What's Your Message

by Cam Barber

  I can still recall the messages from his major speeches. They made so much sense. The performance techniques (that the training course spent sooo much time teaching us) didn’t seem to matter. He was able to appear genuine and believable without using them. He didn’t need to follow ‘the rules’ to be a great speaker.

  But this was just my personal observation. The training course had hard research to back up their rules. Who was I to disagree? (Later I found out that the ‘hard research’ was taken out of context and what they were teaching was in many cases the opposite of what the researcher had concluded!! More on this in the ‘myths’ section.)

  A turning point

  It was around this time that I came across an article in Fortune magazine about the 2 most effective CEOs in the world at the time. It had a profound effect on me, and reinforced the idea that messaging was the vital and fundamental heart of every great speaker. The article was published on December 11, 1995, and talked about how the CEOs of Coca Cola and General Electric had unlocked the secrets of creating shareholder value.

  Fortune had decided to rank the most successful companies in the Fortune 500 based on a new measure. The article starts with, ‘There are all sorts of ways to grade a chief executive…’ Then they list 6 or 7 ways, but decide on a measure called MVA or ‘market value added’. MVA asks: ‘What is the difference between the cash that investors have put into a business over its lifetime and the amount they could get out of it today by selling their shares?’

  So Fortune put together a list of all the major companies in America and ranked them by MVA. They were shocked by the results. Two companies stood out in what would normally be called a statistical anomaly.

  Don Bradman is a statistical anomaly

  What’s a statistical anomaly? It’s when something falls way outside the normal range. For example, a freakishly good result like cricket legend Donald Bradman. His batting average is 99.96. That means every single time he went out to bat, he averaged almost 100 runs. So, how does this compare with all the other greats in history? Well, as of today, incorporating 150 years of cricketing data, the next best have batting averages ranging between 50 and 61 runs. There are dozens of incredible batsmen that fall into that range. The numbers get lower from there. So to have someone with an average of almost 100 is a freak. It’s 65% higher than the cluster of the next best. Statisticians will often eliminate this ‘statistical anomaly’ to better show the truth in the data.

  Well, in the Fortune article there were 2 results that can be considered statistical anomalies. They were both about 65% higher than the cluster of the next best on the list. After looking at 16 years of growth using an MVA calculation, Coca Cola was number 1 with a ranking of 61 and GE was number 2, with 52. And, as Fortune reported, ‘No other company came close. Walmart, in 3rd place, had 35 in MVA, Merck, 32, and Microsoft, 30’, etc. So you can see there is a similar cluster of great operators in the 30-35 range and 2 outliers that were about 65% better.

  Leaders with opposite personalities

  The CEO of GE was Jack Welch and the CEO of Coke was Roberto Goizueta (whose most enduring quote, by the way, is ‘Communication is the only task you cannot delegate’). These men had opposite personalities and completely different leadership styles. What was their secret?

  Roberto was an immigrant with a quiet, measured personality, he was always polite, didn’t like open confrontation, liked a predictable schedule and never seemed to take off his suit jacket.

  Jack Welch, on the other hand, was hot-headed, impulsive, charming, proud of his heavy drinking fraternity days, loved a fight and was most comfortable in his shirt sleeves.

  And their businesses also couldn’t have been more different. Coke is essentially a one-product company and GE is a conglomerate that sells thousands of products. Coke sells image, GE sells performance.

  Ironically, they became chairmen and CEO of their companies around the same time, just a month apart in 1981. Both Coke and GE were in trouble when they took the helm. For example, GE’s manufacturing-based businesses were being killed by the Japanese obsession with quality. Both businesses had lost focus. Coke had been losing market share for nearly 20 years.

  Unlocking the secret of great CEOs

  So my question was, is there a common theme? Is there a quality they both had? A single competence or talent that generated stellar results even though they had dramatically different businesses and different styles? There was! Messaging. Both men’s standout quality was their ability to sell ideas by making them clear and memorable.

  As Fortune put it, both men came up with a game plan and basically said, ‘We’re going to change the way we run these businesses and here’s how we’re going to do it. They figured out what they needed to do. Then told their employees. And then they did it - relentlessly’.

  Does that sound game-changing? Maybe not at first glance, but let’s look more closely. The common theme was that both men were able to create a strategy and communicate it so effectively that the entire company executed magnificently. Both men isolated a vivid message that drove the business for decades.

  They were messaging experts.

  Roberto’s key message

  The Coke message was:

  “We now have one key measure of success, return on capital, no matter what part of the business you are in.”

  He explained that the key to success is efficient allocation of capital. And the way to succeed is to employ this one simple formula. In other words, “You borrow money at a certain rate and invest it at a higher rate and pocket the difference”. This gave all of his managers a principle that allowed them to make a range of decisions without Roberto’s approval, but that followed his core principle. It worked like a charm.

  “Nobody had taken the time to explain what our cost of capital was … when you explain those things, intelligent people will eventually come to their senses,” Roberto said. If people “don’t know where they’re going, I mean, you don’t want them to get there very fast” he added.

  Roberto produced little brochures explaining how powerful this principle was and gave examples of how it worked. He visited all of his senior managers personally and, in his low-key style, talked about return on capital. He leant over desks, chatted over meals, pulled out his folksy brochures and made sure that everybody understood his message. It was even outlined in annual reports to all shareholders.

  This beautifully simple message allowed Roberto to delegate power while giving everybody a laser-like focus on his strategy. In the beginning, the stock market didn’t understand what was going on. They saw Coca Cola making ‘strange’ decisions that caused them to let go of their Triple-A debt rating and borrow more money than was thought prudent at the time. But Coke knew exactly what they were doing with the money they were borrowing because every project was meticulously assessed on return on capital.

  Jack’s key message

  Jack Welch also used a simple message to drive change and delegate authority, yet keep his massive conglomerate focused. His message was that each business in the GE group needed to be number 1 or number 2 in their global marketplace in 18 months. If they were number 3, 4 or lower, these businesses would be sold or closed. Imagine this. The new CEO pulls all the executives together and delivers this simple message:

  “Look at the business you run. You either have to be number 1 or 2, or we will sell you or shut you down. If you are not 1 or 2 now, either make a plan to do so or create a plan to sell or close down your business.”

  Again, this simple message created an ‘invisible hand’ that guided hundreds of individual decisions by senior managers at GE. It worked incredibly well.

  The sharp end of communication

  Ok, we’ve been told ‘communication is important’ before. But what does that actually mean? These examples showed that there should be a specific focus for communication. A vivid message.

  This was a turning point for me. It cut through the noise of personality style, leadership style
, delivery skills and so on. And it was true for an audience of 1 or 1,000.

  These 2 messages (and the CEOs driving them) created a rocket under both Coke and GE in the early 80s that continued to fuel both businesses into the mid-90s when the Fortune article was written, and underpinned a level of success that was 65% better than the world’s next best. The messages convinced the tradition-bound bureaucracies to accept change and gave them a clear focus for their energies.

  So, it seemed that style was irrelevant when it came to results. I mean, of course a person’s style has an impact. It’s integral. But style is not the driver, it’s simply part of the package. The real impact across an organisation came from absolute clarity.

  This helped me realise that the public speaking training I had attended had the focus back-to-front. So I started a consulting business to put it right. We developed training that placed message and natural style first, and allowed the ‘performance’ and ‘style’ to flow effortlessly from clarity. In the beginning we called it ClarityFirst, prioritising the ability to think clearly and structure ideas. It later became known as the Vivid Method for Public Speaking.

  ONE PRESENTATION CAN DEFINE A CAREER

  Sometimes the trajectory of a career can be defined by a single 30-minute talk. Unfortunately, what many of us have been taught about public speaking stifles our thinking, adds to our anxiety and sends us in the wrong direction.

  One of my early coaching clients, Joe, was president of Paramount Pictures in Japan. He had to fly to Los Angeles to outline his plan to promote a big new film, War of the Worlds. He, along with similar executives from around the world, would be presenting to Paramount’s senior executives as well as the heads of both Tom Cruise’s and Steven Spielberg’s production companies.

  He needed to change the existing view

  But this wasn’t a run-of-the-mill presentation. Joe was under pressure following his division’s poor performance over the previous year, including a disappointing result with another Tom Cruise movie, Collateral. There was a perception that he and his team were disorganised. His audience would be sceptical about his ability to deliver on the new film. In short, Joe’s presentation needed to change their existing view and give them full confidence in his abilities.

  It was Joe’s boss in Singapore who called me in to help.

  “Joe knows his stuff,” he told me, “and he has a great team, but he’s not convincing in public speaking situations. He often becomes flustered when interrupted with a question – which will happen a lot in this meeting. He seems to freeze a little under the spotlight, and get lost in the details.”

  The reality was, Joe’s job was on the line. When I first met with Joe he was clearly stressed. He talked about his PowerPoint slides first, “We have 5 people pulling together slides across 3 countries. There are 70 slides so far, and more to come.” He seemed overwhelmed just talking about the quantity of information. “Ok, apart from the slides, how do you feel about the presentation?” I asked.

  Joe let out a sigh, “I have all this conflicting advice bouncing around in my head. I know I don’t present very well, even though I’ve attended presentation courses in the past. And well-meaning people keep giving me advice; how to stand, how to gesture, how to speak – but keeping all those rules in mind while trying to get through all my slides can turn my mind to mud.”

  The Al Gore story

  I decided to tell Joe a story about Al Gore. Al Gore is well known for 3 things: His movie An Inconvenient Truth – one of the most successful documentaries of all time; his 8-year Vice Presidency alongside Bill Clinton; and his close but unsuccessful campaign for the US Presidency against George W. Bush in 2000.

  During this Presidential campaign, Gore was criticised for giving wooden and uninspiring speeches. Ironically, the best speech of his campaign was his concession speech … after he had lost and the election campaign was over. In that speech, he appeared far more relaxed than during the entire campaign, coming across as both natural and believable. It was this ‘real’ version of Gore who would succeed so well in the years to come as a speaker.

  A few years ago I was fortunate enough to meet and chat with Bill Clinton, and asked him about these two different Al Gores. Clinton said, “It drove me nuts” watching Gore communicate during the campaign because he knew he could be so much better. He also shared his view that the invention of the electric microphone changed forever the criteria for public speaking - overacting is no longer needed.

  The problem for Al Gore was that too many ‘experts’ had become involved in his campaign. They coached him on how to speak, act and gesture - including many of the rules Joe had been given. They advised him on specific words he should (and shouldn’t) use based on market research. They even steered him away from the subject he was most passionate about: the environment.

  First, kill all the consultants!

  As Joe Klein noted in his 2006 book Politics Lost, the consultants never considered that Gore’s best opportunity to win was to be real. (I *love* that Fortune magazine titled their review of Klein’s book, ‘First, kill all the consultants’!)

  Many people have wondered if Gore might have won that knife-edge election had he spoken more naturally and ignored the too-clever advice from his consultants. We will never know. But the story illustrates the lost opportunities that can result from misguided advice about communication.

  Joe liked the Al Gore example. “So, I should ignore all that confusing advice and just be myself? How do I know that will get the best result? And how will I deal with the nerves?”

  “Relax and find the pace that allows you to breathe comfortably.” I responded. “Then you’ll be able to think clearly when you speak. That’s your foundation. On top of that we’ll structure your ideas and identify key messages”.

  From that point on, Joe and I focused on 2 main things: 1) the clarity of his messages, and 2) getting comfortable with his natural style.

  His presentation in Los Angeles rocked! It exceeded his own expectations and those of his managers. He was relaxed and confident, speaking with certainty throughout. He didn’t try to be more dramatic or extroverted than he was. He handled tough questions with assurance – because he had anticipated them in his preparation. Far from being flustered and uncertain, Joe was seen as the best presenter from all the countries at the meeting. The end result was that his $22 million plan was accepted – and his career trajectory was once again looking up.

  Joe’s story is not unique. Conflicting advice, concerns about having too much to say, anxiety about presenting in the ‘right way’ – perhaps even a career held back: these are common experiences. Perhaps you can relate to some?

  A message is the doorway to an idea

  Fortunately, there is a better way. It’s possible to speak with certainty, and persuade with clarity. It starts with your message, which is the doorway to your idea. It’s the hook that draws people in to the details. It’s the summary that can be recalled easily, allowing more information to be remembered. A good message becomes the afterglow of your talk; the thing that is shared and repeated. A vivid message is the magic that brings your ideas to life.

  Now, let’s have a look at a case study of a professional sporting club and how vivid messages across their organisation have helped them become so successful.

  MESSAGING CASE STUDY: PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL CLUBS

  Few people outside Australia are familiar with AFL Football, the game many call Australian Rules. It’s a shame. AFL (Australian Football League) Football is the most fun and exciting game played anywhere in the world. And even though it’s only played in Australia, AFL football has the 4th highest attendance of any sport in the world - an average of 32,436 people per game - a bigger average crowd than Major League Baseball.

  After a few years teaching this new public speaking method, I got a call from the President of the Hawthorn Football Club, Jeff Kennett. If you haven’t heard of him, Jeff is a larger-than-life character in Australia. A former politici
an, he was a high-profile Premier of Victoria.

  Jeff was interested in media training for players, coaches and the executive team at Hawthorn. It was funny though. I’d never spoken to him and had no reason to believe he knew about me.

  When I got back to the office after a meeting, my assistant simply said, “Someone named Jeff called, he left a mobile number, I’m not sure what he wants”. I said, “Mmm, do I need to speak to him, if it’s a general enquiry can’t you handle it?” I wondered if it was another caller with 20 questions about public speaking but no plans for business. I called the number anyway, the voice answered “Yes?” and I responded, in a tone trailing off into a question, “This is Cam Barber, returning your call…”.

  Jeff has a loud, distinctive voice and a strong presence. He said, “HELLO CAM, THIS IS JEFF KENNETT”.

  “Oh! Um, hello Jeff, (I spontaneously stood up from my chair. It was weird, I felt too informal sitting down, even on the phone) how can I help you?”

  Anyway, we had a chat about the club’s needs, which led to a program of coaching and training, and a relationship with the club that has lasted 8 years so far. I’ve worked with 3 other AFL clubs as well and it’s been very interesting to observe the importance of communication skills on the success of professional sporting clubs.

  For example, Hawthorn Football Club is regularly referred to as the ‘most professional’ club in the competition. But this didn’t just happen. That branding was consciously created. And it’s part of the reason they have been so successful over the last 8 years. Let’s have a look at how it works…