26. David Letterman’s Top Ten
Pick a Number
In his nearly two decades as the host of CBS’s Late Show, David Letterman has made his nightly reading of his “Top Ten”1 list a social ritual of American culture. Mr. Letterman uses his list for comic effect, but you can use the same approach to create a structure for your presentations.
Authors Stephen R. Covey and Deepak Chopra used the numbering technique as the structure of their respective bestsellers, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success. The popular Politico website2 regularly calls out their Top Five or Six or Seven takeaways from the political events they cover; how-to newspaper and magazine articles add sidebar boxes that summarize their main tips with a total number; and the help desk web page of product and service companies summarize their customer FAQs with a total number.
In the fast and furious business world where presentations are often hastily cobbled together with a disparate collection of begged, borrowed, or stolen slides and delivered by a presenter who is the only one in the room who can understand what on Earth one slide has to do with another, the numbering technique can be emergency CPR. Simply organizing the different elements into a clear order makes it easy for both the presenter and the audience to follow.
Eric Benhamou, the former Chairman of 3Com Corporation (acquired by HP in 2010), did so under rather trying circumstances.
Mr. Benhamou was invited to deliver a keynote speech at a dinner given by the California-Israel Chamber of Commerce, an organization as diverse as the more than 7,000 miles that separate those two centers of business. The event, which was held on a midweek night at Silicon Valley’s large San Jose Fairmount Hotel, began with a cocktail hour that ran for far more than an hour. When the ballroom doors finally opened, the several hundred guests rushed in to find seats at tables they had to share with strangers. After the usual rubber chicken dinner, the Masters of Ceremonies presented awards to individuals who were only familiar to Californians, and some who were only familiar to Israelis. Each of the recipients then proceeded to give an acceptance speech that made Academy Award acceptance speeches seem abrupt by comparison. When Mr. Benhamou’s turn came, it was nearly nine o’clock.
How would you like to have to deliver a speech in those circumstances?
But Mr. Benhamou rose to the occasion. At the very outset, he announced that he would be sharing the top ten experiences of a recent trip he made to Israel. Each of the experiences was unrelated to the next—one historic, one cultural, one economic, one technological, one a human interest story—but he counted down as he went from anecdote to anecdote. Mr. Benhamou is a gifted presenter, and he held his audience’s attention throughout. When he got to his ninth anecdote, the audience began reaching for their valet parking stubs and, as soon as he finished the tenth, they bolted for the doors.
Structure your presentation by organizing your diverse themes into a group of ten or seven or three—many people subscribe to what is commonly known as the “rule of threes.” Give your audiences order rather than chaos, or they will start reaching for their valet parking stubs a lot sooner than Mr. Benhamou’s did.