourself a plan!

You got to take it from the jukebox to the ballot box.

You got to go from the poorhouse to the White House!

Let’s take this thing from sea to shining sea! Keep the faith, brothers and sisters!

Black Dynamite has watched this absurd scene and accosts Gloria to give her astute public speaking advice: Say Mama, you’re gonna have to work on your delivery if you wanna take on Congressman James. The shame is, half these people don’t know what y’all talking about, but at least they can put his to a beat.

Precisely. Gloria talked ‘at’ the audience. Congressman James communicated with them. *** Read closely the deservedly famous speech from the film Miracle. It tells the true story of the unexpected but tumultuous victory of the young United States ice hockey team over the Soviet Union at the Lake Placid Winter Olympic Games in 1980.

The Americans are nervous underdogs. This match is enjoying world158

wide interest, as it is taking place amidst acute Cold War tensions following the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. A hugely symbolic confrontation. Defeat for the Americans on US soil will be a horrible humiliation.

Coach Herb Brooks (Kurt Russell) talks to his team just before they go out on to the ice: Great moments are born from great opportunity.

And that’s what you have here tonight, boys. That’s what you’ve earned here, tonight.

One game. If we played them ten times, they might win nine.

But not this game. Not tonight.

Tonight, we skate with them. Tonight we stay with them. And we shut them down! Because we can!

Tonight, we are the greatest hockey team in the world.

You were born to be hockey players - every one of you. And you were meant to be here, tonight.

This is your time. Their time is done. It’s over.

I’m sick and tired of hearing about what a great hockey team the Soviets have. Screw ‘em!

This is your time. Now, go out there and take it!

Key points of technique here? Several things stand out.

He starts the speech with one mighty and inspiring generalisation. It defines his key message that he then delivers by repeating one word that sums up what they have to do. He puts their ghastly fear of failure right out there, but then confronts it: Yes, they are better than us. But not tonight!

The simple homely word tonight is the brilliant motif, a silver stream running through this short speech and giving it power and meaning.

The speech ends abruptly. No platitudes. No tactics. No folksy words of encouragement. No one final reminder of the game-plan. The occasion is too big for all that.

You know what you can do. You know what you need to do.

Now, go and do it!

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Wonderful technique. All in just one hundred and twenty-five words. *** Finally, Queen Gorgo in the film 300. It features the hardest message for any leader to deliver: it’s time to go to war.

King Leonidas has taken 300 warriors on a doomed mission to defend Sparta at Thermopylae against the vast Persian army. Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey) addresses the sceptical Sparta Council (all men) to urge them to mobilize the army to support her husband: Councilmen, I stand before you today not only as your Queen.

I come to you as a mother; I come to you as a wife; I come to you as a Spartan woman; I come to you with great humility.

I am not here to represent Leonidas; his actions speak louder than my words ever could.

I am here for all those voices which cannot be heard: mothers, daughters, fathers, sons: 300 families that bleed for our rights, and for the very principles this room was built upon.

We are at war, gentlemen. We must send the entire Spartan army to aid our King in the preservation of not just ourselves, but of our children.

Send the army for the preservation of liberty. Send it for justice.

Send it for law and order. Send it for reason.

But most importantly, send our army for hope. Hope that a king and his men have not been wasted to the pages of history.

That their courage bonds us together. That we are made stronger by their actions.

And that your choices today reflect their bravery.

One hundred and eighty-three words. Almost perfect. It just needed to rework that one clumsy phrase that is hard to say and understand: We must send the entire Spartan army to aid our King in the preservation of not just ourselves, but of our children Tortuous use of a noun (in the preservation of) when a verb would be shorter and better. Try this instead:

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We must send the entire Spartan army to aid our King. To preserve ourselves. To preserve our children.

But otherwise this is a superb short speech. It has bold use of repetition and lists and contrasts. It starts strongly on an eloquent personal note. It says what it has to say, then again just stops.

When it comes to momentous messages of war and peace and ice hockey, keep things simple. Less is more.

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6. nuts and bolts

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Historical and Cultural Allusions

T

he Dullard’s Guide to International and Diplomatic Speechwriting gives an iron formula. After opening formalities, the leader should include a passage rehearsing, in a positive way, the “contacts between our two countries” down the centuries.

It doesn’t matter much which examples the speechwriter pulls out from the bran tub of history for this purpose. A couple of solid, obvious, and almost clichéd examples give the audience a glow of comfy familiarity. The ambitious speechwriter might also use one or two lesser-known examples to add variety and cast light on contemporary themes. This safe and sure opening tactic accomplished, the speech then plods through the current agenda.

The Dullard’s Guide never explains why this formula should be used, or what it is designed to achieve other than padding out the speech harmlessly. Yet it is impressively popular. Do diplomatic speechwriters get a twitch of excitement when they look beyond today’s drab word-processed policy formulae and explore the nooks and crannies of history? Perhaps an 163

underlying idea is to assure the audience that this foreign leader knows at least something about the country concerned, thereby conveying respect.

This formulaic way of starting a speech has some advantages. If the right historical examples are picked, subtle points are made about modern people or events that the audience spots and appreciates. It gives confident context, setting today’s events against the wider sweep of history: leader and audience both feel important, part of something bigger than themselves. The speech can pick up examples from this introduction to make unexpected points; the opening passages help with structure. All this can be obliquely flattering to local ears.

More often than not, these openings are not done well. They are eccentric, irrelevant, meaningless. They are there only because the speechwriter thinks they ought to be there, a dollop of dull porridge served at the beginning of a meal to make it look bigger and last longer. Worst of all, they are phony. Everyone present knows that the leader did not know this stuff but has tasked someone to do the boring research work.

We have a superb example of how not to use historical allusions in a speech, thanks to former British Foreign Secretary David Miliband when he visited Warsaw in 2009. According to the official FCO version, David Miliband began his speech this way: Any British Foreign Secretary visiting Poland is deeply conscious of the history between our two countries.

It goes back a long way. Canute, the half Polish King of Denmark who, in 1015, invaded England, bringing with him Polish soldiers and his mother, Princess Swietoslawa, who was buried in Winchester Castle.

The Polish King, Casimir the Great, who in medieval times offered sanctuary to English Jews being persecuted in London and York.

The English and Scottish Protestants who sought and received refuge here in the 16th century and the Scottish Catholics who settled in Chelmno in the 17th century.

Ha! The Internet now allows us quickly to compare the check-againstdelivery version handed out to the media by the FCO with what happened when the real life speech was delivered. Behold the foreign secretary’s unease at being cornered into using this clumsy lump of historical speech material that was quite new to him: It goes back a long way. I didn’t know that Canute—er—was the half Polish King of Denmark who, in 1015, actually invaded England, bringing with him Polish soldiers and his mother, Princess 164

Swietoslawa, who—er—is buried—is buried—Winchester Castle.

When I asked for a historical lesson from our ambassador, I didn’t realize it would be a pronunciation test, but it has become such.

Net result? Diminished intellectual content, served up with a subliminally discourteous message that Miliband had not done the minimal amount of personal homework to learn and understand these historical facts, and to pronounce the words reasonably well. Had he even looked at the draft speech on the plane to Poland and tried to work out how best to deliver these awkward passages?

What went wrong here? It looks as if the main speechwriter knew nothing about speechwriting. This lackluster opening conveys the impression that the speechwriter did some Googling to see what turned up by way of lively examples and quotable quotes from British-Polish relations down the ages. From this trivial and essentially ignorant process a few supposedly interesting examples were dumped in the opening passages, in a way that added nothing to the intellectual or emotional quality of the speech as such.

How to do it properly? Link the migration to Poland of poor Scots in the seventeenth century to the U.K.’s decision in 2004 to open its labor market to Poles. Recall the distinguished Scotsman Alexander Chalmers who served four times as Mayor of Warsaw in the early eighteenth century.

Mention William Lindley who designed the Warsaw waterworks in 1876 and whose sewers are still working today. Allusions like this would neatly make the point for Polish and U.K. audiences alike that down the centuries European peoples have moved to and fro, and that the European Union’s open labor market policies in fact restore the earlier freedoms our ancestors enjoyed.

The speech might also note that Warsaw has many streets named after distinguished foreigners, and thank the city for naming a square after Sue Ryder, the only member of the U.K. House of Lords whose title involved a foreign capital. It could praise Robin Cook for publishing the official papers describing the FCO’s decades-long weasely equivocations about the Katyn massacres, linking that to the positive British reviews of Andrzej Wajda’s film Katyn that had recently opened in the U.K. That reference, in turn, could open a message about how even now Europe is still grappling with the legacy of the Second World War, but in a spirit of democratic and honest debate. Europe offers these examples to other parts of the world: the European way of reconciliation is hard and long, but it works.

In other words, the speechwriter should think how historical references might illuminate the speech’s messages, not add rhetorical stodge. Unexpected historical examples can be worked seamlessly into the speech in an intellectually engaging motif of change and continuity for the audi165

ence. Perhaps for the foreign secretary too.

It’s not what you say—it’s what they hear. This speech opening sent a subliminal message running something like this: Here are some boring, disembodied historical examples and quotes that I’ve never heard of and can’t even pronounce.

My speechwriter put them in, because that’s what a speechwriter does in the Foreign Office these days. But don’t worry, I’ll be through them soon. *** Another pitfall to avoid with historical allusions is inadvertently picking the wrong ones or missing some. This happens when the leader is focusing on her or his own words and not thinking enough about what the audience might expect to hear or appreciate hearing.

In 2007 in Warsaw I hosted a reception to mark the launch of the new book by John O’Sullivan19 describing how Pope John Paul II, President Ronald Reagan, and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had worked together against communism in Central and Eastern Europe. My speech of welcome picked one or two examples from the book and praised its thesis.

A senior Polish guest at the reception had a quiet word with me afterwards to chide me for not mentioning the historic role of Lech Walesa as well.

He was right. The great mass of Polish people, of course, praised and respected the role played by key Western leaders and Pope John Paul II in ending communism, but these leaders had succeeded “from outside” by supporting millions of Poles themselves standing up against martial law and Moscow. Any speech made in Poland talking about those momentous days should acknowledge first and foremost what the Polish people and their home-grown leaders themselves achieved over gruelling years of non-violent political struggle. It’s never just about you.

On this level, too, David Miliband’s 2009 Warsaw speech fell short. It is more than striking that he made no reference to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact by name in its 70th anniversary year. And its personal passages were coy: I am one of the million Britons who have Polish blood. My father’s parents lived in Poland, leaving the country at the end of the First World War. My mother was born here; her life saved by those who risked theirs sheltering her from Nazi oppression. After the John O’Sullivan. The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World. Washington, D.C.: Regnery History, 2008.

19.

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war, in 1946, she left the country for the U.K. I come here with a curiosity about the place where my grandparents and my mother were born alongside [sic] an acute sense of tragedy for the terrible losses suffered during the Second World War. I come here with an admiration for the strength of the Polish spirit, the flame which continued to burn through 44 dark years of Communism.

His speech did not include Pope John Paul II. Any high-profile political speech about modern Europe and Poland delivered in Warsaw by a British politician that does not acknowledge the moral dimension of Poland’s role in the defeat of communism in Central Europe is missing something profound.

Similarly, David Miliband did not mention his earlier relative who fought on the side of Lenin and Stalin in the Red Army that greedily tried to conquer Poland after the First World War ended, and was famously defeated by Polish heroism in 1920. Plus, his father was a noted Marxist writer. Do we know what such senior Milibands made of Soviet communism and Poland’s enforced subordination to the Soviet Union after the Second World War? Did they never talk about it at home with young David and his brother Ed (who as Labor Party leader lost the 2015 U.K. elections)?

It’s not surprising that in this speech David Miliband and his spin-doctors tiptoed past these complicated and potentially controversial issues.

Yet it’s interesting to consider the interest and moral authority that the speech could have had if he had tackled those personally sensitive problems with even modest frankness.

A final word on using classical allusions in a speech. Don’t.

These days such references can sound elitist or inappropriate unless used sparingly and imaginatively, when the leader is sure that the audience will know what the reference means. The record for classical references in one 1980s draft Foreign Office speech was nine: St. Simon Stylites, Virgil, Avernus, Cassius, the Sabine Women, Oedipus, Cassandra, Horace, and, last but not least, the Vestal Virgins. Nine too many. The Foreign Secretary does not want the audience to hear that his speechwriter studied Classics at Oxford, and never recovered.

Conclusion? There is a lot of history out there. Draw on it in a speech to reinforce a leader’s messages and insights. But, please, do it well.

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Proverbs and Sayings

H

istorical allusions are one way for an international speech to respect shared experience. Another solid way to acknowledge and build rapport with a foreign audience is to try to work in a local proverb or adage or two. This needs thought.

I was asked to help someone with a first business speech delivered in China to a Chinese audience. The Internet gives you an abundance of Chinese sayings and proverbs. But how to use them? I asked a former FCO colleague who had served in China. He said that a reliable motif in China is the idea that old people are wiser than young people. This gave me just what I needed: in this case, the business opening an office in China had been set up in the early 1950s, and the two original owners were still alive and engaged with the firm.

The speechwriting trick is not to dump into the draft speech a Chinese proverb for the sake of it. That may raise a spontaneous chuckle on the day, but it can come across as trivial, predictable, or patronizing: Look! I am so pleased to be here that I have been on Google and found a Chinese proverb!

Instead, think about how to weave the local saying or insight into the 169

speech’s structure in an unexpected way: You know what people coming to China from my country to make a speech often do.

They try to find a Chinese proverb to explain something about their business. I tried that. But there were far too many proverbs!

Hundreds of them!

Well, I am from England. So let me share with you an English proverb instead. Here it is: a stitch in time saves nine.

The idea of this saying is simple. It pays to be careful now to save time and money later.

It’s a proverb about wisdom and investment. I’m sure that you here have something similar…

This creates a conversation with the audience, who will be nodding and smiling that they have an answer to this easy question that explains their culture to the speaker. It deftly opens the way to saying something flattering about Chinese instincts for wisdom and investment, and change or continuity, as the basis for your business’s new operations in their country.

That’s practical public speaking technique for any speech involving a foreign audience. Build a speech that speaks engagingly, and convey ideas on the day in ways the audience will appreciate. Oh, and don’t forget to make the flow of the speech, and any proverbs or idioms, easy for the interpreter. Details.

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Mixed Metaphors

W

hat’s a big public speaking problem around the world, in places where English in one version or other is not the native language? Many speeches are delivered in English by non-native English political and business leaders who have asked other non-native English leaders to help draft them. A top U.N. official from Kazakhstan may have a German speechwriter drafting a speech to be delivered in English to an international audience in Geneva. There’s a lot of scope for getting things badly wrong, especially when the leader’s team try to pep up the usual dry stuff with clever English idioms that can’t be used in day-to-day policy drafting.

People starting to learn a foreign language make really basic mistakes: Je pouvoir voir la chat. People who are really excellent at a foreign language make really excellent mistakes. Such as getting idioms and metaphors hopelessly tangled up: The open door policy of the Alliance is not at the forefront of today’s discussion. I expect though that it will also remain one of the cornerstones of our approach to promoting security around our borders.

Hurrah! An open door policy is not at the forefront of a discussion.

But it is a cornerstone of an approach.

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Or this: We have to give the E.U. credit for its effectiveness as a powerful conglomerate of various vectors and ambitions framed around a lowest common denominator, which is generally grand enough to allow it to write scenarios for others worldwide.

And this: Do not believe blindly the prophets of doom. Europe is strong.

We just need to work hard now to overcome the sense of fragmentation permeating the European environment as a consequence of the financial crisis. We need to undress Europe of sense of insecurity and uncover the bare beauty anew.

The mind boggles at the cis-heteronormative patriarchal sexual aggression against Europe’s unhappy pallid flesh implicit in this passage.

If only drafting misery in English were limited to the non-Englishspeaking world. It is not. My all-time favorite mixed metaphor mess came in a draft speech by a British diplomat. It achieved eternal infamy by being quoted in my FCO Guide to Speechwriting: And our present is conditioned by the past. History hangs around our necks like the albatross in a poem by a famous early nineteenth-century English poet. It contains moments of light and moments of darkness. But we need to see clearly where we are now before we can move forward.

It’s fun to spot influential British pundits falling into this trap, such as leading Guardian writer Polly Toynbee spiralling out of control to lament an anti-politics mood in the U.K. exemplified by horrid bloggers: The blogosphere could have been a source for better information, but purveys even more rabid anti-politics bile.20 Can bile be rabid? And purveyed in serious quantities? *** As the teaching of Latin and disciplined English prose fades away in the U.S. and U.K., new generations of ambitious but gormless writers start their long march through the institutions, and inflict their incompetence upon

Polly Toynbee. “The bile of anti-politics is corroding the zeal for change.” The Guardian, June 26, 2009.

20.

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the rest of us. The problem is not that they inadvertently serve up these vapid expressions to our leaders. It is that they have never been taught what the mixed metaphor actually is, and why it is well worth avoiding.

How about David Cameron’s keynote speech at Bloomberg in London on the U.K. and European Union on January 23, 2013?

Healing those wounds of our history is the central story of the European Union...[Emphasis mine] Cameron is a rank amateur mixed-metaphorista as compared to his predecessor Gordon Brown. As a former senior British civil servant, I find it beyond baffling that Gordon Brown said (and, worse, was allowed by his team to say) so many bizarre things. Not least in his 2009 speech to the European Parliament: So I stand here today proud to be British and proud to be European: representing a country that does not see itself as an island beside Europe but as a country at the center of Europe, not in Europe’s slipstream but firmly in its mainstream. [Emphasis mine] Matthew Parris in The Times enjoyed mauling this speech.

This hole in the air encased in a suit of clunking verbal armor?

This truck-load of clichéd grandiloquence in hopeless pursuit of anything that might count as the faintest apology for an idea?

Words fail me.

Not an island? Airborne in a slipstream? In a river in a mainstream? So much for geography, aeronautics, and hydraulics.21 Not to overlook this stupendous mess served up by Gordon Brown in August 2009 denouncing the Burmese authorities’ treatment of Aung San Suu Kyi:

The façade of her prosecution is made more monstrous because its real objective is to sever her bond with the people for whom she is a beacon of hope and resistance.22 Get that? A monstrous facade has an objective to sever a bond between her people and their beacon of hope.

Matthew Parris. “Do the honourable thing, Mr Brown. Run away.” The Times, March 28, 2009.

22.

Thomas Bell. “Aung San Suu Kyi punished with house arrest in Burma.” The Telegraph, August 11, 2008.

21.

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Even President Obama’s speechwriters ran out of sensible things to say and added crass padding in his address to the nation on August 31, 2010, on the end of combat operations in Iraq: We’ve persevered because of a belief we share with the Iraqi people—a belief that out of the ashes of war, a new beginning could be born in this cradle of civilization…

But we have also understood that our nation’s strength and influence abroad must be firmly anchored in our prosperity at home. And the bedrock of that prosperity must be a growing middle class. [Emphasis mine] *** A draft speech is not a policy brief or a dull memo. It needs to be written to reflect the way people speak. Up to a point. In real life people do used mixed metaphors. Leaders should strive not to do so: their speeches will be clearer to the audience on the day, and to anyone reading it later on paper or on the website.

Some mixed metaphors and exotic similes are harmless clichés. Outlandish new ones can be invented to create bizarre comic effects. P. G. Wodehouse was the master of this device: She looked like a tomato struggling for self-expression.

Pongo Twistleton gazed at Polly Pott like an ostrich goggling at a brass doorknob.

These things work well on paper. They work much less well in a speech, when words whiz by and there is little time for an audience to spot and relish witty special effects. One way or the other, don’t overdo it. Take a break. Stand back from your work. Show no mercy. Strike out things that were fun to write but just don’t make sense. Less is more.

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Musty, Needy Speeches

P

ity modern politicians. They campaign for office and are elected on the promise of bringing in specific policies to achieve outcomes voters prefer. Yet in practice it is, like, soooooo difficult to make anything happen for the better.

The sheer complexity of modern life is overwhelming the capacity of democratic institutions to deliver anything useful. Avalanches of dosomething regulations combine with the threat of litigation to smother common sense. In former communist Europe, the old joke had the workers pretending to work, and the system pretending to pay them. In our postdemocratic West we have politicians pretending to be able to make things better, and voters pretending to believe them.

This creates a curious problem. Leaders want to show themselves driving forward policy and making significant improvements, but they also are determined to avoid being blamed when things go wrong, or promised policies aren’t implemented. Thus, a question: How do you draft speeches that convey leadership and purpose while avoiding any responsibility for failure? We find the answer in the contemporary proliferation of musty, needy speeches.

I first noticed this phenomenon when U.K. Foreign Secretary David 175

Miliband made his speech in Warsaw in 2009. One of the public speaking guru’s handiest tools these days is the computer “word count” tool. Imagine my amazement when I realized that Miliband had used the verb “need” no fewer than 21 times in that one speech.

“We need,” he said:

• • • • • • • •

a compelling positive case for the European Union bold strokes to deepen cooperation and incentivize reform to diversify our energy supplies more solidarity between Member States to prepare better for energy shortfalls to make G3 cooperation work to get better at formulating genuine strategic responses to the really difficult policy questions

The E.U., he said, “must” do the following:

• • • • •

adapt once again to the changing geopolitical context we face set itself a goal of creating a single, low-carbon energy market across the E.U. be prepared to speak with a strong voice so that it can engage the main global powers support political reforms adapt to new insecurities

On top of that, “we must,” (he said):

• • • •

regulate to make our homes and industries more efficient confront the fact that the desire to enlarge Europe is facing increased opposition make the case [for enlargement] avoid two dangers. One is denial about the scale of the [economic] problem. The second is quack remedies

Note how the effect uses (nay relies on) depersonalized verb forms.

It is all about what anyone and everyone, other than the leader himself, “must” or “need” do.

This is high-order junk speechwriting, faux leadership intended to generate a fleeting sense of purpose and energy when the reality is exactly neither of those things. Such strangely repetitive, exhortatory language, detached from any real analysis of problems and how in fact to tackle them, is reminiscent of the communist apparatchik from Central Committee HQ addressing the workers on a barren collective farm field. He hectors them to ever-greater efforts to achieve the final triumph of socialist productivity. They stare blankly at him, lost in the disappointed emptiness of 176

their blighted lives.

Once you start watching for such useless, musty, needy exhortations, you find them all over the place. In 2011 Dr. Clare Gerada, chair of the U.K.’s Royal College of General Practitioners, made a speech attacking the U.K. Coalition Government’s proposals for reforming the U.K. National Health Service. There were 19 different uses of the words “need” and “must” in a 20-minute speech.23 Another version of the musty-needy form is the depersonalized “should.” The letter about the eurozone crisis sent in August 2011 by France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy and Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel to Herman Van Rompuy (president of the European Commission) is a classic senior example. It showed two European leaders wanting the Euroworld to transform itself on their terms, when it was not clear how to make that happen. The English text uses the word “should” a bewildering 22 times. For example: • • • • • • • •

Cooperation should...

Member states should…

The ESM should…

The fiscal rule should…

Aforementioned proposals should…

Cohesion funds should…

Progress should…

Parliaments should…

More empty, creepily communist exhortations. Improve competitiveness! Foster [sic] employment! Ensure stability! If any of this were possible, it would have happened already after hundreds of similar high-level Euroexhortations and declarations, and the European Union would not be in its current mess. *** President Obama succumbed to musty speechwriting in his TV address to the nation about Iraq in August 2010:

• • • • •

We must never lose sight of what’s at stake We must use all elements of our power We must project a vision of the future That effort must begin within our own borders Our nation’s strength and influence abroad must be firmly anchored in our prosperity at home

23.

Clare Gerada. “NHS doctors are under pressure to replace caring with market values.” The Guardian, October 20, 2011.

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• • • • • • •

The bedrock of that prosperity must be a growing middle class We must tackle those challenges at home We must give all our children the education they deserve We must jumpstart industries that create jobs We must unleash the innovation that allows new products to roll off our assembly lines It must be our central mission as a people Today’s servicemen and women must have the chance to apply their gifts

Worse, he subsequently unleashed mustiness a disturbing 21 times in his speech about Israel and the Middle East in March 2013. For example:

• • • • • • • •

•

Assad must go so that Syria’s future can begin Iran must not get a nuclear weapon America will do what we must to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran And that’s why security must be at the center of any agreement The Palestinian people’s right to self-determination, their right to justice, must also be recognized Arab states must adapt to a world that has changed Palestinians must recognize that Israel will be a Jewish state Israelis must recognize that continued settlement activity is counterproductive to the cause of peace, and that an independent Palestine must be viable with real borders that have to be drawn You must create the change that you want to see

Why does this style of rhetoric sound hollow, if not positively annoying? The fusillade of musty requirements devalues each of them. But also they show faux leadership, hinting at bold, visionary purpose while sidestepping personal or political responsibility for what actually happens. We have seen how much notice Syria’s President Assad paid to Obama’s assertion that he “must” go. Likewise, Arab states have been unimpressed

by Obama’s call that they “must adapt to a world that has changed.” Has Israel recognized that continued settlement activity is counterproductive?

Have the Palestinians recognized that Israel will be a Jewish state? *** That said, while we despise our elected leaders’ evasiveness as exemplified by slippery language like this, how might we respond if they started being honest, telling us that their capacity (and our capacity) to achieve outcomes we all want to see is close to zero? Good question, to which answers come there none.

Such is the sad state of modern political rhetoric. It is so easy for a speechwriter to slip into a soothing mud bath of musty, needy clichés.

Leaders want them, lest they risk being exposed as incompetent. Or, far 178

worse, irrelevant. And these phrases are so easy to write. The more ringing and ambitious and unachievable the musty neediness, the better it sounds!

Until it fizzles out. People compare the speech with what actually happened. Everyone hears weakness, dishonesty, lies. Disillusion with democratic politics grows.

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More Mistakes

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o you shed a silent tear when you read today’s government department mission statements? You know the sort of thing: Working towards a safer Britain

What’s with the “-r”? Why not work towards a safe Britain?

Here’s an example from Scotland: “Towards a Safer Healthier Workplace.”

Who, after all, would not want a safe and healthy Scottish workplace?

This depressing comparative way of setting policy goals appears in many different guises. Today’s politicians use this language to avoid responsibility for outcomes in favor of interminable process. Not that they don’t have a point. Suppose a politician proclaims that the U.K. National Health Service really is now a “safe and healthy” workplace. The first nurse or doctor or porter or patient who breaks an ankle by falling on a slippery hospital floor demands exemplary damages. The politician is trashed in the media as a deluded liar.

The real problem is that no politician is prepared to say the truth: that in human affairs perfection is never reached and, yes, bad things will happen that no amount of new regulation or mission statements can ever prevent. If somehow things are made “safer” rather than “safe,” it’s harder 181

to blame leaders when something goes wrong. Plus, the fact that there is “still more work to be done” opens the way for politicians of all camps to impose never-ending, busybody controls on us voters.

Some examples of this language in top-level action.

Back in 2009, then-U.K. Foreign Secretary David Miliband urged the case for voting for Labor in the European Parliament elections. One reason he cited: [David Cameron] says he supports overseas development—but denounces the Lisbon treaty’s shift to majority voting that will make it faster and more efficient.

Note the obvious implication that these changes to majority voting will not make E.U. development assistance fast and efficient. Is that outcome unattainable under any circumstances?

These comparative forms are oddly revealing. Here’s Alan Johnson in 2009, the then-U.K. health secretary, bemoaning the state of his own Labor Party: But my betting would be that something will happen this summer. People out there are angry, they want change—and we can no longer ignore that.24 Ha! Labor M.P.s preferred to avoid the views of irate voters indefinitely, but “no longer” could do so?

The issue for public speaking technique is that these comparative forms send unhappy messages about a leader’s own confidence in policy positions described in the speech. In January 2010 the new E.U. High Representative for Foreign Affairs Baroness Ashton made one of her early pronouncements: The E.U. is now in a position to assume a stronger, more credible role in the world.

The comparative form here conveys limp pessimism. Someone occupying one of the very top positions in the European Union seems to be accepting that the European Union can never be strong and credible, but that it might (or might not) tip-toe a bit in that general direction.

Apart from that comparative mistake, what is the big policy mistake here? The very act of talking about the credibility of one’s own policies reveals weakness or lack of confidence. Does a leader of China or Russia 24.

Toby Helm. “Labour loses out in people’s revolt.” The Guardian, May 31, 2009.

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typically talk in these terms? Of course not. They want everyone else to see their strength and credibility as massive, flowing from the force of what they are saying and doing.

U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron fell into this comparative trap in his visit to India in July 2010: We in Britain are determined to work even harder to earn our living: attracting more foreign investment to our shores, making more things for the world again, selling ourselves to the world with more vigor than ever.

I’m not ashamed to say that’s one of the reasons why I’m here today.

Hear how defensive that sounds: work even harder attract more foreign investment make more things for the world again more vigor than ever This language sounds weirdly striving, too keen to make a point and impress. It sounds anxious. He even uses the word “ashamed” with its tone of apologizing. Woeful.

Another version of the comparative mistake is the tautologous “further.” The earlier chapter on musty-needy speeches looked at examples from the 2011 joint letter sent by Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy about the eurozone. This horrible text can inform a long masterclass in how not to write. See how it uses Euro-tautologies to convey ersatz dynamism and inexorability. Progress is not enough! There must be further progress: In particular, further progress should be made on tax policy coordination to support fiscal consolidation and economic growth…euro area member states should be ready to consider enhanced cooperation for further progress on tax coordination.

These wretched examples speak for themselves. They show how easy it is to serve up words that purport to froth up energy and purpose in serious speeches, but in fact send quite different signals to anyone listening carefully.

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Punctuation writing requires punctuation why because it helps break down written material into manageable pieces

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riting requires punctuation. Why? Because it helps break down written material into manageable pieces.

For an outstanding look at the underlying logic and role of punctuation, see Paul Robinson’s “The Philosophy of Punctuation.”25 This brief essay draws an important distinction between (a) writing as a way to express spoken thoughts on paper, using punctuation accordingly; and (b) writing as a separate means of communication with its own punctuation rules: A colleague of mine, whom I consider a fine writer, punctuates, as it were, by ear. That is, he seeks to reduplicate patterns of speech, to indicate through his punctuation how a sentence is supposed to sound. Consequently his punctuation lacks strict 25.

Available online at: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/721833.html

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consistency. But I can respect it as guided at all times by what I consider philosophical principles.

Given my character, my own philosophy is more legalistic. My colleague, you might say, is a Platonist in punctuation, while I am an Aristotelian. My punctuation is informed by two ideals: clarity and simplicity. Punctuation has the primary responsibility of contributing to the plainness of one’s meaning. It has the secondary responsibility of being as invisible as possible, of not calling attention to itself…

I gravitate to the Platonist end of that spectrum in my own writing. We primarily write because it is the best way to talk to people not in the room.

Punctuation helps deliver precision in meaning that is lacking when tone of voice and body gestures aren’t available to show emphasis or tone.

Look at this simple sentence: I think you are wrong. There are many different ways in which that can actually be said with changing emphasis and tone of voice. In writing, verbs can be added to make that clear (“he jeered,” “he sneered,” “she exclaimed,” “she wept,” and so on). The sentence on its own can be cast on the written page in five ways using one of the usual forms of typographic emphasis, thereby helping convey the meaning of the words:

• • • • •

I think you are wrong (others may think you are right, but I disagree) I think you are wrong (I am not quite sure about it) I think you are wrong (others aren’t wrong) I think you are wrong (you’ve been denying it, but I insist that you are wrong) I think you are wrong (I want to stress your wrongness in this case)

These can be combined: I think you are wrong (I am getting really annoyed! Back off!)

Paul Robinson again: Then there are parentheses and dashes. They are, of course, indispensable. I’ve used them five times already in this essay alone.

But I think one must maintain a very strict attitude toward them.

I start from the proposition that all parentheses and dashes are syntactical defeats. They signify an inability to express one’s ideas sequentially, which, unless you’re James Joyce, is the way the language was meant to be used.

This is over-strict. Why should ideas expressed via language be sequential? A portrait artist does not paint a picture by starting in the top left-hand corner of the canvas and then working down and 186

across. The artist sketches out the shape of the portrait as a whole and then adds more and more detail. Writing and speaking can do something like that too. Just pick the tool for the job.

Here’s an experiment. I’m going to dictate straight into my computer’s voice recognition software, without using the punctuation commands, a passage describing the sort of thing I might say during a speechwriting masterclass on the subject of punctuation. Starting now: When we speak we don’t use punctuation we just talk questions exclamation emphasis all come from tone of voice and body gestures not from little dots and squiggles on a page people easily work out what we’re trying to say more from these non-verbal ways of communicating rather than from the words themselves so punctuation is just an approximation of the way we talk to help a reader of our words get a sense of the tone of voice and conversation we might have used had we been there in the room.

Had anyone been listening to me when I said all that, it would have been easy enough to follow. But that long paragraph, with no punctuation or other way to distinguish when one thought ends and another begins, is as hopeless for a leader giving a speech as for a reader. How might the same words be served up in a draft speech?

The simplest way to make it accessible is to split it into easy-to-read chunks: when we speak we don’t use punctuation we just talk

questions exclamations emphasis all come from tone of voice and body gestures not from little dots and squiggles on a page people easily work out what we’re trying to say more from these non-verbal ways of communicating rather than from the words themselves so punctuation is just an approximation of the way we talk to help a reader of our words

get a sense of the tone of voice and conversation we might have used had we been there in the room

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Interesting! By leaving out all punctuation, including capital letters, and just spacing the words in a way that’s easy to follow, I am creating a different sort of draft speech. It looks and reads more like a fancy modern poem with an irregular but engaging rhythm than a passage from a speech, and is maybe none the worse for that. A leader could easily work with that text.

Is it really improved as a passage in a draft speech by adding lots of grammatically precise punctuation and making the text a normal piece of prose? Not enormously: When we speak we don’t use punctuation—we just talk.

Questions, exclamations, emphasis all come from tone of voice and body gestures, not from little dots and squiggles.

People easily work out what we’re trying to say more from these non-verbal ways of communication, rather than from the words themselves.

So punctuation is just an approximation of the way we talk, to help a reader of our words get a sense of the tone of voice and conversation we might have used had we been there in the room.

Given that so much of the way we communicate with each other is all about energy and tone of voice, it is striking that punctuation gives us so few options for expressing those things when we are writing. The punctuation marks we use are a modest, uninspiring lot: they were all Mr. Qwerty could squeeze on to manual typewriters. Many of them (period, comma, semi-colon, colon, brackets, hyphen) simply denote different pauses or shifts of subject or emphasis.

The question mark is a huge public speaking tool. It identifies a question, and can turn a statement into a quizzical question with a different tone of voice. A question mark on a page, supported by other ways of breaking up words, helps create conversation between author and reader.

Is this a question? This? Is a question?

We also use sneaky, inverted commas to give a hint of supercilious detachment, much beloved by the BBC website: Cruise passengers shot by ‘terrorists’ President Bush calls on Afghans to support ‘freedom’ And we have the exclamation mark, or we can underline words to make them stand out on the page. These seem to bring unseemly overexcitement to the understated, sober English-language page. Exclamation 188

marks look silly! And over-exaggerated!!!!!!! Take a look at Facebook and teenagers’ text messages.

Basically, the word on the page has far too few conventional ways to help the leader run through different tones of voice and moods in communicating those words aloud in a speech. It seems frivolous to add stage directions to a draft speech (although if the leader is in favor, why not?): *New tone of voice and change of mood now. Moving from light-touch opening passages into the substance* *The next passage in red is the heart of the speech. Talk slower, give it weight* *Joke coming up* *Nearly there! Strong final passages follow* *Long Pause here. Signal something weighty is coming. Then sum up in a positive, optimistic tone* Help is at hand, through the improbable media of text-speak and Twitter. Texting (sending messages on mobile telephones) has come from nowhere to be a planetary phenomenon: most teenagers have given up on actually speaking and now do nothing else. Twitter is dynamic micro-blogging in which everything you want to say on a subject has to be squeezed into 140 characters or fewer.

Texting and Twitter are fast and immediate. You cram as much meaning as possible into as few characters as possible. So a profusion of symbols and acronyms and action-expressions has appeared to allow the texter or Tweeter to convey highly condensed shades of meaning and mood: LMAO XXX / : ) ¯\(°_°)/¯

[“laughing my ass off”] [kisses] [raised eyebrow; questioning expression] [shoulder shrug]

Plus we now have Smileys, those proliferating, childish-looking little icons created precisely to help us give tone of voice to short and otherwise ambiguous text messages or Tweets: I really like your new hat I really like your new hat I really like your new hat

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Has the time come to treat Smileys and other abbreviated forms as a new form of punctuation? Why not use them in draft speeches in lieu of stage directions, to help the leader shift emotional or intellectual gear by changing tone, rhythm or intensity? Isn’t this a great idea?

Probably not Not because they are a bad idea. It’s because no leader will dare risk the hoots of derision when the speech notes are left behind on the podium and then appear on the Internet.

It comes down to the fact that a speechwriting team must do two very different things.

First, prepare a text that is user-friendly for the leader on the day, using dynamic punctuation and layout and anything else that helps the leader effortlessly use inflection and tone and emphasis to get a good audience reaction. This may mean using informal or even ironic mock-folksy expressions that work when someone is speaking, but are eschewed in normal writing: This policy ain’t workin’. It ain’t been workin’ for the past two years.

It ain’t gonna be a-workin’ any time soon. Time to change course.

Second, craft a text that can be published afterwards in a checkagainst-delivery version made available for the public, or even more formally “for the record” as a coherent piece of work with authority.

Here the speech is talking to a different audience. The punctuation, layout, and feel of the words as a reader sees them on the page define how the speech comes over as convincing to that reader. So depending on what effect is required for each version of the speech, the lines above might need formalizing: This policy is not working. It has not been working for the past two years. It can not and will not work in the future. It’s time to change course.

Or this slightly less formal version: This policy isn’t working. It hasn’t been working for the past two years. It can’t and won’t work in the future. It’s time to change course. *** It’s easy for a leader’s team to get preoccupied with writing and the way the words feel on the page (or screen). They miss the crucial point: above all, the text has to work for the leader on the day talking to a sizeable audience.

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This is why I use voice-recognition technology to get the bulk of a draft speech down on to the page via my mouth, not my fingers. A draft speech produced that way has indefinable directness, freshness, and energy. It works better for the leader.

Get the leader’s version right first. Grammarify and punctuate it in slower time to make it read nicely for the media and the organization’s website.

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PowerPoint

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magine a product that is so successful that many people start hating it, to the point of blaming general intellectual decline and other social problems on its very ubiquity. Welcome to PowerPoint. The expression “Death by PowerPoint” now generates over 4,000,000 results via Google, with myriad links to horrible examples of PowerPoint presentations and surveys purporting to show how PowerPoint damages delicate minds.

Public speaking coaches advocate the judicious use of visual aids to help make a point in a powerful unexpected way. I once watched an Irish seismologist use a slinky spring stretched across the front of the classroom to show different basic earthquake vibration patterns. Simple. Brilliant. Memorable.

PowerPoint and other such presentation computer platforms such as Prezi are powerful visual aids. So what’s the problem? Why is it bad for a speaker to give you the chance to absorb insights and information via your eyes as well as your ears?

The problem lies in the very ease of the technology. A leader’s speaking time-slot is limited. But what if the length of that leader’s computer presentation is, for all practical purposes, unlimited? Easy. Fill up slide 193

after slide with everything on the subject. Before you know it, the leader is supporting the slides and not the other way round. And if you are a dull or an unwilling leader, that’s not a bug. It’s a feature. Maybe the best feature.

This open-endedness of PowerPoint/Prezi creates anxiety: What if I leave something out and then later something goes wrong? They’ll say they “weren’t told.” I might get into trouble. I might be sued.

Best to err on the safe side. Use the PowerPoint slides as prompts for my live presentation and as lecture notes the audience can keep afterwards. Cram in all possible information, however marginal.

Safety first! I’ll proof myself against any legal problems and start with the most boring slide imaginable: a dense unreadable list of formal disclaimers!

PowerPoint’s simplicity also allows a leader to produce a great mass of material then “mix and match” slides for any possible presentation. This needs to be done carefully.

I watched a smart corporate presentation about a top European engineering corporation. The speaker and PowerPoint presentation were not too horrible. What annoyed me was the fact that the presentation started at slide 27 and went through to side 44. The speaker had told his office to separate out a couple of sections of a longer presentation, then dumped it on the audience.

What did eagle-eyed members of the audience hear? I’ve done nothing special for you. You aren’t important enough to deserve it.

Mixing and matching also creates subtle inconsistency of format within slides and between slides. Fonts vary, spacing and layouts diverge. The audience subliminally senses the mess, and misses the message. Stylistic inconsistency and underlying psychological insecurities spread across the business world. Indeed, a positive feedback loop develops. Presentation skills get sucked into a spiral of secondrateitude. Presentations get worse, so leaders get worse, so presentations get worse, so audiences get worse.

All round the world people hear boring! when they know that PowerPoint is to be used. Out come the smartphones: I can sit here all day away from the office messing around on Facebook and Twitter, and glance at the dreary PowerPoint slide printouts on the way home. *** 194

Can we turn things round to use PowerPoint to create a great presentation that supports a great leader? Yes we can.

Prepare a PowerPoint or Prezi presentation as you prepare a speech.

Push aside detail. Focus on wisdom. What do you want the audience to feel, understand, remember from you and your supporting slide presentation? If you don’t know how to answer these questions, cancel the speaking engagement. When you are clear on what you are trying to do, make sure that the presentation supports you when you do it. The style and energy and tone of the presentation need to exemplify or reinforce the style and tone and energy of the speaker.

A slide is a picture. Often a picture of some words. It has to be seen, not read. And it has to be seen at a glance by everyone in the room, including everyone in the back row. If anyone in the audience is left peering at the screen trying to follow what a slide says or means, that slide fails. Someone peering at a convoluted, cluttered slide loses contact with the leader, and is hearing annoying. That’s why it is so important to find out what sort of room you’ll be using when you give your presentation before you start preparing it. Likewise the number of people in the room. What am I dealing with here?

So when in any doubt, go for three or more short, snappy slides rather than one long confused one. Make sure that every slide has no more than, say, 12 words boldly appearing on it. Or even fewer. A slide with just one huge bold word to signal a signpost or hinge moment is fine. Once you grasp that a PowerPoint/Prezi slide is a picture, not part of a long written text, you strip out everything cluttering the picture. All smart-ass animations and transitions and sound effects. Most punctuation. Bullet-points.

Yes, bullet-points. Do you want nasty useless spots on your face? No. So why cover your presentations in them? Less is more.

Add as many lively pictures as possible. Don’t stick teensy pictures like postage stamps on slides because someone has told you to use pictures.

Let each picture fill one slide completely: no margins, no slide headline, no words. That adds dramatic impact and interest. It sends a subliminal message of the speaker’s confidence.

Rummage around on YouTube for short amusing videos to illustrate a key point. Video clips in presentations (especially if funny or unexpected) bring abrupt changes of rhythm, gripping audience attention. But be careful. Video clips can fail in so many different ways. It’s madness to rely on a live Internet link for showing a video in a PowerPoint or Prezi presentation: you are outsourcing the success of your presentation to all sorts of factors over which you have no control. Download and save the video clip to embed in the presentation.

But that does not guarantee success. The presentation with embedded 195

videos may work fine on your own PC or MacBook. Put the presentation plus embedded video clip on your USB stick, and it sometimes fails to work in someone else’s machine. Horror. Something to do with the different computer drives? If you are using video clips, get to the venue early to make sure that everything in the presentation works there on the day.

Insist that someone with technical skill be there early too. You may need quickly to re-embed the video clips into the presentation using the organizers’ equipment. Check that the sound is working strongly enough for the room or hall concerned. In my experience, that’s the hardest thing to get right on the day in many venues.

If you are not 150 percent sure a video clip is working in a presentation loaded on to the equipment at the speech venue on the day, cut it out. There’s nothing worse for a speaker than the audience being led right to a splendid video that does not work. The speaker is left floundering for help. The flow and energy of the presentation collapse. The audience hears Loser! Go away!

Finally, make the structure and signposts in your presentation clear and strong. That’s how you lead the audience from one key point to the next one. People will be pleased and flattered that you are helping them through it sensibly. *** Business leaders and others need to be good at making conference presentations. It’s not hard to deliver punchy, rewarding presentations that people will appreciate if the lessons in this book are followed. PowerPoint or Prezi done well are just another tool to help hit that target.

But like all tools they need using properly. A good leader supported by a boring slide presentation creates disharmony, just as an elegant presentation read out by a would-be leader with nothing else to add is a waste of time.

A good way to get optimum results is to include detailed information slides in the presentation for a printed version to be shared after your speech, but not show those slides on the screen on the day. Tell the audience that they will get all the detail they need in the full handout afterwards, then put up on the screen for the live audience only the slides that are easy to grasp and support the key messages you want to convey. That allows you to cover both what matters and what’s important in an elegant yet comprehensive and helpful way. You come across as confident and in full control.

In a nutshell, treat your presentation as you do a speech. Think about message, structure, stories, and signposts/hinges. Play with all these elements to get that More please impact on the day. PowerPoint and Prezi?

Fine when they support a leader. Awful when it’s the other way round.

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7. conclusion

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Authenticity and Leadership

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reat speeches sound effortless, confident, and authoritative. That applies as much to a keynote political speech to a vast crowd at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate as it does to a speech opening a business conference exhibition, or a small family wedding speech. A great speech sounds authentic. Authentic not simply in the sense that the speaker is being open and honest, speaking from both head and heart and not ‘spinning’ the issues for trite advantage. The audience hears the leader owning the content, stepping forward to take responsibility for it.

This is where Russian President Vladimir Putin scores strongly these days. By contrast to President Obama, his major speeches have few soaring passages or obvious sound bites. It is hard to imagine his Kremlin team wasting time on running key passages past private focus groups across Russia. He makes no evident attempt to keep his language simple and comprehensible to Russian teenagers. He is not folksy. He does not tell many human-interest stories. Listening to a Putin speech is not a warm and amusing experience.

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President Putin’s pronouncements can be immoral or disgraceful. In his keynote March 2014 speech about the Crimea crisis he rehearsed the deep historical ties between Russia and Crimea, noting that during the Soviet period Crimean Tatars had been treated ‘unfairly’: Millions of people of various ethnicities suffered during those repressions, and primarily Russians…

Unfair? This bland description of what happened to the Tatars is appalling. In May 1944 the whole Tatar population of Crimea was rounded up in days and transported to gulag-style slave labor in the eastern USSR: ethnic cleansing amounting to genocide, perpetrated by Stalin against fellow Soviet citizens.

On one famous occasion in 2002 Mr. Putin left European leaders with him on the podium at a mass press conference staring bewilderedly and uneasily into space as they tried to work out whether what they had just heard through their headphones could possibly have been interpreted correctly. He answered a journalist’s question about the heavy cost of civilian casualties in Chechnya this way: If you want to become a complete Islamic radical and are ready to undergo circumcision, then I invite you to Moscow.

We are a multidenominational country. We have specialists in this question as well.

I will recommend that he carry out the operation in such a way that after it nothing else will grow back.

There are now some seven billion people living on Earth. Not a single one of them could have drafted those crude words for Putin as a proposed answer to a tough question on Chechnya. They emerged smoothly, almost nonchalantly, from him and him alone.

The effect was creepy, but staggeringly powerful. He did not answer the question. Instead he conveyed a top-level message of sheer ruthlessness that the European leaders and most of the foreign journalists sitting next to him had never heard before. It was all the more brutal because it was delivered to their faces in front of a global audience. He took the risk that the other leaders (and probably all the journalists too) would not have the nerve immediately to push back, and that risk paid off: You people here live in a world of nice, polite European rules.

I live in Russia. We do things differently.

Come and visit me. If you dare.

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Yet despite (or maybe because of) such repellent Soviet-style cynicism, President Putin’s speeches project strength and self-confidence: in a word, leadership. They draw on subtle language in closely woven intellectual arguments to exemplify patriotic pride and defiance. The audience at home and beyond Russia’s borders is left in no doubt that what President Putin says is what he believes, and that under no circumstances will he ever apologize for anything. He is only concerned about the fate of Russia. He thereby sends the Russian masses themselves a simple message: I know what you want.

You want a strong leader who stands up for Russia’s eternal interests, and will do what it takes to promote them without effete Western so-called compromises.

I am that strong leader. Be proud! Be grateful when I order you to make sacrifices for the fatherland!

Vladimir Putin’s speeches are full of ripe, chewy, raw political meat.

President Obama’s speeches are soufflés, impressive to behold but oddly insubstantial and unsatisfying when examined closely.

No one else delivers a speech in President Obama’s powerful, engaging style. Yet in all his hundreds of speeches since he first took office, and particularly in his foreign policy speeches, it’s hard to find a single memorable passage or phrase that has defined a successful policy agenda, or changed the way people think about issues. He projects didactic detachment: eloquent and informed, but not interesting or challenging or even engaged.

This style of doing things has advantages. It is quite different in tone and substance from what came before under successive Republican presidents. Insofar as the American people voted for something completely different by twice electing Barack Obama as U.S. president, that’s what they have been given. That studied detachment compels other countries to think harder about what they should do to confront the world’s problems, without complacently assuming that American leadership will do the heavy work.

President Obama’s rhetorical style nonetheless has obvious disadvantages even in its own terms. An appalling example was his statement in August 2014 after the murder of American journalist James Foley by the fanatical Islamic State movement. The statement itself hit most of the right notes, although there was one clumsy rhetorical misstep (and note the repeated musty formulation “there has to be…”): From governments and peoples across the Middle East there has to be a common effort to extract this cancer, so that it does not spread.

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There has to be a clear rejection of these kind of nihilistic ideologies. One thing we can all agree on is that a group like ISIL has no place in the 21st century.

The problem is that Islamic State and Al Qaeda and other such extreme Islamist formations do have a place in the 21st century. In fact, they have a rapidly expanding place, including in our own countries. They are attracting converts from across the planet whose idea of a meaningful life is butchering prisoners in fiendish ways and posting videos of the carnage on the Internet as quickly as possible. President Obama’s words left an unsettling impression that he has analyzed the world, but drawn dangerously inaccurate conclusions about what is happening in it.

I started with this thought: The supreme skill of a speechwriter lies in making sure that those words say something interesting, and in helping the leader create just the right mood.

In a great speech everything fits like a jigsaw: words, emotional tone, audience, occasion, and message.

Here President Obama’s statement on the murder of James Foley fell badly short. Not only did he not wear a somber tie. His relaxed openshirt stance was open to criticism that it was disrespectful to the Foley family. Worst of all, soon after making this statement he returned to the golf course. This undermined his words. He himself framed his own solemn, firm words about the cold-blooded murder of an American citizen as something tedious that he had to do during his vacation, before getting back to the main work of the day, namely having fun with wealthy friends.

In short, the statement and its tone did not match the context he had created. Not a neat, strong, complete jigsaw, with all the pieces locked together and giving each other meaning. More a messy pile of pieces from different jigsaws that did not fit together at all. You could not and did not hear leadership. *** President Obama’s nuanced, burden-sharing messages are understood by senior people in capitals around the world who are on more or less the same Western political wavelength. Other, more dangerous (if not deranged) leaderships and movements hear something quite different. And they are drawing their own conclusions: The mighty river of history is finally flowing our way! At long last, Washington is pulling back! Now is the time to advance!

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True, Obama may well hit us hard if we overdo it. But he gives the impression that he really doesn’t want to. And we plan to overdo it! We plan to keep on slaughtering American prisoners live on YouTube, to show him that we don’t care what he does.

Obama talks more in sorrow than anger. We act in anger—and we are sorrowful only when we don’t kill enough Americans!

We can take more pain than Obama is ready to inflict.

Obama is weak. We are strong. And this is the point. He knows it… *** These examples at the highest levels of global public speaking today illustrate the basic problems facing anyone preparing a speech intended to show leadership.

When every word counts in speeches delivered at the top level, even the best leaders and their speechwriting team can end up poring over microscopic language points. They lose sight of the likely impact of the speech both for the audience in the room on the day and around the planet. They somehow get stuck in the detailed drafting and lose sight of the biggest question of all: does this speech as a whole, delivered at this event to this audience on this occasion, make sense in what we’re trying to do?

And, alas, too often it doesn’t.

How do you capture in words on a page the leader’s own personality?

How does a leader choose words that fit tightly like jigsaw pieces with the audience, the occasion, and the wider context? How to make sure that what they hear is what the leader wants them to hear? How can the leader use this speech to sound strong?

How to pitch the speech at just the right level of ambition and risk that make sense given the leader’s current reputation and career trajectory?

There is no one answer. It’s all about working out the key messages (open and subliminal), then developing them through intolerant attention to detail for both the speech itself and the surrounding context. Be clear what you want the audience on the day and more widely to learn, understand, remember, and feel.

Be honest with yourself about your own level of ambition. Understand the risks involved in being the best speaker you can possibly be. Own those risks; accept responsibility for them. Then, finally, pick the tools for the job. Have lots of tools. Keep them sharp. Look out for new ones. *** 203

At some point even the most trusted and effective speechwriters have taken things as far as anyone in that role can take them. To turn their fine words into a fine speech, the leader may need personal sessions with a tough-love coach, and a merciless video camera. Public speaking for leaders at that point is not about words. It’s about therapy—helping the leader as a person improve his or her communication skills and self-awareness, and so reach many different audiences with unerring precision.

The jigsaw is complete when the leader and speechwriters get everything just right. All those listening in the room on the day, and those reading the speech thousands of miles away today and tomorrow and in years to come, hear one thing above all: Hmm. That was good. That was a leader. More, please.

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APPENDIX

Foreign Office Cables

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Pope John Paul II Sarajevo, April 1997

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President Clinton Sarajevo, December 1997

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French/German Foreign Ministers Sarajevo, December 1997

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President Chirac Sarajevo, April 1998

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Speeches at Auschwitz Commemoration January 2005

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Pope Benedict XVI Auschwitz, May 2006

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PRAISE FOR CHARLES CRAWFORD Reader of Daily Telegraph, 2012 Welcome back Charles, the Rolls Royce of Daily Telegraph Bloggers.

Maciej Zywiol, 2011 Another proof that Charles Crawford was THE sharpest knife in TEDxKraków 2010 drawer (full of plenty of other sharp knives, so that’s saying something!).

Editor of Blic (Belgrade), 2010 I would like to congratulate you for marvellous blog—very funny but also very informative and provocative.

Anonymous FCO official, 2010 For aspiring diplomats it is great to have as free-spirited and courageous a role model as yourself, to sharpen and define the issues.

Reader Boris Volodarsky, 2010 Finally, out of a wall of stupid and totally unqualified media reports there is something worth reading on these Russian espionage issues.

Reader in Philadelphia USA, 2010 I just finished your subject article (‘A Very Polish Conservative’) in today’s National Review Online. It was an outstanding summation of many complex issues. And it was written with a wonderful sense of proportion and perspective.

Expatua.com, January 2010 Here’s an entertaining blog. Everything is pretty much covered in it, from climate change to Russian law. You will probably need the requisite “dry British humour” in places.

Dominic Lawson (The Times) 2010 The most telling critique of this delusional foreign policy comes in regular instalments in the form of a blog by the former British ambassador to Poland, Charles Crawford. If you want to know just how much in despair many of our diplomats are, this is the place to look.

Slugger O’Toole, December 2009 A post that demonstrates the real power of the blogosphere, in which the sharpest insights are not to be found in the highest profile blogs but the ones just bubbling underneath.

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European Affairs Society, October 2009 He is known for his unorthodox diplomacy and excellent public speaking skills.

Politics.co.uk There’s a lot to be said for this blog from former diplomat Charles Crawford. For those with an interest in international affairs and diplomacy this site is an absolute must. The unique perspectives of a long-time diplomat are the sort of thing everyone should be reading, regardless of their political background.

Blast Receiver, after St Albans School Prize Giving, September 2009 Hi Charles—really enjoyed your speech—which was witty and funny and pitched just right: you’re not boring.

John O’Sullivan, National Review Online 2007 Charles Crawford, the British ambassador, is similarly an unconventionally effective diplomat.

Michael Dembinski (British-Polish Chamber of Commerce) Charles’ writing on Poland cuts through the lazy thinking, sloppy journalism, misleading political shorthand and sheer ignorance that often appears in the UK media—and indeed in Government circles—when Polish politics, history or economics are mentioned.

Daniel Kawczynski MP, House of Commons 2006 I met Mr Crawford last December during a brief visit to Warsaw.

He represents our country extremely well. He is not frightened to put forward our stance. He does not suffer fools gladly and he does a very good job in being quite strong with the Polish Government and protecting our interests.

Devil’s Kitchen blog, 2005 A simple ambassador who talks in plain English!

Edward Lucas (Economist) Britain’s ambassador to Poland, Charles Crawford, is sharp in his wits, pen and humour.

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PRAISE FOR CHARLES CRAWFORD Sunday Times, November 2005 “Charles is very hard-working although he does have an off-beat sense of humour,” said one friend yesterday.

Old Jack Tar, Samizdata 2005 A diplomat speaking the truth? A diplomat? No, no, no, this will never do! Next thing you know we’ll be seeing water running uphill...and all manner of other freakish occurrences that risk tearing a hole in the space-time continuum.

Andrew Dodge, Samizdata 2005 Such honesty has no place in modern government...it’s bloody dangerous!

FCO Annual Appraisal 2003 Opinionated, passionate, disruptive.

FCO Annual Appraisal 2001 Not many Balkan Ambassadors would have thought of borrowing a kangaroo.

FCO Annual Appraisal 2000 Ideas deluge forth, some unfiltered FCO Security Review 1984 Perceptive, idealistic, impetuous, intolerant, abrasive.

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About the Author

CHARLES CRAWFORD CMG is a public speaking and negotiation expert. He worked for 28 years in the U.K. Diplomatic Service including three postings as British Ambassador to Sarajevo, Belgrade, and Warsaw before starting a private consulting career in communication technique.

A barrister and professional mediator, he draws on 28 years’ experience in the U.K. diplomatic service, much of it spent in former communist central and Eastern Europe.

In his early diplomatic career he served as FCO Speechwriter. He has contributed to speeches by members of the British Royal Family and successive U.K. Prime Ministers and Foreign Ministers. In 1987 he wrote the U.K. Foreign Office’s first Guide to Speechwriting; 25 years later it remains the basis for the FCO’s speechwriting training.

He played a significant role in post-conflict reconciliation in Bosnia and Herzegovina, including tackling the war crimes problem; in coordinating international support for democratic change in Serbia, Kosovo, and Croatia; and in helping negotiate important aspects of the 2005 EU Budget deal and 2007 E.U. Lisbon Treaty.

Since leaving the U.K. Diplomatic Service in 2007 he has worked as a communication skills consultant for many different private and public sector clients, including a leading European energy corporation, the United Nations, foreign ministries, and the head of a Western intelligence agency.

As well as drafting and delivering many speeches, articles, and media interventions over his FCO career, Charles Crawford produced a large body of official British government work in an unconventional direct style. His work was read and praised at the highest levels in London, NATO, and the European Union.

He appears frequently on the UK and international media to discuss international policy issues and diplomatic technique (CNN, Sky News, BBC, ITV, Voice of Russia) and is part of the Daily Telegraph (London) comment team. He is the only overseas contributor to the U.S. speechwriters website PunditWire.

He is married with three children and lives near Oxford in England. His website is www.charlescrawford.biz.

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“Charles Crawford is the Dale Carnegie of speechwriting. Also its P.G. Wodehouse.”

“Charles Crawford is the Dale Carnegie of speechwriting. Also its P.G. Wodehouse. His book is not only terrific practical advice that will win supporters and influence audiences, but also a very funny, entertaining read. It’s unputdownable. And when you’ve read it, you’ll be unputdownable too.”

John O’Sullivan, former speechwriter to Margaret Thatcher and Editor-at-Large, National Review.

“It was said of Winston Churchill that ‘he mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.’ Waging war with words is as old as civilization, and in his bold and insightful analysis, Charles Crawford draws on his huge experience and talents to analyze how well today’s leaders measure up—and how we could all improve our speaking skills.”

Michael Dobbs, Author of House of Cards and Executive Producer of the American TV series of the same title.

“There are many pearls of wisdom in this book, the most important of which concerns preparation: ‘don’t write a speech, speak a speech.’ Charles Crawford does not pretend that delivering a speech is easy, for it requires the skills of a craftsman.But those skills can be acquired. Amusingly—and in a highly readable format—Crawford reveals the crafting of a speech with examples of fine oratory and the pitfalls to avoid.”

David Owen, former U.K. Foreign Secretary