Monthly Archives: June 2012

Ending Your Speeches With a Drum Roll

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By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to end your speeches more emphatically. Reading time: 4:54.

            Those two words, powerful on the lips of every effective leader at the end of a project, are powerless at the end of a speech. That’s why the most effective leaders find a more powerful, more productive and more permeating way to conclude a speech.

      They drive toward their conclusion in high gear– with an attitude! Not a platitude (albeit politicians who can’t resist blessing America).  Maybe that’s why of the 217 speeches listed in William Safires’s anthology:  Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History, only seven conclude with “Thank you.”

     Indeed, effective speakers leave their audiences thinking the way effective comedians leave their audiences laughing. Consider these different ways of leaving your audience thinking:

            If you were concluding a speech on the importance of embracing change, you could say:

      “Our tomorrows need new and different solutions today. We have to recall the insight of President Abraham Lincoln on the brink of the Civil War. Lincoln said,

   ‘The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate for the stormy present and future,
as our circumstances are new, we must think anew and  act anew.” Continue reading →

Oooops: Making Mistakes in Judgement

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By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to build your self-confidence in spite of your mistakes.

             So you made a mistake and now you’re feeling bad. Well cheer up! If misery loves company, you’ve got plenty of company in the mistake department  Even Albert Einstein and Thomas Edison and Aristotle made snap judgements that were less than buttoned down:

               Einstein said in 1932– 13 years before the advent of nuclear energy –that  there is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will be obtainable. (Ooops!).

Edison said that no one would ever use alternating current. (Ooops!).

And Aristotle said it was absurd to think that wind was really air in motion. (Ooops!).

          The most effective leaders I know make mistakes. After all, mistakes come with the territory when you lead.  If you weren’t making mistakes, you wouldn’t be leading the new and different. You would be following the proven and sound.

         Considers these classic mistakes in judgement across various disciplines.  In business: Western Union, labeling the new invention a “toy”, turned down the rights to the telephone in 1878. (Ooops!).

 IBM Chairman Thomas J. Watson in 1943 said that there was a world market for only five computers. .(Ooops!) And in 1978
Digital Equipment Corporation’s president Ken Olsen said there was no reason that any individual should have a computer in their home.” (Ooops!). Continue reading →

Investing Together in a Mutual Trust Fund

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By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to establish more trust in your relationships. Reading time: 3:03.

           The executive director showed up unexpectedly at the summer camp his organization sponsored. He made the rounds, inspected the facilities and noted the cracked window, the torn screen and the dirty walls.

        Then the executive confronted the camp director with the infractions. In a few hours the camp facilities were back in working order.

        Meanwhile on the other side of the lake, the executive director of another sponsoring organization showed up unexpectedly at their summer camp. She made no rounds. There was no inspection.

        She visited with the camp director and then together they walked randomly through the camp grounds without any predetermined itinerary to visit briefly with other counselors.

     The facilities were in good working order. No cracked windows. No torn screens. No dirty walls.

        To get good performance, leaders don’t have to inspect it. They EXPECT it. Continue reading →

Breaking Through Dams on the River of Understanding

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By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to help you become even more influential. Reading time: 3:01.

        You are the subject-matter expert in your company, the sharpest saw in the shed in your field. Yet every time you try saw through a concept with a customer, those BLOCKHEADS seem to get thicker and thicker. What can you do to help your audience’s soak up your message more fully?

Hoover Dam

      Stop sawing. Start watering.

     Turn your faucet of information on slowly, watering only when the customer says they are thirsty. Yet too often over-zealous experts are too quick to flood their audiences with information.

     And audiences are even quicker to build a dam to protect them from those flood waters.

     But a particular audience will open its dam if it believes the speaker’s water (i.e. message) will flow into its own stream.

    Audiences will open their dams if they think your water will fill – and more significantly FULFILL—their own personal pipelines — without polluting their values, beliefs and concerns already flowing in their personal streams of consciousness.

     You can influence your audience to soak up your message when you recognize that the meaning of the word “influence” stems from the the Latin to “flow into.”

     When you influence others, you flow into their feelings so fully that they can be move to purposeful action, as James MacGregor Burns notes in his Pulitzer-Prize winning book on Leadership.

     Continue reading →

Sharpening Your Vulnerabilty on Elephant Tusks

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By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to enhance your sense of interdependence. Reading time: 2:10.

             You just got that big job, that promotion, that major account. And now you are feeling on top of the world. Invincible. You are the King or Queen of the corporate jungle. Hear ME roar!

         Hear ME roar! Like an elephant: the largest living land animal on earth with no natural predator.

       Hear ME roar! Like an elephant- a 10 to 12-ton weapon used in war during the Roman Empire.

     Hear ME roar! Like an elephant  wielding a trunk with more than 50,000 muscles that can suck up to 15 quarts of water at a time.

     So huge. So strong. So unconquerable. And yet so vulnerable.

     So vulnerable that an elephant’s skin is very sensitive to insects in key spots like behind the ears. So vulnerable that the elephant’s best friend in the jungle is the egret — a small bird that rides on the back of an elephant eating flies and other insects that “bug” the elephant’s sensitive ears.

        The elephant and an egret  are reputed to be Mother Nature’s Odd couple. They feed off each others’ vulnerabilities that  counter-intuitively makes both stronger.

      Continue reading →