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
1-650-631-8459