The How of WOW

A Guide to Giving a Speech That Will Positively Blow ‘Em Away

Author: Tony Carlson
Pub Date: 2007
Your Price: $24.95
ISBN: 0814472516
Format: Hardcover

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Chapter 8: Find the Hook

There's an energy that crackles through the room when you approach the podium to speak. The same kind of energy that fills a theater when the curtain rises. It's a moment of expectation, of anticipation, perhaps of some drama. It is not a moment to waste with conventional pleasantries. It is a time when the audience is most open to the speaker. It is your moment to hook them with an indelible first impression, like a Top 40 pop song that grabbed your teenaged heart.

So even before writing a word, it pays to spend a lot of time figuring out your hook. Your nervousness and the audience's anticipation are both human emotions. It is the perfect moment to respond with a hook that sets itself right in the imaginative center of your listeners' brains.

There are numerous ways to make that connection. In this chapter, we look at half a dozen.

The Story Hook

A properly written news story is shaped like an inverted triangle. The most important, weightiest facts go at the top of the story. Then the second most important, then the third, and so on down to the bottom of the story. It's done this way because, in daily newspapers, writers and editors are never sure until the last minute how much space they'll have to fill. Often, if the space for the story turns out to be smaller than the story is long, an inverted-triangle model makes it easy just to lop off the last couple of sentences or paragraphs to make the story fit. No harm done, as the most important part, the lead of the story, is still intact at the top.

The classic model of a speech has been likened to a set of bookends: strong and broad at the start and finish, with a bunch of stuff in the middle. In other words, there's a strong start; a middle that proves the start; and a strong finish that reiterates the start. Whoever came up with this classic model had one thing right: People do tend to remember the first thing a speaker says and the last. So why don't the bookends work?

Because the second bookend is the same as the first. You've heard it all before, not twenty minutes ago. What's more, because everybody does it, you know you've heard it before so you can, without guilt, nod off or check your BlackBerry for e-mail and instant messages as you kill time till the next session. In fact, I tend to think of the classic model as a circle-you end up where you started, no further along the road. And what's the point of running in circles?

That's why I advocate a speech model that looks more like this:

It's the classic story-telling arc, building in interest and involvement from the opening till the climax. The curtain doesn't open with the stage strewn with dead bodies. It opens with the introduction of a problem and the people who must confront this crisis. And as the actors deal with the challenge in various ways, they take the audience with them, inveigling them little by little to participate, even if just intellectually or emotionally. The tension rises as complications appear. The connection between watcher and watched strengthens until the resolution is reached. If it's a tragedy, most if not all of the star-crossed characters are dead, and we're supposed to feel a sense of catharsis, cleansed by having gone through the trauma. If it's a comedy, the boy does get the girl, laughter ensues, and a life of picket fences and darling babies beckons.

In truth, in a first-rate story, the curve is never as smooth as this. There are sharp inclines as tension mounts, and plateaus as everyone, hero and reader, catches his or her collective breath, then on to the next complication, then breather, then complication, till at last you get the resolution. But always, always, the momentum is building, not stopping to review what you already know, not heading back to where you began, but moving inexorably toward a new, higher plain.

The Power of Story

Story-telling is the most common form of entertainment. But it is also the most effective way we humans have yet devised to teach (or to learn, depending on your perspective). Its roots are impeccable. Look at one of history's greatest teachers, a fellow named Jesus, from Nazareth. Regardless of what faith you follow, if any, you cannot escape the fact that this man, through the power of his stories, has had an enormous impact on the shape of our world. His life story is an integral part of the Christian calendar: his lowly birth in humble surroundings of poor but proud craftsmen parents; his tempestuous youth, rebelling against the economic power brokers of the day; his show-stopping events, from turning water into wine to raising the dead and feeding the multitudes with a couple of bonefish and some bread. We have his mature philosophy-theology, call it what you will- and the inevitable, fatal clash with the political authorities; then the miraculous dénouement-the ascension-and the basis of a faith that has enraptured billions of people for more than two millennia. Apocryphal or not, there's no denying it's a great story, as a newspaper person might say.

Then look at the way Jesus taught, the way he enlisted support. Certainly, he lived the way he preached, and that is a powerful attractor, a brand builder par excellence. But primarily he was a story teller, and the parables he told are woven into the fabric of our lives, at least in the West: the sower and the seed, the prodigal son, the house built on rock or on sand. This last one has its echo in one of the earliest stories many of us hear as children-the Big Bad Wolf and the Three Little Pigs and their houses made of sticks, straw, or brick.

And that is the point. From our earliest stirrings as cognitive beings-that is, creatures who can react not only to physical stimuli but also to abstract ideas-we learn the lessons of life, we absorb the values of our culture through stories. Stories form the basis of our myriad faiths. Stories tell of the history of our secular communities. Stories illuminate our own ancestral roots. Stories are the most fundamental method by which we begin to make sense of our world. They help define who we are and what we think, what ideas we reject, what causes we support.

What's more, stories are the basis of most of our entertainment even in the multimedia universe of our entertainment today. Television, the movies, live theater-they're all story-telling media. X-box games are story driven. Much of the content of the Internet likewise, as billions of chatroom users and Web site owners seek to attract some eyeballs to their own stories. Certainly there are people who live for the pure gore and mayhem of a Kill Bill, the special effects of a Matrix (pick a version), or the visceral bang and crash of a Monster truck rally. But most people who don't wear their baseball caps backwards actually respond more readily-and more indelibly-to the plot thread that ties the explosions together. Why do you think the world of professional wrestling, and I use the words loosely, is less about mano-a-mano in the classic Greek sense of the sport and more about cartoon characters in the flesh following broad plotlines that are simple variations on ages-old morality plays? Whatever else he may be, Vince McMahon is surely a wizard of a marketer. He gets people, millions of people, to suspend their disbelief and buy into his world vision. And he knows he needs the story to make the connection.

Does it not follow, then, that modeling a speech after the structure of a story might just be an effective way to connect with the audience? Yet you rarely, if ever see it. And that's a shame, because it can really work.

Some years ago, I was lucky enough to do a couple of assignments for an executive who had figured this out. I was called in by the PR staff of Xerox Canada to prepare a speech for their new CEO. It was the first time this subsidiary had had a female CEO, the staff said, and they wanted to capitalize on that, given the egalitarian tenor of the times. Plus they really wanted to hit heavily on the fact that Xerox was changing its name, putting its new slogan ahead of the name: The Document Company-Xerox. The PR staff, thinking they were being helpful, sent me a thick package of background material, including a draft outline that emphasized the corporate messaging strategy: times of change; female leader; new name putting what we do ahead of what we're called. Yada, yada, yada.

Then I met with the executive, clearly a focused and driven woman, but one who understood the need to make a connection with those she spoke to, both one to one, and one to many. She was gracious in meeting me, and when I suggested we go over the draft outline, she was a step ahead of me: "Let's put it aside for now, and just talk about this idea I have." So she talked and I listened, and scribbled notes as fast as I could. She talked of her own story, of coming from modest roots and working hard to accomplish great things. But she talked with just as much passion about the Xerox story. And those are literally the words she used: the Xerox story.

She drew a vivid picture of this large and successful company that near the end of the 1970s had essentially fallen asleep at the switch. And in doing so, it had been overtaken by offshore competitors who were putting better products on the market for much less than Xerox could. Market share had eroded. Financial losses followed, investor confidence wavered. An unhappy trend that was building momentum until the company admitted its myopia, changed its way of thinking and operating, and recreated itself.

It is in that context, she said after talking for twenty minutes, that we have renamed our company. And in this story is a lesson for others who spend too much time reading their good reviews and not enough looking ahead at what's coming at them over the horizon.

"You have just," I said, "given your speech." And she agreed. I transcribed my notes. She made a few tweaks, and we were done. We had the Xerox parable. And here is how we connected as we got into the meat of the speech, after a bit of buttering up the audience:

The '90s arrived about 15 years ago at Xerox-and we weren't ready.

Refreshing, even radical candor. A stark, unmodified statement that said, "Listen up. This is not going to be your usual corporate babble."

We had literally invented a better mousetrap-the plain paper copier-and spent the '60s and '70s basking in the shortsighted kudos of Wall Street. We grew fat on the industry we'd created, selling all we could at whatever price we set.

But we weren't paying attention to what was happening outside our self-imposed boundaries. We were so happy simply reproducing our success that we did nothing to capitalize on other inventions that came out of our labs-little things like personal computers, the mouse, graphical user interface.

You might have heard of them-but not with a Xerox name on them.

Not only confession, here, but "Gee-I-didn't-know-that" information. You could see a real spike in the interest level in the audience when she talked about those little-known facts.

We were so busy counting our paper profits that we failed to read the Sayonara message in our Japanese fortune cookies. Until one year our profit dropped by $1 billion, overnight, and we realized that in just five years, the Japanese had gone from zero to 40 percent market share in the industry that we had created.

A Xerox lifer, the executive shared her sense of bewilderment with the audience, inviting them to experience the lost-in-the-barrens feeling Xerox executives must have gone through at the time. Then, to bring it home, she got specific:

They were selling their machines for what it cost us to make ours. Our benchmarks were not even in the same league. Our product lead time was twice theirs; we had ten times the assembly line rejects they did; and nine times the number of suppliers. . . .

The open kimono laid bare the problem for everyone in the room. And everyone could relate. From this nadir, the executive started to build toward a happy ending, for in a speech you pretty much always want a happy ending. She talked of a relentless focus on quality, a redefinition of what Xerox was selling-not copiers but document management. It was similar to Henry Ford's story. He didn't sell cars, he used to say. He sold mobility, freedom for everyman.

That Xerox speech was so successful for this executive that she repeated it in variations for months. From her perspective, it was a great return on her investment, both financially and in terms of building her personal brand and support for the new identity of her company. It was a story her audience of senior executives could relate to. It was also a story she could sell convincingly, because it was her story. She had lived through the tough times herself and could talk with authenticity about the impact. "I was there" not only gets attention, it commands respect.

That is not to say that only first-person stories are useful. Far from it. The great thing about stories is that you can usually find one that fits virtually any audience. Some have universal appeal because, in their simplicity, they capture some essence of what it is to be a human being, part of a larger world.

Know the Facts . . . but Tell the Story

One of the key tricks to connecting through story-telling is to recognize that facts are not intrinsically interesting or particularly illuminating. Someone has to marshal those facts, put context around them, link them with a narrative, in order for them to be memorable.

Think of it this way. People spend more time reading biographies and novels than they do reading almanacs or tidal tables. Why? Because the story knits together facts-and sometimes fancy-in a pattern that is more easily digested and internalized by the human brain. Many novels are brimful of facts, but they're presented as important drivers of place, atmosphere, character, or plot. They are not the end, but a means.

Yet speakers often will present lists of facts as if this somehow creates a memorable image in the audience's mind. "Here's our Revenue. Here's our EBITDA and, of course, our Free Cash Flow." Doesn't work for me. Begs a big "So what?" Needs a narrative around it to put those numbers in context.

This is not to say that speakers should eschew facts. Far from it. Rather it is to say that facts, especially numbers, are great to illuminate a point, but almost never are they the point. Speakers may think they're imparting material of great substance because their speech is packed with lists of facts. In fact, those lists can quickly get an audience flipping through the program to see who's next. Just remember, there's a place for a telephone book, but it isn't in a speech.

Remember, too, that different people relate in different ways to statistics. And most people have no idea how big a billion really is. So your job is to humanize the data. We know, for instance, that there are more than 400,000 tobacco-related premature deaths in the U.S. every year. Big number, but how big? Well, it's your job to connect that cold hard fact with an indelible image, and which image you choose depends on your audience demographic. For some people of a certain age, you could say that's like having the whole unwashed human mass at the first Woodstock wiped from the face of the earth. For others, frequent fliers especially, it's like having three fully-loaded 747s crash every day for a full year. Or maybe there's a city of 400,000-plus in the vicinity; imagine that as a city of the dead. There are lots of ways to imprint the image on the collective brain of the audience. To bring the fact to life; to help tell your story.

The Metaphorical Hook

Being memorable from the first moment you open your mouth means plugging into the imaginative power of the audience. An image, not a picture, is worth 10,000 words. For example, when I was very little my parents read me the story of Robin Hood from a big chapter book with no pictures. From the words alone, I developed a strong mental picture of what Robin and Little John, and especially Maid Marian, looked like. In fact, I think I had a tiny little crush on Robin's love interest, whom I saw as a raven-haired beauty not unlike Maureen O'Sullivan of Tarzan movie fame.

Imagine my excitement, then, when word came of Robin Hood, the television series. Much was made of the star, some actor I'd not heard of then-or since-but my eager anticipation was focused almost entirely on Maid Marian. Imagine, too, my disappointment to see that the actress was some bleached blonde, not at all in the image that I had conjured up for myself.

I've experienced that same sinking feeling many times now as the images I conjure in my mind while reading consistently differ from-and are usually better than-what I see when the book is translated to screen. This doesn't apply just to starlets, or even people. Often, it's the on-screen physical setting that jars my senses. Call me a dreamer, but I believe that's a pretty common experience.

There's no question that a wonderful photograph can have an impact far greater than any 10,000 words. The single man confronting the Tiananmen Square tanks comes to mind. Marilyn Monroe's dress billowing over the air vent, too. But I haven't seen too many business photos that stay in my memory.

The fact is that the theaters of our minds are often much richer, and certainly much more personal, than the theaters of the local multiplex. And a good speaker can use that common experience to create powerful, personalized images in the minds of the audience-images that are compelling enough in themselves to make the speech memorable.

Take this example. One day my boss called me into his office to discuss an important speech he had to deliver a few weeks hence. Now this was the corner office on the top floor of the nine-story suburban head office of a major telecommunications equipment manufacturer. Although the building was beside a sixteen-lane highway and across from an international airport, it was the first structure in a new commercial park and was therefore still surrounded by cornfields.

My boss and I chatted for a minute or two about the opportunity and what general theme he might want to pursue. Relatively quickly, he decided he wanted to address the issue that technology was getting too complex for people to understand. His take was that although telecommunications technology was getting more and more complex, its main purpose was to make life simpler by making it easier for people to stay in touch with one another. Simplicity out of complexity.

That's a great theme, and one that remains relevant in a world of convergent communications technologies some 15 years later. It was a theme, too, that included the submessage that since our company had a good idea of what was happening at the 50,000-foot level, we'd also be the best option for operating down in the trenches where the machines were built and the connections made.

Without doubt, it was a somewhat complex and ethereal theme. We agreed that we needed to capture it in a way that made it instantly and intuitively obvious so that the audience would understand not only what was happening in technology but also see that we were the best people to deliver on its promise. In short, we needed a hook, and for fifteen minutes or so we kicked around some ideas, none of which caught fire for either of us.

Then, as people do when they're stuck for ideas or something to say, we both happened to look out the window at the same time. And there, not twenty feet from the pane of glass, with wings outstretched, hovered a beautiful adult red-tailed hawk, soaring on the updraft of the west wind that swooshed across the expanse of the airport till it hit our building. The hawk's piercing black eyes were tightly focused on the field some ninety feet below him until, with an almost imperceptible dip of one wing, he was off, shooting down to the ground where, with talons extended, he swooped once, emerging with a dumbstruck-and doomed-field mouse.

The boss and I looked at each other in one of those Eureka! moments and said, "That's it. That's our hook." It was the biological complexity of the hawk-its different systems for sight, mobility, snatching-all coming together to make simpler the fundamental need to hunt for food. In the same way, complex telephony technology was coming together to make simpler the fundamental human need to communicate.

Talk about a common experience. Who hasn't watched a hawk making lazy circles in the sky as it hunts? Who can't instantly conjure up in the mind's eye the image of a bird of prey? We took it as a sign and built the speech around that metaphor, although we changed the hawk to a falcon since the word hawk still had some negative post-Vietnam's connotations. But that didn't matter. The image would remain the same in the audience's perception, whether falcon, hawk, or eagle. Whatever the individual's perception, it would have the essential elements of the theme: intricacy, power, simplicity of purpose.

We didn't need a slide with the picture of a hawk on it; in fact, I would argue that a slide would have made the image less compelling, imposing an external definition on an image that was more powerful if it remained in the mind's eye of each listener. For years people who had seen the speech, or read it after, referred to it as the "Falcon speech." It was an image that caught in their memory and, as long as it was there, there was a chance that they would remember at least the speaker, if not his theme.

Another example, same industry, different speaker. This time, the boss wanted a fresh take on convergence, and especially the synergies that the convergence of various communications technologies would bring to people in general. Again, part of his objective was to calm the fears of technophobes who saw the evolution of various technologies as in some way threatening to their comfortable way of life.

Now there are no greater clichés in the technology industry than "convergence" and "synergy." So this executive's desire was to find some new way to talk about these concepts, which, although trite, were nonetheless true and gaining in prominence virtually every day. So we wracked our brains and came up empty, until, that is, we considered the time of year and the venue.

The speech was to be made in December. The venue was Ottawa, which is, except for Moscow, the coldest national capital in the world. The weather in Ottawa, they say, is ten months of snow and ice and two months of lousy sledding. What do you need in Ottawa in winter? Comfort food. What's a good comfort food? Stew. What's stew? A conglomeration of different foods all boiled up together into a meal that is greater than the sum of its parts-convergence and synergy. Voila! A common experience that conjured up an image that fit every part of the theme.

So with a few words, you can establish an immediate rapport with your audience, not just a laugh thanks to another golf joke, but a true connection based on a shared human experience. And that's a big step toward being memorable.

© 2005 Anthony Carlson.
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