Watching the avalanche of speakers to the Democratic National Convention has been interesting. Some really hit the mark and others not so much. What makes the difference? From what I could see they were all using teleprompters, so effectively they are reading what they wrote to us. Some I felt were just reading back to us what they wordsmithed and others connected with us. How did they do that?

Comfort with the medium is a big differentiator. There is also the issue of which teleprompter you look at, because they had them left, center and right. Too much rapid head turning is distracting. Burrowing into just one screen seems to be denying the love to the other areas of the audience.

Teleprompters are set at certain speeds and the advanced models will coordinate with your personal timing. You stop and it will wait until you start again. I couldn’t tell which type they were using, but I would have to expect the most advanced tech was being used for such an important event. Nevertheless, it was obvious that the cadence for some people was slightly off and that may be because they don’t get a chance to give many speeches using teleprompters.

If you think about the case of businesspeople, I would guess that 99.9% of those located in Japan, have never had an occasion to use one. So here is a hint, don’t make your speech your test bed for trying out a teleprompter. Get hold of one early and practice with it until you feel comfortable.

Holding the moment is another skill. Imagine facing an audience of 25,000 people and having your face projected on the most monstrously huge JumboTron screen for the folks in the cheap seats at the back. You also have all of those at home tuning it on television to watch, an audience of around 29 million people, plus all the social media views. That would make anyone nervous, but the pros are not feeling rushed or speeding up because their pulse rate is going through the roof. They know how to hold the moment and build anticipation for what they are about to say. As business folk, we have to have the same ability to hold the moment. Probably we won’t have a massive audience putting incredible pressure on us, so we should be able to manage it, if we do our planning well.

Pausing is a tough skill. You feel the pressure to speak, but the ability to deny that itch is important. By creating a gap between what you have just said, what you are saying now and then between that and what you will say next is powerful. I thought Michelle Obama did a masterful job of combining the anticipation component with her pauses. The speaker’s one liners are like a punchline for a comedian and timing makes all the difference. Too short doesn’t work and so does too long, so it is a real skill to find the right gap.

The key for businesspeople is to programme in pauses at certain points of emphasis in the talk. These pauses will highlight and illuminate the key point we want to make and have it rise above all the other points we are making.

Energy is a tricky beast. Too much and you are seen as verging on insanity or at least hysteria. I recall when I saw Kimberly Guilfoyle at the Republican National Convention, it seemed too much to me. Her speech felt histrionic and just too forced.

Too little and the connect with the audience is hard to establish. Biden and Clinton are both losing their voice strength and it stood out in terms of the energy they could bring to their points.

Where is the line is a good question? There is a tendency to go hard from start to finish, rather than having some modulation. That is easy to say but hard to do, with 25,000 people screaming out, while you are talking. You feel you have to project above the noise of the room.

In business, that is not a likely scenario, so we can have better control over where we insert strength and softness throughout our talk and we should be aiming for both.

In my observation, American politics continues to descend into a morass of nastiness topped up with a lot of name calling and rabid criticism of the other side. In my native country of Australia, politicians won’t publicly call their opponents “stupid” or “weird”, because they know the voting public won’t accept that type of behaviour. In our national Parliament during the policy debates, the language is carefully monitored by the Speaker and always kept within the bounds of propriety. As in most things, America is a different planet, especially when it comes to domestic politics and elections.

What about in business when we are giving public speeches in Japan? Should we call elected officials or bureaucrats “stupid” or “useless”, as we rail and lament against their shortsighted, unwieldy, ludicrous, ridiculous policies? Can we attack our sneaky, underhanded competitors in public and complain about the evils they are doing? In general, can we do some good old-fashioned whining and complaining about whatever is aggravating us at the minute? Basically, the answer is “no”.

We don’t have American style comparison advertising here in Japan because it is banned. Showing your product’s better virtues up against the opposition is felt to be endangering societal harmony and is against the law. The thought of a Japanese CEO publicly laying into a Minister or official, regarding some policy felt to be egregious or unfair, is unthinkable. In general, public venting is not a thing here.

The fear of the consequences to the firm by the Government taking revenge as a result of the public name calling is certainly a part of it. Future applications requiring official approval may suddenly get slowed right down or rejected outright. Maybe a surprise tax audit suddenly springs up out of nowhere. Complaining publicly about your company’s rival is thought to be very low-level, unrefined behaviour (品がない- hinganai) and would reflect very badly on your firm’s brand and reputation.

We can mention about industry wide negative events like the 2008 Lehman Shock, the 2011 triple whammy of earthquake, tsunami and triple nuclear reactor meltdown and the 2020 pandemic. Referencing the hard times resulting from these external events is acceptable, because we all probably suffered to some extent during these recent events, too. We can’t labour the point though and we can’t go into too much hidden detail about the impact on our businesses. If we share too much data, the thought will arise that we are unstable and maybe not long for this business world.

The Phoenix is a symbol here of rising for the ashes and Japan loves a good resurrection story. We can lay out in general terms that things got very bad and talk about how the team pulled together and we made it through. Going into detail about how we did it is a good idea. Everyone loves to learn lessons at the expense of others, rather than themselves. Balancing negativity with hope and revival is the key. Even if things are not totally hunky-dory just yet, talking about what you are doing to get out of the hole you are in is of interest to the audience.

In my experience, the glass tends to be half empty in Japan most of the time, so we have to make an effort to break out of that formula. Telling people things are bad garners a “so what” reaction, because that is how they see things as being normal and not news to anyone. From another angle, I don’t think too many Japanese enjoy schadenfreude though, at hearing about our troubles. Telling listeners how things were bad and that now they are slowly improving is felt to be more interesting. Our efforts to revive are seen as worthy and admirable, because we are ( 頑張ってる - ganbatteru) or working hard and that is a good thing in Japan.

Japan suffers earthquakes, tsunami, typhoons, flooding, landslides etc., on a regular basis, so every year there is some area wiped out. On television, we see scenes of people trying to rebuild their businesses and lives and their efforts are respected. “But for them, there go I”, being the prevailing thought.

We don’t have to be Pollyanna in our talks, expounding how wonderful and successful we are. That approach is not well regarded either, because it sounds elf-serving and boastful. Leavening the good with the bad is a better balance and better accepted when giving speeches in Japan.

Most business speeches are very definitive. We did this, and it worked for us and you could do the same and also get similar results. Usually, we are asked to speak because we have had good results and have rich experience in our industry. The hosts believe that others will be interested in hearing what we did, so that they can take lessons from it and they will be able to pull a crowd. The problem is today we are in the Age Of Distraction and the Era of Cynicism.

If what we are offering doesn’t sound valuable or sounds dubious, then the audience loses interest immediately and lunge for their phones to hit the internet and escape from us. Once upon a time, listeners would sit there politely and absorb what we were saying and wait to reach judgement. Now we have to win them over from the very start.

They are also more sceptical than in times past and are constantly on the prowl for fake news. No wonder though, given the barrage of scams and fake information hammering us every day. I constantly get fake emails trying to get me to click on something that will allow them to take over my computer and clean out my bank account. The fakes have become more and more sophisticated and sometimes I have trouble telling if they are real or not. I have had to ring my bank or my credit card company to check that what I have received is legit or not. They are now that realistic. Little surprise people are on guard.

This combination of short attention spans and cynicism about what we are telling them makes it very much harder to advance our arguments when we are speaking. One approach is to use a couple of simple tools. One is the rule of three and the other is recency.

Basically, audiences cannot take in more than three points and remember them, so to prove our arguement, we should assemble the strongest three points we can come up with. The way to use these three points, though, is not to just list them and explain what they mean. This Age of Cynicism demands that we offer more balance. We should list the pros and cons associated with each point we are making. So as we go through them, we offer the pluses and minuses for each point.

I remember when I was an undergraduate student doing Modern Asian Studies at Griffith University in Brisbane, we had a guest lecturer come in to talk about the causes of the Battle Of Sekigahara. Tokugawa Ieyasu won that battle and set up a dynasty which lasted for hundreds of years and it was a major turning point in Japanese history.

He started by going through a long list of the usual explanations for the events leading to the battle, and it was all very convincing. I was sitting there in the front row busily making notes. He then proceeded to pull down each of these standard arguments and replace them with his own interpretation of events. It was a powerful intellectual example of providing balance and therefore becoming much more convincing than if he had just rattled off what he thought explained the situation.

We should do the same with the points we are making in our talk and provide balance. This invites the audience to observe that we are not being dogmatic and that we are considered and looking for fairness in our argument. It is very disarming. We don’t present a static target to be attacked because we are demonstrating our intellectual flexibility.

Additionally, the recency phenomena is a key contributor to being believed. We all tend to remember best what we heard last. So, of the three points, the strongest recommendation should come last. We do the same thing with the pros and cons for each point. Finally, we offer the last point as our strongest recommendation for the audience. They heard this last, so it has the impact of being the most memorable argument and therefore more likely to be accepted.

Is running it last cheating? No, we are just adapting our order to best suit human psychology to have the best shot at convincing the listeners of our argument. We have shown balance by going through the pluses and minuses and we just order the points in a way which is the most convincing and effective.

So next time you give a talk, consider how you can introduce more balance in the argument you are making. If you do, the chances are much higher that you will be believed and well regarded as an expert in your field. This will advance your professional and personal brands.