Services Safari

Be a Better Speaker (3)

Delivering a Great Keynote Presentation

Part 3 – The Story

A great story has a beginning, middle and an end.  It should also have moments that touch us deeply.  Some humor along the way often helps the story as does the personal touch.  How many elements like this can be incorporated into your presentation?

If you really want to nail your next keynote presentation then invite some colleagues in to hear you deliver it for them.  Let them tell you where the highlights and the flat spots are.  Let them tell you how you could soup up some of your slides to increase their impact on the audience.  What I’m suggesting is that you seek second party review of your keynote presentation before you give it.

I believe that each of us are capable of coming up with somewhere between 65-95% of a great presentation on our own.  However, a few minutes spent with others can take a passable presentation and make it outstanding if you are willing to seek the counsel of peers.

Sometimes the best movies or books that we see or read contain a plot twist.  It’s that a-ha moment that make us stop and consider why we were so sure the plot was moving in a different direction. A good keynote presentation should have some moments where the speaker confronts our biases, prejudices, or conventional wisdom and makes us see things in a different light altogether.

When you challenge the status quo, you may have an immediate impact on the attendees.  You are creating cognitive dissonance – that unsettling feeling we get when we realize we may have been wrong. In public speaking, you must engage the minds and hearts of the audience if you want to have an impact on them.

Great keynoters utilize a mix of proof points as they speak.  People in an audience distrust a single source of insight.  Just because you’ve done a research study does not mean that the conclusions are necessarily true.  It’s fine to share relevant facts with an audience but do not assume these will change the audience’s perspectives in and of themselves.  You must back up any research with anecdotal conversations with business executives or others who are facing the issue you’re discussing.  You should illustrate how one company has confronted this issue via a case study.  Audiences will not believe your conclusions until you paint a vivid, complete and colorful picture around the subject matter.

Try these techniques to make your story telling better:

-          Substitute a picture for each slide within the body of the deck. Find relevant pictures, graphics, etc. to use instead of text. Pictures are worth thousands of words and people remember them. Audiences are terrible at memorizing your text.

-          Incorporate music or a video clip into your presentation. Multi-media isn’t just for the artsy types. You can do it, too, especially since I’ve seen school age children do it all the time.

-          Ask people in the audience to offer up some answers to a question you pose. Put the question on a slide or ask it from the podium/stage.

-          Poll the audience once or twice. A funny thing happens when you ask an audience for their opinion. Funnier still, see how they react when you bust their bubble as to conventional wisdom.

-          Walk out into the audience. Walking around is visually more entertaining to an audience. It’s a rare person who can stand motionless behind a podium for an hour and still keep the audience’s attention.

Be a Better Speaker (2)

Delivering a Great Keynote Presentation

Part 2 – The Presentation Deck

Great presentations should be heard and seen but not read.

Your slides should support your audible dialogue and visual effect. They should never be read-only.  If the audience wanted to read your overly dense and text filled slides, they would have asked you to e-mail them in advance and they would've skipped your keynote altogether. 

Some of the greatest presenters use no slides or written scripts.  They know the story they intend to tell and they move across the stage making their well rehearsed talk seem like a friendly conversation between two colleagues.  These speakers understand that slides are not the star of the show.  Slides are secondary or tertiary to the message and the emotional impact a speaker is trying to deliver.

Many speakers use PowerPoint as an organizing tool.  Whether they use the outline feature or not, the structure that a PowerPoint presentation deck enforces or helps create a familiar method of constructing a set of presentations slides.  However, the presence of a slide deck does not mean that a great presentation will be delivered. 

The worst presenters use something I derisively call “The Un-deck”. These presenters confuse their keynote address with a sales presentation.  Worse, they use a really bad sales deck as the core of their presentation. See if you recognize this bad keynote speaker:

“Hi, I’m Jane Doe and I am the Senior Vice President of Marketing and Communications for Nefarious Software, Inc.  Before I get to my remarks, let me take 30 or 40 minutes to tell you about my company.  Nefarious Software was founded in 1847 by Adolphus Gearhead…here is a picture of our glorious leader… here is a picture of our glorious headquarters building… here is a map of the world that highlights all of our office locations… here is a list of our 6000 customers… here are three short video clips of customer testimonials…”

“In the remaining 10 minutes, let me tell you how our firm defines today’s topic and why you need to hire us to solve it”

This type of bad keynote speaker usually wastes our time with irrelevant trivia about their employer because they are:

-          insensitive to the needs and wants of the audience

-          unqualified to speak about the topic they are supposed to address

-          inconsiderate boobs

-          all of the above

If you would like any tongue in cheek version of the “Un-Deck”, just drop me a line at contact@finalanalysis.com. I actually built one of the most offensive decks a presenter can ever use as an illustrative backdrop for a webinar I recently did with the PSA vendor OpenAir.

The cardinal sin that bad keynoters often commit is to spend too much time on the setup. They take too long gabbing about their company, their product/service and how delighted/honored to be there. The audience is there to learn and be entertained. They are not be lectured to or bored. 

Ideally, a good presentation deck contains the following:

-          Title slide

-          The Credential slide – In one and only one slide, tell us who you are, a tiny factoid about the company you represent and your relevance to be topic at hand.  Any more than this is disrespectful to the audience and boring.

-          Top 3 Messages slide – Here you tell the audience the top three takeaways they are going to hear from you.  If you don’t know them before you create your presentation, you cannot give a concise and to the point presentation.  Moreover, great speakers can adjust the length of their presentation when they know their top three messages.  I’ve had keynotes scaled back from 50 minutes to five minutes because of schedule screw ups that were out of my control.  I would have struggled to do so had I not focused my presentation and remarks around the top messages.

-          12-15 slides that make up the body of the deck – These slides should directly correlate to one of the top three messages.  If they don’t, then take them out of the deck.

-          The Summary slide – This slide recaps the top three messages in slightly different verbiage. The purpose of this slide is to remind the attendees the three critical points you are trying to make.  This solidifies in their mind the value they received from your presentation and it provides you an opportunity to wrap up the last 50 minutes.

-          Questions? – This slide simply allows listeners an opportunity to pose questions to you.  In a large setting, this slide is not utilized.

-          Thanks and Follow-up Info – This slide serves two purposes as it thanks the audience for their interest and time while also providing your contact information for those who wish to follow up directly with you.

Remember, great presenters spend on average three minutes per slide.  If you believe a given slide requires a 10 minute soliloquy, you probably have too much information on the slide or you have failed to distill the guts of the slide to their most important components. You should simplify the slide, simplify the message or break this slide into one or more other slides.

There are some other guidance points involving the body of the deck.

-          Avoid using more than 20 words per slide – No one will have time to read more than this anyway and too much verbiage takes the audience’s attention away from the speaker.

-          Avoid using histograms – Researchers tend to use histograms with three data points per column to an excess. These are fine for research reports but they show poorly in a large auditorium. Pie charts can be equally obtuse when used incorrectly.

-          Put some pictures in the deck - Text is soooooo boring.

Next – Part 3 - The Story

Please Be a Better Speaker

Delivering a Great Keynote Presentation

Part 1 - The Delivery

We have all suffered through our share of bad speakers.  But the most unfortunate experiences occur when a keynote speaker really lets us down.  In my profession, I get to hear hundreds of presentations annually and invariably there are those that make me wish for a Dr. Kevorkian for public speakers.

Last week, I attended an event where the keynote speaker was supposed to be some sort of distinguished, polished professional.  He should have handed out vials of Novocain to the attendees because his talk was peppered with sentences with such enthusiastic and emotionally captivating thoughts such as “the ontological and semantic underpinnings behind the RBAC² constructs in neo-dynamic enterprises…..”

This fellow’s talk was bad on many levels. He:

• wanted us to believe he was important because he max’d out the Fog Index
• stated an incredibly obvious fact (e.g., “IT projects need executive sponsorship”) and acted as if he had discovered the Holy Grail
• read to us a number of arcane data points from some histograms none of us could read anyway
• had no personality, no humanity and no warmth

I know a person’s a bad speaker when I can imagine my 14-year, with absolutely no advance preparation, could be way more entertaining with the same material.

So, let’s get some positive action going. Here are my tips for delivering a great presentation:

Part 1- The Delivery

A technically brilliant presentation is worthless if the delivery is flawed. If we can't hear you, then your presentation serves no purpose.  If you can't convince us that you truly believe in this material that you are presenting, then we won't believe it either.

An effective delivery is one where people can hear you speak.  A startling number of individuals cannot tell if they are "on microphone".  This takes some practice so that you know your voice is being picked up by a microphone and is being boomed out to every last chair in the venue.  It is far better for a speaker to ask the audience if they can hear him or her than to assume as much and be incorrect.  When you are on microphone you should be able to detect a bit of latency in your voice as it moves through the room.  If it sounds like you are merely speaking to yourself, then it's a sure bet you are.

But great delivery means that you think about how you come across to a crowd.  If you are not comfortable speaking before a large group, then go ahead and admit it.  Let the audience know that you are a fellow human being with your own particular set of concerns, strengths and fears.  Tell us that you're not a great public speaker but you really know love the subject matter and that you hope they will understand the spirit you have about this subject.

Honesty goes a long way with forming a connection between a speaker and the audience.  An audience is far more forgiving of a fellow human being than they will be with a supposed expert who lacks the humility and awareness to know that their delivery is bombing.

Many public speaking coaches will suggest that you open a talk with some sort of joke.  But let's face it, many of you are not comedians and joke telling is not your second career.  Don't use a keynote opportunity as a place to test drive some material you've been dying to use on an open microphone night at the local comedy club. Substitute a joke for a genuine if not heartfelt story involving yourself and the subject matter.  This will pull the audience into your perspective and your unique point of view about this material.

Nothing makes people pay attention more than a good story.  Human beings will listen for the longest time until they hear the conclusion, moral or punch line of a good story. Think about some of the great speakers you have heard.  They start their talk off by describing a problem, story or other event and then tell you how they will discuss this throughout the next 45 minutes.  They will likely use some sort of shorthand mnemonic or other gimmick to keep you guessing and waiting to hear the story through its completion.  These speakers use techniques like: the nine habits of effective….; the 10 steps to...; or, what the XYZ model stands for. People will pay attention to hear each and every one of those individual components.

Great keynoters also utilize props.  A funny thing happens when you bring a big box on stage.  Everybody in the audience wants to know, subconsciously, what's inside that box.  Throughout the presentation the audience wonders in anticipation what the next new strange item you will take out of the box.  But props hold another value beyond attention retention.  Props move the focus of the conversation between you and the audience away from a PowerPoint slide show.  The audience can now focus on a completely different area of the stage and they use a different part of their mind.  Props do not require the brain to think in textual or language terms.  Props appeal to different parts of the brain that deal with images and creativity.

Props can be humorous as well.  In a sales training session I gave, I changed clothes in front of 1,800 people on stage.  When I walked onstage I was attired in the worst possible polyester-based, mismatched used-car salesman attire known to mankind.  When I left the stage, I had filled a box with the worst professional clothes possible.  People laughed as I shed my seven pinkie rings, gold chains, etc. to fill a box full of these horrendous clothes. More than a decade later, people still bring up that stunt and still remember the points I made at that talk.

A great delivery also requires you to be self-deprecating and not self important.  No one in the audience is perfect and they all know that you aren't either.  Sure, you need to have an air of confidence in your material but you do not need to assert yourself as the most important person in this space.  Remember, if you weren't already deemed to be an expert in this space, you wouldn't have been given this keynote opportunity in the first place.  Do not spend a moment during the keynote re-credentialing yourself or reasserting your legitimacy to be on the stage.  No one really wants to hear it and secondly they will give you the respect you crave after you earn it from them.  The best way to earn it is to act like a colleague of theirs and not some sort of prima donna.

Lastly, make sure your delivery is aligned with the brand of your company.  If your firm is a hip, cool California operation, then why are you giving a dull, dry, academic, preachy and stiff talk?  The keynote presentation is an opportunity for you and your firm to make a lasting and favorable impression on hundreds or thousands of audience members.  If you come across as imperious or arrogant, then won't the audience assume as much for your firm?  Think about your delivery and think about what it says about you and your firm as you may want to seriously rethink how and what you present.

Next post: Part 2 - The Presentation Deck

Who's IP is it Anyway?

           Protecting Your Hard-Fought Intellectual Property

I was talking about services contracts a few weeks back with some colleagues and was surprised at how many of us were encountering contractual language from clients that was especially grabby when it came to our (not their) intellectual property.

I have developed some exceptional IT marketing databases over the last few years. Ditto for some interesting application software architectures and other products. I don't mind sharing these with paying clients and my fees reflect the cost of this. However, once I depart, those assets remain my property and no one else's.

Bob Lewis of Infoworld recently posted in his blog (http://weblog.infoworld.com/lewis/archives/2006/12/advice_for_a_ne.html ):

Of all the advice I could give, one issue stand out. The first is that you'll be bringing your intellectual property (IP) into each engagement. You'll refine it while on the clock, and you'll develop new intellectual property as well. Which brings up the question of who owns it when you're done.

Most large companies these days have onerous IP clauses in their contracts. I've personally run across quite a few companies that try to reassign ownership of my IP, so that once I include it in a work product I no longer have the right to use it anymore. I've run across it enough to be pretty sure it's a trend.

Some companies may argue that they are entitled to the IP you create while working for them. I can certainly appreciate their position if the product was not an extension of another product you brought with you on the job. In a spirited conversation I had with one firm's attorney, I reminded him that I was not a contract programmer who was developing an application. I was a marketing research and IT research firm employee who was bringing my company's IP to bear for them. My company was not tendering or surrendering its rights to any of its IP for them.

As with any business contract, if you're not sure what it says or what you're giving up, get a lawyer. The best money you can spend is the money that keeps you out of court and keeps you from getting into a nasty dispute with a soon-to-be ex-client.  It's always easier to fix a proposed contract before a deal is inked than to live with the after-effects later. With IP and contracts today, let the consultant beware.

Indian?? Outsourcing

            American Indians - Another Outsourcing Option

Story: The Other Indian Outsourcer, BusinessWeek, 11/6/2006, www.businessweek.com

I had written previously about rural outsourcing but this piece in BusinessWeek about Accenture committing to a five-year outsourcing arrangement with a native American group was interesting. Here is a business opportunity to use on-shore workers whose employers are in low cost of living areas and pay no corporate taxes.

Great business leaders find ways to make things work in their own country. Swatch bucked the decline in Swiss watch making a couple of decades ago by finding a new way to keep making and selling Swiss watches. More U.S. based firms should do likewise. It doesn't take much work or thinking to offshore or outsource much of one's business. That's something anyone can do. But, finding a unique way to stay onshore and/or keep functions in-house while still staying cost-competitive is more challenging.

I like executives who think outside the box and I support any new business idea that provides jobs and opportunities to the one's own countrymen, especially to the original Americans.

Let the Adjusting Begin

Offshoring Meets the Legal Profession

   

Did you see the BusinessWeek piece “Let’s Offshore the Lawyers” (9/18/2006, www.businessweek.com)? This article describes DuPont’s decision to use OfficeTiger to assist in collecting and processing evidence and documents. The goal is to materially shorten the elapsed time in reviewing documents and to cut overall legal costs. The article also states that DuPont estimates that 70% of labor “in a typical insurance or liability case can be outsourced.”

   

Consultants, lawyers, researchers, architects, engineers and more are finding that lower-cost service professionals will do the same work for less. (See attached slide with Forrester dat for information on Architecture job changes). The lessons from prior outsourcing waves will apply to law firms, too. Specifically, law firms should:

-          develop a global service delivery model so that lower cost resources can be incorporated into more of your cases

-          change your compensation methods to reward those who structure high margin, not necessarily high dollar fee, work

-          accept the fact that the market is changing and that clients will no longer accept traditional rates

-          alter work processes and incorporate more collaboration tools to permit 24/7 global teams to excel

-          create the methods, tools, training, protocols, etc. that permit successful trans-national collaboration

-          re-think the need for local paralegals and young staffers. Your new business model may require more ‘sales’ and client relationship talent locally with the more junior skill sets outsourced or offshored.

 

The wood paneling in the offices may need to go, too. Entering many law firm offices feels like taking a step back in time, a very expensive step. Remember, clients are scrutinizing the SG&A costs of every systems integrator, outsourcer and contractor they use. They will look at your cost structure and want to know what value they get from your leather-studded office furniture, Grecian statues in the lobby, oak paneling in the washroom, etc. If your cost structure is out of line/out of date with the times, expect to hear about it from clients.

 

I know – many people hire attorneys based on their reputation not cost – but corporations don’t. They see many law firms as big talent farms and are interested in securing the services of those who match their lower cost ethos. Clients, in any service environment, want value and the offshore movement in legal simply serves as a wake-up call for this industry to re-invent itself.

New Services Magazine

                 New Title from CMP: Global Services

CMP, publishers of InformationWeek and Optimize, have a new publication out called Global Services. While I've penned several pieces for Optimize, I have no connection to this publication. In fact, I just became aware of this publication in the last few weeks.

I mention this as there are only a few publications for services professionals. Consulting magazine is a very good publication (www.consultingmagazine.com) and I welcome more publications in this space. Global Services (www.globalservicesmedia.com) is very global in its editorial bent and content but it's not as sharp yet as Consulting. That's not a criticism - that's an aspirational nudge for this new publication. Qualified readers can get a free subscription to Global Services (follow the link above).

I welcome the additional coverage another magazine brings to this industry. I also think the global focus is spot on given the way our industry has changed over the last decade.

Let's hope this publication (and others in our industry) makes it.

Cobbler's Children

                     Re-Engineering Service Firms - NOW!

As part of some client work I've been completing lately, I've had time to reflect on a few major points concerning professional service firms, especially systems integrators.

Finding #1 - Margins are not where they should be. When I examined the margins of companies all across the technology stack, I fully expected margins to be at their greatest when companies and products are closest to end-user/buyers. By and large, that was true except for two notable exceptions: Software Companies and Commercial IT Service Providers. The former had stupendous returns (mostly due to exceptional returns by MSFT, SAP and ORCL) while the latter did poorly at around 5%. (see Margin Map graphic)

Finding #2 - The competition for commercial systems integrators has changed yet again. One of the new combatants are ERP vendors who have been clawing back services revenues from these players for years. However, if ERP vendors are successful in rolling out newer versions of products that require less implementation effort, the effect on SI revenues could be chilling. Other competitors, like offshore firms, have really cut into the meat and potatoes of SIs. Moreover, corporations just don't want or value the old type of general consulting these firms offered in abundance in the 1970s-1990s. Specialized hosting and BPO firms (e.g., Hewitt) are chipping away market share, too.

Finding #3 - Global Service Delivery Models are easy to claim in sales presentations but are an expensive and difficult feat to pull off. Several commercial SIs that are dragging down group margins are still trying to sell and organize around an obsolete business model.

Finding #4 - Consultancies are finding that it is easier to give advice than take it. Telling a client that they are not operating at first quartile performance is one thing, but, doing something internally is a real change management challenge.

________________________________________________________________________________

Change strategies are needed now.

There is no magic one size fits all answer here. However, I recently re-discovered this chart in the book "Strategy Safari" by Mintzberg (no connection at all to my site). Way back in the book is this graphic by Ulrich (see below).

Every service firm should assess where they are in this curve and see what strategy is appropriate is right for them.

To illustrate, I conducted a Point of View sales training day the other day for a major ERP vendor. I gave them a case study involving a major systems integrator. When they read the background materials on this firm, one team after another expressed shock at how dysfunctional and troubled this company was. While the intent of the case study was to get them to see how they need to prep more before doing their old 'dialing for dollars' sales practice, it also shocked them to see how messed up a major, publicly traded SI could be.

Look over the Ulrich chart - where does your firm need to focus?

This brings me to the quote of the week:
"I don't think competition causes companies to fail. Much more often, they rot from the inside". 

(Source: InfoWorld 5/22/06 pg. 48)

China - A Service Opportunity? Part 2

The China Workforce for Services

When you get a minute, there’s a short article in Forbes this week on hiring China personnel (Get Me Personnel). It’s a fast read but packed with insight into the job market in that country.

For service firms, the problems identified in this article are serious:

-          no national databases to verify employment history, criminal records, etc.

-          very high costs incurred to perform background checks

-          a culture not conducive to reporting bad news about people

-          rampant resume fraud

-          forged recommendation letters

-          etc.

The story goes on to report the issues a US manufacturer encountered as its work force sold secrets, sales professionals led double lives, etc.

As more and more service firms build out their global delivery models, expansions in China (with its low cost, abundant and increasingly skilled workforce) will become more common. The lessons and risks identified in this article are important to understand and anticipate. Does your firm have what’s required for China?

Where are Services Going Now?

Big Themes in Recent Services Stories

Here are some stories you might want to follow:

“HP Goes Distance for P&G”, eWeek – This piece describes how “to win P&G’s accounting, HP rebuilt Cincinnati in India”. This piece illustrates how far companies are willing to go to develop and capture business process outsourcing (BPO) work. Not content to move application development and maintenance to offshore sites, we can expect more firms (both US and Indian) to build out more BPO processing centers in low cost country sources. More information available at:  www.blog.eweek.com

“BPO: The Next Frontier”, eWeek – Also, in the same issue, is a piece with IDC (International Data Corporation) statistics on the size and growth rates of the BPO market. Logisitics and Sales/Marketing were the big dogs in BPO with Customer Service a solid third. If you don’t know how big these spaces are (and how small some others like Procurement are), you should check this data out.

Wal-Mart and Dell also announced large planned increases in offshore workers.

M&A activity is hot in BPO. R.R. Donnelley picked up OfficeTiger for $250 million. OfficeTiger provides a number of back office BPO services to firms. Accenture’s acquisition of assets of Savista is maybe more noteworthy that a quick glance would suggest (see story at http://www.finextra.com/fullpr.asp?id=8311 ). 

Behind all of these stories is something much bigger. First, the services space is evolving and service providers are adapting – rapidly. The most immediate change underfoot is the creation of true global delivery models (GDM). High concentrations of workers in one (e.g., India or China) or a few countries is no longer economically viable or is unresponsive to end-customer needs. Service buyers want the flexibility of using blended groups of people in nearby/lower cost, remote/very low cost, and local/high cost countries. This flexibility in locales allows them to tailor which service professionals will be used to solve specific customer needs. This only makes sense as an all-U.S. solution is too expensive and an all-India solution may be lacking in certain functional, culture or other sensitivities. Choice is what’s driving some of this change. With choice comes the ability to offer more tailored solutions to service buyers.

But, another force is driving the rollout of GDM: diversification. In a speech I gave this week to procurement and supply chain executives, I discussed how one company’s, one industry’s and one country’s over-reliance on one country as its source of key products or services is potentially ruinous to a company. When Enron collapsed, those employees who put all their retirement savings into Enron stock were effectively wiped out. Buyers of services need a diversified approach to services acquisition if only to better manage risk.

The other big thing afoot is the growth of BPO and BPO into new markets. We can reasonably expect BPO to take off for some back office functions (e.g., Finance, HR). Furthermore, BPO into the mid-market is ripe for an explosion, too. Let’s see what happens once the M&A dusts settles.

Comments?