Slamming together Vital Speeches of the Day this morning, I wasn’t sure whether I had or hadn’t inserted a George Allen speech into the final document, so I searched for “Allen.” Allen was there—but what the search also turned up in the month’s dozen speeches, 42 uses of the term chALLENges.
The entire document is 40,000 words, so I did the math and found that “challenges” makes up almost one percent of the words in these speeches.
A wicked smirk pulling on my cheek, I did a similar search for “opportunities.” Nineteen. So about 1.5% of the words in the best speeches in the world are either “challenge” or “opportunity.”
As for why so many challenges and relatively fewer opportunties? Hey, these are tough times indeed.
But I wonder if I didn’t just stumble into a new measure of overall well-being. Mulling over a monthly Vital Speeches Leadership Confidence Index ….
Today the Dow Jones was is up 100 points on higher-than-expected Leadership Confidence Index figures. Vital Speeches of the Day reports that this month in speeches delivered by public- and private-sector leaders, “challenges” outpaced “opportunities” by only 15 percent, the lowest number since Vital Speeches started keeping records, in 2010 ….
So there’s a typo in the subhead of a speech in the July issue of Vital Speeches. “Delusions” is spelled “deulsions.”
Which sucks.
A reader wrote to us, “Given the topic of the speech [public education] I find it particularly painful to see the glaring typo in the title of the address given by Ms. Bilik. Please reprimand your delisionally adequate copy editors.”
Smarting, I wrote back tersely, “We find it particularly painful too. Thanks for reading; we’ll do better.”
And then we got back a note that (almost) made the typo a good thing:
“I appreciate the access to speeches that you provide, I use your resource at a public library. You’re right, it is a critical part of the democratic process to know what our leaders are saying and how they are saying it. I apologize for the tone of my note, with the anonymity of the internet I turn into a jerk sometimes. Keep up the good work.”
The possibilities aren’t quite endless, but for executive communication pros trying to match multiple speakers with hundreds of potential speaking platforms, they might as well be.
How do other executive communication pros identify the best conferences, summits or city clubs to place their speakers?
The best way to find out is to tell us how you do it—and let us compare your methods with your peers’ and then issue our report.
Vital Speeches is partnering with CEO-reputation guru Leslie Gaines-Ross of the global PR firm Weber Shandwick, on a survey about business leadership conferences and events.
Because your faithful editor will be, shall we say, immersed in the Super Bowl festivities this weekend—visiting a journalist colleague in Gulfport, Miss. this weekend—Vital Speeches is leaning on you, dear blog reader, to review the show in the comments section here.
Help us out. Help all of us out. Is this a show we all ought to watch together every Sunday, or one we should we should stay away from in droves?
Vital Speeches is partnering on it and Communitelligence is holding it, at the gleaming new headquarters of Henkel of America, and among the headliners are Henkel’s president and CEO, Brad Casper. Also at the show, I’m presenting a “Speechwriting Jam Session” of dramatic readings from winners of the 2010 Cicero Speechwriting Awards and hair-raising examples of great oral communications from the Vital Speeches YouTube channel.
It’s going to be quite a show. You owe it to yourself to go.
With the White House slashing the pay of the seven bank executives last week, the nabobs are nattering, none more convincingly than my favorite Chicago columnist, the Sun-Times‘ Neil Steinberg. In his Oct. 24 column, he scoffed at observers who predict a “brain drain” from firms whose execs don’t have a sufficient upside.
Snarled Steinberg:
Were I a financier, say Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit, whose 2008 pay of $38 million is being cut to a paltry $19 million, I’d have already turned in my security badge, grabbed my coat and stormed out of the building and over to the nearest park, to sit glumly on a bench, watching the children play for hours on end because heck, why work? …
That people still cling to this fantasy—still believe corporations are run by financial wizards paid in accordance to the bounty reaped by their secret wisdom—is a testament to human self-deception and guile.
Where do you see the greatest business genius? In high-tech start-ups—scruffy guys in college dorm rooms, paying themselves with Clif bars and Red Bull, forging the next billion dollar industry between classes. How come they can do it for a dream, but a banker goes from earning eight figures to earning only seven and he’s fleeing to St. Bart’s to sulk? I don’t believe it.
Personally, I mostly agree with Steinberg. But I’d love to read—and I’d love even more to publish in Vital Speeches—a speech in which someone convincingly argued the opposite. (Or, addressing the subject directly from any point of view.)
