Speaking Up: Surviving Executive Presentations
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About this ebook
If you are in middle management, to get anything done you must present your ideas to decision makers, and those presentations can be brutal. The stakes are high—one presentation can make or break a career—but the rules are utterly unclear. Tactics and techniques that work well with peers, subordinates, and immediate supervisors can actually work against you when presenting up the chain.
Speaking Up is an indispensable resource for anyone who needs to know how to present to those at the highest levels. Psychologist and coach Frederick Gilbert offers revelatory insights into the minds of the men and women at the top—information that is crucial to understanding what they’re looking for from presenters. Based on ten years of research and hundreds of interviews, Speaking Up features extensive comments from executives explaining exactly what they want and don’t want in a presentation and includes nine chapters containing QR codes for free videos on the chapter topics. This is a must-read book for surviving high-stakes meetings.
“I wish I had access to these insights when I was on the other side of the table. Now I will recommend this book to my entire management team.”
—John Kispert, CEO, Spansion
“Speaking Up is to presentations what the Boy Scout motto is to life: be prepared.”
—Todd Lutwak, Partner, Andreessen Horowitz, and former Vice President of Seller Experience, eBay
“Impressive in its breadth and yet very much ‘on point.’”
—Don Eilers, Managing Director, Vanguard Ventures
“Speaking Up has outstanding insights for successful presentations not only in the boardrooms of corporate America but also in the briefing rooms within the Department of Defense.”
—Winston Copeland, Jr., President, WWC Consulting, and Rear Admiral, US Navy (Retired)
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Book preview
Speaking Up - Frederick Gilbert
Speaking Up®
Surviving Executive Presentations
Speaking Up®
Surviving Executive Presentations
Frederick Gilbert
Speaking Up
Copyright © 2013 by Frederick Gilbert
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed Attention: Permissions Coordinator,
at the address below.
Ordering information for print editions
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at the Berrett-Koehler address above.
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Berrett-Koehler and the BK logo are registered trademarks of Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
First Edition
Paperback print edition ISBN 978-1-60994-896-2
PDF e-book ISBN 978-1-60994-901-3
IDPF e-book ISBN 978-1-60994-902-0
2013-1
Cover design: Nicole Hayward
For Mary McGlynn whose belief in this project and in me has made it all possible.
Contents
Foreword
Preface
Introduction
PART I The People at the Top
1 Clueless
2 Life at the Top
PART II Survival Tactics at the C-Level
3 The Seven Deadly Challenges
4 Time Cut: A $30,000/Hour Investment
5 Disengaged Executives: It’s You or the Smartphones
6 Food Fights: You Are Not the Referee
7 Decision Maker Leaves: Reading the Room
8 Topic Change: Time to Improvise
9 Side Talk: Keeping Your Poise
10 The Energetic Discussion: Less Talking and More Listening
PART III Creating Winning Executive Presentations
11 Content + Facilitation + Listening + Improv = Success
12 Public Speaking Unplugged
13 Delivery Style
14 I Really Did Give a Damn!
PART IV Career and Personal Advice from the Top
15 Parents, Mentors, and Role Models: Looking Over the Pickle Barrel
16 Career Challenges
17 Career Advice
18 Legacy
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Glossary
References
Endnotes
Index
About the Author
FIGURES
2.1 Authority Attitude Chart
2.2 Executive Presence
2.3 Executive Backgrounds
4.1 PREP Model
11.1 Deep Listening
11.2 Risk Assessment Curve
12.1 Presentation Framework
12.2 Data Dump vs. Executive Model
12.3 The 10/30 Rule
12.4 The Big Seven
12.5 Different Processing Styles
12.6 Stories vs. Data
13.1 Style Hierarchy
TABLES
12.1 Types of Business Presentations
12.2 Senior Executive Presentations Are Different!
Foreword
Over the course of my career, I have spent more than my fair share of time with other executives as we listened to woefully unprepared speakers drive staff productivity in the wrong direction. These speakers surely wanted to help our productivity, competitiveness, and bottom line—but they didn’t. Senior management appreciates speakers who immediately get to the point with well-vetted information delivered in a concise manner. Failing that wastes time, and time is our most precious resource.
Between the covers of this book, you have actionable solutions to this problem. If you are an executive, sell these ideas in your organization. Meetings will become more productive. If you are in middle management, this book will help you succeed in those high-stakes, high-stress meetings where so much hangs in the balance, not the least of which may be your career.
I believe that leaders are born not made. The challenge of senior people is to identify those leaders rather than trying to create them.
In identifying future leaders, I look at how people communicate as one indicator of their leadership skill set. The ones that have those communication skills baked in
have these three ingredients as part of their management DNA:
Content—They are able to get to the point immediately, knowing the value of time in a roomful of executive decision makers.
Visual Aids—They understand that PowerPoint slides are not the focal point of the meeting. They know we want a discussion about an important topic, not a monologue and slide show.
Improvisation—They are flexible by nature. When business reality demands that they be light on their feet, they improvise and create something new in a heartbeat.
In addition to these three communication skills, people who rise to the top levels at places like Sun Microsystems are able to manage a room full of bright, competitive, time-pressured executives with ease. Somehow, when things get off track or conflicts erupt, they know how to refocus the group and get us to a decision.
They understand that senior leadership wrestles with much bigger issues than just their department demands. Almost as second nature, they listen to the conflicts and issues around the table and summarize what they hear, creating a sense of trust. That trust tells me these are natural leaders.
Through his interviews with top-level executives from a wide variety of companies, Rick Gilbert has shined a light on the nature of these skills. This remarkable book breaks these highly sophisticated communication skills into learnable units. With the amazing insights of both the executives and the midlevel managers profiled in the book, you will learn how to present at top-level meetings. The executives will see you as a natural leader.
This book would have been useful for many of the people who presented to me over my career, but of course, it had not been written yet. Now it has been. You can cut years off your leadership learning curve by applying these skills.
Scott McNealy
Founder and former CEO of Sun Microsystems
Chairman of Wayin
Preface
"For middle management, our quarterly board meetings are terrifying events. Every three months this hallway is lined with people in black suits with their presentations clutched in their hands and panic in their eyes, said our tour guide at the Atlanta, Georgia world headquarters of the Coca-Cola Company. She added,
The tension is so high, I stay away from here on those days."
If you are in middle management, you live with daily ambiguity, lack of control, and even chaos. To get anything done, you must present your ideas to people up the chain, and those presentations can be brutal. Careers and projects can come unwound in a matter of minutes if the presenter doesn’t know the rules at the top level. Your people depend on you being successful so that you will bring home the bacon.
Although you may be confident speaking at your own level, as you go up the organization, your confidence can crumble knowing that the stakes are higher, and at the same time, the rules are very different from day-to-day presentations. What are these rules? That is what this book is about.
The good news is, the rules are simple and easy to learn: 1) know the people; 2) get to the point; and 3) improvise. Unfortunately a staggeringly high number of mid-level people (67%, actually) march right into top-level meetings and shoot themselves in the foot by: 1) not saying what they want at the beginning; 2) having too many PowerPoint slides; and 3) rigidly sticking to their scripts. This is a formula for career suicide.
We’ve researched this topic for the past ten years, interviewing C-level executives, and getting input from literally hundreds of mid-level managers. The strategies you will learn in this book come directly from the executives who tell you exactly what to do to be successful in those high stakes meetings. In addition, this material has been road tested
in hundreds of classes. We get feedback constantly from graduates who tell us stories of deals won and careers enhanced when they applied the principles you are about to learn.
We teach classes on this topic, both live and web-based. We also offer an award winning (Brandon Hall Gold Excellence in Learning) in-depth, on-demand, self-paced course called Speaking Up®: Presenting to Executives that streams to your computer. This book is interconnected with that video program. On the last page of some of the chapters you will notice a QR tag. If your smartphone or tablet has a QR tag scanning app, you can go right to the videos that are the foundation of our Speaking Up® online program. Some we’ve found that work well are: i-nigma (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/i-nigma-qr-code-data-matrix/id388923203?mt=8) and Microsoft tag (http://tag.microsoft.com/download.aspx). There are lots of other free QR tag readers. Find the one that works best with your device.
For more information about our programs, please visit our web page: www.powerspeaking.com.
Finally, as this book is going to press, the European and United States’ debt crises promise to make our economic future uncertain at best, and catastrophic at worst. This book is about the skills that C-level executives told us will keep careers on track because they help their corporations be more competitive. Obviously, Speaking Up® communication skills are not the be all and end all of a successful career, but having them will surely be a success factor as you keep your boat afloat in the choppy waters ahead.
I hope you enjoy this book and find it helpful.
Rick Gilbert
rick@powerspeaking.com
1-650-631-8459
Introduction
I started PowerSpeaking, Inc. in 1985 to teach people how to make winning, career-building business presentations with confidence. Because the demand for these skills is huge, our company has been very successful. Our trainings provide excellent tools for people who present to their own departments, to subordinates, and to peers. By the early 2000s, however, I started hearing horror stories from mid-level managers about the terror they felt when presenting to senior-level management. Top-level meetings clearly require a different approach. One of our clients learned this lesson the hard way when he had a complete meltdown at a C-level meeting.
No Stories! Fire Gilbert!
Matt was a PowerSpeaking® graduate and a vice president of IT at a $3 billion Silicon Valley company. Preparing for a presentation to the founders and top officers of his company, he came to me for one-on-one presentation coaching. I drilled him on the importance of using stories to connect with his audience and to create long term retention of his core message. The research is crystal clear that stories are more powerful than data in this regard.¹
In his own departmental meetings, Matt had used storytelling successfully. A major problem occurred, though, when, following my advice, he tried the same approach in his quarterly presentation to the executive staff. A few minutes into Matt’s story to illustrate one of his key points, the COO bellowed, Where the hell are you going with this? Get to the point!
Matt’s response reverted to childhood and made matters worse. Looking plaintively at the COO, he stammered, Well, Rick Gilbert, the presentation coach you sent me to, told me to use stories.
Matt seemed to be looking for approval from a stern father. But instead of approval, the COO yelled, Well, fire Gilbert and get on with it.
It was a bad day for Matt and a bad day for me.
As the speech coach who had just been fired, I called the COO to find out what had gone wrong. I told him about the research showing that stories move people more than data, and that stories aid in retention. I will never forget his blunt response, We don’t have time for stories, and I don’t care about retention. We have to get the next agenda item on the table, make a decision, then move on.
Suddenly a light bulb went on above my head. It was instantly clear that what works in most presentation situations can cost you your job in higher-level meetings. That conversation with the COO literally changed our business from that day to this.
Different Rules at the Top
Since that eye-opening exchange with Matt’s COO, we have been studying the dynamics of senior-level meetings. Like cultural anthropologists, we set out to explore the unique set of rules in this strange land referred to as the C-suite.
We asked questions, such as: How can major projects and successful careers fall apart in a matter of moments at a senior meeting? Conversely, how does one become a corporate hero in the C-level meeting room?
To find the answers, we conducted in-depth, video-based interviews with 22 C-level executives. They shared priceless insights about how to survive and even thrive in the often brutal life at the top levels of corporate America. What they revealed, although not exactly secret, is generally unknown in the lower ranks. This explains why so many mid-level managers fail when presenting to C-level executives.
OneID CEO Steve Kirsch being interviewed
In short, the insights these high-ranking executives shared will help you avoid presentation pitfalls and boost your professional standing in the process. Now let’s meet our senior executives.
Greg Ballard
SVP, Warner Brothers
Ned Barnholt
Chairman, KLA-Tencor
Steve Blank
Founder, Former CEO, Epiphany
Robert Drolet
Brig. General (Retired), Former Defense Industry Executive
Dan Eilers
General Partner, Vanguard Ventures, Former CEO, Claris Corporation
Doris Engibous
Board Member, Natus Corporation, Former CEO, Hemosphere, Inc.
Anna Eshoo
Member, U.S. Congress California’s 14th District
Harold Fethe
VP, Anacor Pharmaceuticals
Ginger Graham
Board Member, Walgreens, Former CEO, Amylin Pharmaceuticals
Vern Kelley
SVP, Intersil Corporation
Steve Kirsch
CEO, OneID
John Kispert
CEO, Spansion, Inc.
Bryan Lamkin
CEO, Clover Network, Former SVP, Yahoo, Inc.
Mark Leslie
Founder, Former CEO, Veritas Software
Mike Lyons
Venture Partner, Paladin Group, Associate Professor, Stanford University
Audrey MacLean
Co-Founder, NET, Former CEO, Adaptive, Associate Professor, Stanford University
Felicia Marcus
Western Director, Natural Resources Defense Council, Former Regional Administrator, EPA
Corinne Nevinny
General Partner, LMNVC
Brenda Rhodes
Chairman and CEO, InTouch Communications
Jane Shaw
Chairman, Intel