10 Simple Secrets of the World's Greatest Business Communicators by Carmine Gallo

10 Simple Secrets of the World's Greatest Business Communicators by Carmine Gallo

Author:Carmine Gallo
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2019-10-16T16:00:00+00:00


Simple Secret #6: Brevity

“In history, many of the most powerful talks were short and to the point.”

—­Chris Anderson

John F. Kennedy galvanized the nation in 1961 with an inaugural address scripted for fifteen minutes. Think about it. In fifteen minutes, Kennedy shared a vision that inspired generations, changed social policies in the sixties, and inspired a nation to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade. The world’s greatest communicators, in business or politics, keep it brief.

The most persuasive speakers are their own best editors. They cut, cut, and cut some more. In his magnificent book about the Kennedy years, A Thousand Days, Arthur Schlesinger said Kennedy “was an excellent editor, skilled at tuning up thoughts and eliminating verbal excess.” In Kennedy, JFK’s primary speechwriter, Ted Sorensen, wrote that Kennedy would use one-­syllable words instead of three-­syllable words when appropriate, or one word instead of two or three words to say the same thing. The inauguration speech is on display at the Kennedy library near Boston. You can see where Kennedy crossed out the word “adversaries” and replaced it with “foe.” Kennedy kept his speeches—­his presentations—­as tight as possible. Actually, it was George Washington who set the tone for brevity. His second inaugural address was only 135 words!

Now ask yourself, “Do I really need sixty minutes and fifty-­two PowerPoint slides to tell the story behind my service, product, company, or cause? Can I cut something out?” I’ll bet you can, and your presentation will be stronger for it.

The Window of Impact

The public’s desire for brevity is universal. Nobody wants to hear you ramble. The famous TED Talk conference has a hard-­and-­fast rule for all presenters, no matter how famous the name. No speaker can present for longer than eighteen minutes. After more than thirty years of experience, the TED organizers conclude that eighteen minutes is long enough to have a serious discussion about a topic and short enough to hold the audience’s attention.

When it comes to presentations, ten to eighteen minutes is what I call the “Window of Impact” to get your message across. Studies have shown that our attention span isn’t that long. Audience attention drops off dramatically after approximately ten minutes to eighteen minutes. After that point, your listeners’ brains experience “cognitive backlog.” It’s like holding out your arms while someone else piles on weights. At some point, you’ll drop everything.

The long-­running television news program 60 Minutes runs, well, an hour. But each segment is about fifteen minutes. Kennedy’s inaugural speech ran fifteen minutes. Steve Jobs’s famous Stanford commencement speech lasted fifteen minutes. And Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech came in at seventeen minutes.

If Kennedy and King can inspire a nation in under twenty minutes, you can certainly cover your topic in that time.

The Short Story of NYC’s Broker to the Stars

Barbara Corcoran is a motivational dynamo, a great speaker, very wealthy, and a famous television personality on ABC’s Shark Tank, the show where entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to a panel of investors.



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