What makes a great speaker?

Essence is the key!

Recently I sat having coffee with two very smart fellows. The afternoon was very enjoyable as an open conversation covering events, speakers, bureau's ensued. It was of those discussions where each individual was completely respectful, listening intently and not jumping in. On that score alone I was having a ball.

One of the gentlemen who was a speaker of some reputation asked me how I would describe a great speaker.

Before I go on tell you what my response was, perhaps I had better explain how I came to own and run a Speaker's Bureau and a Speaker's Management company.

Like many who have failed at there first entrepreneurial venture, I was no exception. We only lost everything....

While my friends were busy buying houses, having children and climbing the corporate ladder, I was out chasing a dream. The Dispensary Theatre Restaurant in Newtown opened in 1994 and closed its doors in 1997 In that time I had produced hundreds of shows, managed talent, booked acts, speakers, MC's, entertained corporates such as Glaxo Welcome, rubbed shoulders with stars of stage, screen and TV, wrote, directed and produced three major musicals, ran the restaurant, built the sets for the shows, costume designed, delivered and won sponsorship proposals, cleaned, cooked, served, leading a team of inspired artists, musicians and others who anted a slice of the action. My God! It was the hardest I had ever worked and I loved it!

Phew....well as I said we only lost everything and that is another story which will be told in time.

Licking my wounds I searched the positions vacant column. I was hired as an outbound telemarketer for a large IT company, I needed to do something and IT was the in thing. I did not know the difference between a mouse or a keyboard, however four years later I was QLD State Manager (for a short time) I was doing 80 hours a week and commuting from Sanctuary Cove to Brisbane daily. I walked in one day and handed my car keys and all other debris one collects from having a high paid position and said "stick it". There is more to the story but for brevity's sake lets move on....

Michelle and I had moved to Queensland to self educate ourselves, we were going to find a business and return to Sydney to build it. We did not know what at the time.....

The big mistake we made the first time was going into business with out any idea of the basics, like so many entrepreneurs do at their peril.

We were reading and studying at home with a voracious appetite and started goal setting, visualisation, listening to CD's. Our unit was very much a study. We were absolutely determined to go back to Sydney and have another crack. We started attending conferences and watching speakers from all over the world and from Australia. We were like sponges and desperate to attract the right stuff, people, things into our life to get back to what we knew we supposed to be, business owners.

We just loved watching speakers. We had found our passion, we were addicted to conferences and speakers. They were giving us so much. As they say when the students ready, the teacher appears. We were ready and hey presto!!!!!!!!!

Around that time I reacquainted myself with performance turnaround expert and one of the foremost golf coaches in the world, Lawrie Montague.

Lawrie asked me if I would like to start work for him, running his Golf Academies and booking his speaking engagements. I gladly accepted. That was where life seemed to start for us again. Before that it was never ending story of putting everything into our debts so we did not have to go bankrupt.

Not long after I commenced work with Mind on the Game, Lawrie gave me a book called Speak and Grow Rich by Dottie Walters to help me accustom myself to the industry. I was a good student and started doing what the Dottie suggested, I called the Bureau's and asked if I could get Lawrie on their books. Well............attitude!!!! I could not believe how short and disrespectful the response was from some of the biggest Bureau's in Australia. I remember thinking these guys cannot be happy with their jobs. In fact it was then that I realised there was a place in the industry for Michelle and I and we went about making our plans to own a Speakers Bureau. Around this time I was also invited to sit down and talk with Keith Abraham (incidentally, and if you get a chance to see him speak, he is one of the top 5 speakers I have ever seen in action.) I learnt much in a short time from Keith and he shared some awesome resources with me.

My time with Lawrie (3 years) was the most informative and empowering time of my life. The lessons I have learnt from him are at the forefront of my thinking.

Ok so we moved to Sydney in May 2011. I wanted to get a job at a Speaker's Bureau for 12 months to acquaint myself with the "who's who" in the industry. I did that much more easily than I thought and I am very grateful for the position and time I was allowed to spend with this strange folk.

So....while The Entertainers seemed to fly up over night, it had taken many years of study, visualisation, searching for our passion and hard work to make it happen. Nothing was going to stop us and we knew we had a winning formula. Treat Speakers with the respect they deserve and drive value and innovation to our customers.

Now...... back to what makes a great speaker.

While opinions on speakers are always varied at conferences or within the industry from one person to the next and to a large extent is a highly subjective view point, some speakers are just amazing.

So amazing that event the most cynical of people have to at least say, "yeah she/he was pretty good."

So what is it that stands these individuals out from the crowd?

My belief as to what that is can only be described as essence. The dictionary meaning is of essence is "The intrinsic nature or indispensable quality of something, esp. something abstract, that determines its character."

You could make a case certainly and say there are a number of elements that go into the creation of an outstanding keynote, some of those could be, reliability, personality, expertise, experience, passion, humour, and the list goes on...... boy does it go on.........

To take a line out the movie The Castle, "it's the vibe". Try as you will, coming up with a formula will even have the academics scratching there head. As I mentioned this is completely subjective and therefore impossible to quantify even by those who have been on the stage for many years.

I have witnessed hundreds of keynotes, there have been times where I have come out thinking OMG that was amazing, only to hear a comment "he/she was hopeless, what a waste of time". Go figure!

So when I am asked what makes a great speaker I answer "essence". To me this is the highest compliment we can pay to a speaker. It has taken a lifetime for them to hone their craft, work on their subject matter, promote themselves, study, fall over, get back up only to inspire us again and again again.

Indeed essence is the magic that we feel when we shake our head in disbelief at the brilliance of  Speakers.

POST FORMAL LEADERSHIP - what is it I hear you ask. This short document outlines the work being done by SpeakMark Leadership populist Earl de Blonville. 

www.speakmark.com.au

‘Is this the Dawn of Postformal Leadership?’
By Earl de Blonville, FRGS Doctoral Candidate School of Global, Urban and Social Studies RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
Abstract
In her latest book ‘The End of Leadership’, Founding Executive Director of the Harvard- Kennedy School’s Centre for Public Leadership, Professor Barbara Kellerman throws down a massive challenge to the world’s multi-billion dollar MBA ‘leadership industry’. In doing so she crystallizes for many other academics and practitioners a problem that was, like the elephant in the room, too big to ignore yet too scary to confront. If Kellerman and others are right about the need for root and branch change to our current global leadership paradigm, what does this mean for an all-pervasive leadership model that now affects government, healthcare and higher education, and is there anything better we can replace it with? This paper asks: ‘Is this really the end of leadership, or is it the dawn of postformal leadership?’
As background, I will introduce three looming and unavoidable global challenges that will not only unravel our view of leadership, but also the current corporate model with its pervasive influence that may not survive beyond this decade. After briefly discussing the old paradigm leadership model that grew out of the American military industrial complex and was underpinned by radical behaviourism, I will introduce a new humanistic approach to leadership that I call “postformal leadership.”
Postformal leadership draws on the 40-year-old field of US-based adult developmental psychology research on postformal reasoning. In recent years there has been a flurry of new-paradigm approaches to leadership, such as creative leadership, empathic leadership and integral leadership, to name but a few. Yet, to my knowledge there has not been to date a systematic examination of the implications of the adult developmental psychology research on postformal qualities and their relationship to leadership. It is this relationship that is the primary focus of my research as presented in this paper.
Keywords: Postformal, leadership, behaviourism, corporate model, adult developmental psychology, leadership industry.
Bio
Earl de Blonville FRGS is Australia’s pre-eminent Arctic explorer, a critically acclaimed author and filmmaker. He led Australia’s first Arctic expedition, with patron HRH The Prince of Wales, and has been a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society since 1984. Earl holds the Queen Elizabeth II Silver Jubilee Award and the rarely awarded Olegas Truchanas Expedition Award. His current doctoral research draws on lessons from 25 years of field expedition leadership, 12 years in C-Suite leadership coaching and recent ground research into Europe’s leadership future. His primary research into Postformal Leadership draws together balanced, nuanced and yet confronting insights for change that could revolutionize and liberate leadership globally.

The Innovation Generation -

Something had to give! What? You think this can go on forever without someone or something finding a better way to work with Speakers while giving the client a better deal..............

It often takes an individual, an outsider, a stranger to recognise that change is long over due. One who can point to a place  and say "THERE" that's where you can change it up!

I had an experience recently where I was talking to someone about The Entertainers and the work we do. I was relating to them that I did not just want to copy other Bureau models, I certainly did not want to contact 4000 speakers indiscriminately, post them onto a web site and wait for the SEO to kick in, get on the blower and tell everyone why we are the best, compete with more established agencies on the usual set of kpi's. In that world, it is all about image and very little to do with who you really are and what you are looking to achieve. Frankly I don't give a damn what other Bureau's or agencies think of The Entertainers, we are more concerned with serving two sets of very important people, Speakers and Clients.

I digress.....back to the story.....

While the person had never worked at a Speaker's Bureau , (Epiphany, I will call her) while young, had been in events for some time dealing with various agencies at a large PCO. After listening to her views on our industry I asked her what changes she would like to see when engaging with speakers. Her answers were remarkable, simple and made so much sense.  An avalanche of ideas ensued with the "ha ha" moment arriving just before we finished eating at Big Breaky in Petersham.

"I would love to tell you what that was, but .....I would have to kill you" so the saying goes. Different......yes.....confronting for some....absolutely.  Change is always hard to cop.

The old adage "why fix it if it is not broken" seems to be loosing it's grip in the brave new world of social media, data management platforms and a generation of young people who will just not cop what the last forty years or so has dished up. So get used to it Bucko! No doubt recycling will be a part of the shift, however the leaders of tomorrow are looking to make wholesale changes!!!!

In the Bureau/Agency space, if not this year then the next,  change, she is a coming! The landscape as we currently know it will be hardly recognisable in the future and you will have to more than to set up a a Facebook and Twitter account and post clever little hooks that everyone "likes"!  The nature of the beast predicts it, not me. The beast being the "innovation generation".

If you are listening to the up and coming leaders of tomorrow, one thing is clearly evident, they know there time will come, they are savvy, switched on and what I like is that they talk openly and freely about their ideas. "It's all about Apps' man! Why you trying that old school shit?""It's about mind share". and so on.....

What is hard for a traditional business owner to turn on to, (particularly if we are over 35 years of age) is the fundamental shift in the "head space" around how and why we do the things we do in business and more importantly to a new breed of entrepreneur, how that affects our lives and lives of the people we share the planet with. A noticeable and conscious effort to assimilate both elements into a meaningful experience which is for the greater good.  WOW!!!

While far from Utopia and certainly scattered with the usual suspects that life throws up, I believe the fertile ground for the "innovation generation" is a perfect foundation for massive change, which I embrace and welcome.

We have organised two focus groups to give some of these switched on young dudes a platform to express how they would "change it up" if they were at the helm.  We listen hard, let them speak, after all they are our future and they understand the "new rules of engagement" better than any author, speaker or journalist or Blogger. What is great is that they are looking for an audience, someone who will listen.

Ignore them at your peril, however my ear is firmly placed to the ground. I can feel and hear the groundswell of change. Nothing can avert that, not even a poorly written blog.

Peter Baines - Real Time with The Entertainers

The Entertainers with Peter Baines interviewed by Terry Burgan  

Welcome to Real Time, today I am speaking with Peter Baines.

Peter can we start by asking you give us a  brief description of who you are and what you do?

Sure Terry, I spent 22 years with New South Wales Police and in that time I was in the forensic services group, I did a science degree and a law degree.

I was deployed into Bali after the 2002 bombings and Thailand after the tsunami, my roll there was the identification of the people who died. I was leading Australian and International teams in both responses and from that I started sharing stories of what we had done, the challenges we had face and why the Australians ended up as Leaders  when there was 36 other countries present. 

Then I worked for Interpol in Lyon in France, on a counterterrorism project for 12 months following that i was seconded on to work with the United Nations in the Office of Drug and Crime around capacity building and leadership. Then I worked in Saudi Arabia after some floods, the government asked me to go over and have a look at their response and then recently worked in Japan after the earthquake and the tsunami there. That is the kind of professional work I was doing around the crisis and disaster response and leading the large teams in to those events.

What services do you offer in terms of keynotes and workshops and maybe go little bit into some of the other services that you are offering in Asia.

Yes sure, so the stories I started sharing were around leadership and one of my Keynote's is "Leadership Matters" in that I focus on leadership which is basically true leadership is defined by their actions and reactions so what people do to put them into leadership positions as opposed to just an organisational chart that says people leaders. This is very clear from what I saw occurring in these disaster areas both in Thailand and Bali and in Japan. 

A real key to that was the presence of leaders, being seen and being present with your team, it conveys a number of things, that you care and that you understand. With those experiences that I had overseas I am now able to share those stories with different organisations who are looking at Leadership. It doesn't have to be that the Leadership Matters" keynote is for an organisation which is struggling, the key messages are universal and apply to all organisation no matter where they are at.

It's about having a real clarity purpose around why you do what you do as an organisation and as an individual and it makes a decision making so much easier if you are clear around that. 

You alluded obviously to the work I do now, a lot of my time is spent that running an organisation called Hands Across The Water which is a charity that I set up after the Boxing Day tsunami. I met some kids who are living in a tent and had all lost their parents,  I couldn't change what had happened but I thought I could change what happened next for them.

So I set up the the charity with the aim of building a home fast forward on since that time and we have raised AU$7 million dollars, we have never spend sent a cent of the donors money on administrational fundraising and we are now running seven projects across Thailand. We run a  HIV orphanage, we are now working in the Hill Tribes of North Thailand theres a lot of work thats been going on around there.

When I looked at why we were successful there, what became clear to me was the value of experience and Terry that's the second and latest Keynote that I have developed which is around  "Experiences Matter"  I looked at why Hands Across The Water has grown and that what made us successful and very clearly for us it's about providing experiences, if we provide experiences we get engagement, if we get engagement then we get commitment and then it's about results. 

For leaders theres a responsibility to build a legacy and the legacy might be in that the team that you formed a project you run or something on a grander scale to look at that on the legacy might be in T form the project you Rhinall or something on a grand scale. So I looked at that and again package that up into into a new keynote which are touches very nicely and has a real flow on from the initial keynote around Leadership Matters.

You have a range of services that you offer could you run us through them?

Again we looked at why were successful, what the lessons were.  There's a couple of different options and because I run the facilities over there we just custom the trips to whatever the clients needs are. I run a program called "Journey of Change"  where we take small groups away and spend  3 or 4 days with them in a real leaderships space and we visit different projects and spend time with the kids and seeing why we have bee successful.

Something else we have just done recently, I have just returned from Bangkok where I took 103 delegates into the slums of Thailand I gave a keynote in the morning and then we spent a day painting the kindergarten inside and out. Terry I have spoken at a lot of conferences, I have never had an experience as rich as that. One  of the delegates summed it up when he said there are 50 odd business owners here and not one of them has checked their phone once!

The talk about legacies is that you plant a tree and walk ing away knowing that you will never sit. They did this work completely selflessly  knowing that they will never go back there but the richness of the experience I have never had such genuine acknowledgement of the experience that lasted for as long as it had. 

So those are the offshore experiences, I also run half and full day programs I run a unique program called operation Delta and what we do is I do a keynote in the morning at the start of the session Then I break the group up in to teams, then I run a simulated disaster exercise so that basically they are tested on all the leadership lessons around decision-making, communication, team building and leadership, that I have discussed in the hour previous they get to roll it out and it's a simulated exercise they run of  iPads, news broadcasts come into to interrupt their thinking. it is a pretty cool experience to see how people respond. At the end we have a de-brief, look at the way it rolled out and revisit the leadership lessons again

Thanks for taking the taking the Time to talk with The Entertainers and being part of Real Time Peter Baines.

Thank you Terry

Billy Tucker Interview | Cudo

The Entertainers interviewed CUDO Founder Billy Tucker recently.

I asked Billy to give us a brief snapshot of who he is.

The Owner of data consultancy 57 Signals, Co-Founder of Beyond Cover and Founder of MD Yabbit.

Prior to founding Cudo, Billy worked for Microsoft where he helped launch the Xbox business in London, before leading the Bing Search business across Asia.

Billy operates on the cutting edge of marketing, with a vast knowledge of personalising and optimising the digital experience that clients have when they interact with your business on-line, maximising the likelihood of purchases.

Billy is passionate about new business models, recognising their benefit in the market place and having the ability to understand and execute that business successfully.

His consultancy service 57 Signals also has current contracts with QBE Insurance and American Express.

His keynote style is confident and assured, bringing to the platform information and statistics which are extremely relevant to companies wise enough to embrace current on-line trends in marketing position and profitability, using such mechanisms as crowd-sourcing and aggregated data.

Here are some notes from the interview:

"Why can't big companies innovate?" is one of Billy's keynote topics. Why in this age entrepreneurs can sneak in behind them with great innovations and steal market share. He believes that big business does have the ability to innovate, however it not natural to them or at the surface of their DNA. By helping large corporates recognise that they do have an inner entrepreneur is something Billy enjoys immensely.

This keynote is around why it is difficult and some great case studies on why so major companies are failing against craggy little startups. He likes to conduct brainstorming sessions with anything up to 200 to 300 people on ways to bring innovation to life inside their business.

Other sessions have been around the fascinating "big data", the easiest description of "big data" is aggregating data, some that is yours some thats not yours, some that you buy, some you find on Google, for example "have you Googled yourself?" There is information on each one of us which can be collated and used. Imagine doing that on mass

for all of the million customers you have and using that data to go personalise their internet experience when they touch your business, on-line or off. While it is a complex formula it holds a huge amount of value for big business today.

His keynote can also focus on "How do you personalise the experience for consumers to drive a better experience but a more profitable experience?"

A lot of the margin lives in getting loyalty from you customers, in the up sell and cross sell.

I asked Billy "What types of companies should be seeking you out?"

The keynotes that have been really successful are large organisations which have executive offsites of 100 to 200 who trying to rethink their strategy. I have also had great success at large marketing conferences.

I enjoy awakening people to the nuances of the internet. That means any size organisation will benefit from the information I have especially if they want to take advantage of current on-line trends in big data.

Billy is able in his Q & A session, to facilitate insights on how the business can innovate, the insights may not come from Billy however, he knows how to get the workshop exploring this territory which can be extremely valuable.

His interest are helping big business innovate, helping drive an improved and more profitable customer experience and generally help that entrepreneurial spirit emerge from big business.

For more information on securing Billy Tucker at your next event contact Terry Burgan by email on terry@theentertainers.com.au or call +6 1 2 8958 6482