Foreword

Over the course of my career, I have spent more than my fair share of time with other executives as we listened to woefully unprepared speakers drive staff productivity in the wrong direction. These speakers surely wanted to help our productivity, competitiveness, and bottom line—but they didn’t. Senior management appreciates speakers who immediately get to the point with well-vetted information delivered in a concise manner. Failing that wastes time, and time is our most precious resource.

Between the covers of this book, you have actionable solutions to this problem. If you are an executive, sell these ideas in your organization. Meetings will become more productive. If you are in middle management, this book will help you succeed in those high-stakes, high-stress meetings where so much hangs in the balance, not the least of which may be your career.

I believe that leaders are born not made. The challenge of senior people is to identify those leaders rather than trying to create them.

In identifying future leaders, I look at how people communicate as one indicator of their leadership skill set. The ones that have those communication skills “baked in” have these three ingredients as part of their management DNA:

Content—They are able to get to the point immediately, knowing the value of time in a roomful of executive decision makers.

Visual Aids—They understand that PowerPoint slides are not the focal point of the meeting. They know we want a discussion about an important topic, not a monologue and slide show.

Improvisation—They are flexible by nature. When business reality demands that they be light on their feet, they improvise and create something new in a heartbeat.

In addition to these three communication skills, people who rise to the top levels at places like Sun Microsystems are able to manage a room full of bright, competitive, time-pressured executives with ease. Somehow, when things get off track or conflicts erupt, they know how to refocus the group and get us to a decision.

They understand that senior leadership wrestles with much bigger issues than just their department demands. Almost as second nature, they listen to the conflicts and issues around the table and summarize what they hear, creating a sense of trust. That trust tells me these are natural leaders.

Through his interviews with top-level executives from a wide variety of companies, Rick Gilbert has shined a light on the nature of these skills. This remarkable book breaks these highly sophisticated communication skills into learnable units. With the amazing insights of both the executives and the midlevel managers profiled in the book, you will learn how to present at top-level meetings. The executives will see you as a natural leader.

This book would have been useful for many of the people who presented to me over my career, but of course, it had not been written yet. Now it has been. You can cut years off your leadership learning curve by applying these skills.

Scott McNealy

Founder and former CEO of Sun Microsystems

Chairman of Wayin