January 25th, 2006
Guy Kawasaki on Successful Speaking
On his weblog, he started early this year, Guy Kawasaki has an interesting point on “How to Get a Standing Ovation” by making a succesful speech.
Inside one of his infamous ten-item-lists he states:
Focus on entertaining. Many speech coaches will disagree with this, but the goal of a speech is to entertain the audience. If people are entertained, you can slip in a few nuggets of information. But if your speech is deathly dull, no amount of information will make it a great speech. If I had to pick between entertaining and informing an audience, I would pick entertaining–knowing that informing will probably happen too.
This immediately reminded me on my apprenticeship as an industrial clerk, when after a — as I had assumed — quite successful seminar I had given, one of the trainers looked at me, while trying to talk as serious as he could:
Watch out, that your entertaining presentation won’t kill your appearance. A very entertaing speech isn’t going to be considered "professional".
Since then I wondered what to make of this, since the audience had been happy and — as they told both the trainer and me lateron — they obviously had taken much more out of my lecture than of any other on this day.
Therefore I decided to keep my style of presentation and didn’t ever regret that since.
Deutsche Version
In seinem Weblog, das er seit Jahresbeginn betreibt und welches sich regen Zuspruchs erfreut, beschreibt Guy Kawasaki, in einer seiner berüchtigten Zehn-Punkte-Listen, “How to Get a Standing Ovation” durch eine erfolgreich vorgetragene Präsentation.
Zustimmen muß ich dabei ganz besonders seinem Ansatz zum Thema Unterhaltungswert:
Focus on entertaining. Many speech coaches will disagree with this, but the goal of a speech is to entertain the audience. If people are entertained, you can slip in a few nuggets of information. But if your speech is deathly dull, no amount of information will make it a great speech. If I had to pick between entertaining and informing an audience, I would pick entertaining–knowing that informing will probably happen too.
Das erinnerte mich gleich an eine Trainingspräsentation während meiner damaligen Ausbildung zum Industriekaufmann, die sich eigentlich eines sehr positiven Feedbacks erfreute, bis schließlich einer der Ausbilder Bedenken äußerte, ein zu hoher Unterhaltungswert in meinem Vortrag könnte dessen Inhalt gefährden…
Glücklicherweise hätte Guy auch hier rechtbehalten: Der Vortrag war auch inhaltlich erfolgreicher als die meisten anderen an diesem Tag.
Deshalb werde ich auch in Zukunft den Unterhaltungswert bei meinen Seminaren in den Vordergrund stellen, weil Freude am zuhören einfach den Lerneffekt erhöht.
Posted by Bardo N. Nelgen at 7:47 CET
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