Speech 1 - Inaugural speech for FDR

Trying a new technique to improve my speaking ability by a quantum leap - why not memorise entire speeches? Just finished FDR's inaugural address in Mar 1933. Took me a couple of weeks just to finish this behemoth of 1800 words. Next one here we come!

Win: The Key Principles to Take Your Business from Ordinary to Extraordinary - Frank Luntz

I was looking for a book to help me improve my communication skills, and ended up finding this book in a list of online reviews. I think that the book is more inspirational in nature than informative, from my point of view. Here are the key learning points:

1. Selling yourself. I think this is a paradigm shift that is useful for my (and anyone's) career. It is the recognition that communications and marketing is more than about one's ideas, but more importantly, selling oneself. Henceforth, it will be key to think carefully about what is the professional image and identity that I want to portray.
   
2. Empathy is practiced. Maestros such as Bill Clinton took time to hone his skills in listening and empathising. The appropriate facial expression and tone to use, for example, was carefully rehearsed. I see that each encounter with people is an opportunity for one to practice one's skills in these areas. One key prong of effective listening is really about respect - giving the speaker the full attention in that moment. This takes great discipline.
   
3. "Get your hands dirty". To fully understand one's customers or one's competitors, it is not possible to remain in the ivory tower and base one's thinking on pure logic. There is a strong need for leaders to be on the ground, listening and learning all the time.
4. One sentence answer. Communications is centred very much on brevity. Practice how to condense your ideas into one sentence forms that can be sold quickly to people.
   
5. Selling the problem. The most effective way of selling a solution is to sell the problem. Steve Jobs' talks on the release of new gadgets, for example, sells you the problem by telling you no less than 3 times before he unveils the product.
6. Types of audience. He classifies the audience's receptiveness to one's ideas according to 5 levels - Rejection, disagreement, neutrality, agreement and action. The right thing to do for each of these groups are different. For example, for the vehement rejection group, just getting them to stay silent is good enough. Whereas for the agreement group, what you need to do is to energise them enough such that they go around evangelising for you like the action group. This useful way of classification allows one's messaging to be targeted.
   
7. "Persistence is the art of manufactured motivation". Speaks for itself!
8. Crafting the vision for your people. To engineer passion and commitment in people, give them a vision, and communicating this vision well to people is key.

The McKinsey Way - Ethan Rasiel

Read this book to try to learn a little more about management consulting and to see if there could perhaps be some skills that I could adopt. Overall, this was not a superb book - many of the ideas that the author presented were not of sufficient detail but just broad concepts. However, the interesting thing was that I found a great many similarities between the concepts and what I have been learning during my civil service stints so far. For example, basic ideas (or archetypes that can be used to solve problems) such as the 80/20 rule, dealing with the low-hanging fruits first, not boiling the ocean, etc.

Nonetheless, as with any book, there will always be learning points. Here are some of them:

1. MECE. First time I'm hearing this term - Mutually Exclusive and Completely Exhaustive, but it makes immediate sense and I can relate this to what I've been doing all these while in my work when breaking down complex issues into its components. However, this short phrase succinctly captures what it usually takes me paragraphs to explain to people.
   
2. Issue tree. I had been using mind-maps to perform a similar function. For any problem, use an issue tree to drill the issue down at increasingly detailed levels, which will help identify the possible facts to validate a particular course of action or unearth what are the other possibilities that one might not have considered. At each tree branch, apply MECE to make sure that all the bases are covered.
   
3. Understanding about the management consulting world. I learnt a little more about how the management consulting world operates, and this is similarly rather akin to the civil service in some way. Teams are built to solve problems, and everyone on the team are knowledge workers.
   
4. The book also shared some guidelines for what are considered good interview skills. This include: listen and don't lead the interview, prepare significantly in advance, paraphrase the person's response. The author also introduced the "Colombo technique" (after a movie character), which I think can be quite useful! Essentially, the suggestion is to only ask the interviewee a question after the interview is formally over and the interviewee more relaxed. This can be done as a "by the way" kind of question just as the interviewer is about to leave the room.
   
5. The last thing I learnt is on how to sell ideas to clients. The trick is always to "pre-wire" all the different stakeholders through earlier meetings or presentations so that when all of them eventually come to the meeting room, your presentation faces less chances of catching people off-guard and being rejected.