Speakers: Think Through What Might Happen to Prepare Your Audience

Art is lone, life short;
judgment difficult, opportunity transient.

--Goethe (adapting the words of Hippocrates)

In September 1995, I made the most important (and perhaps the only important) speech of my career when I introduced the 400 Year Project (a program to help everyone learn how to accomplish 20 times as much with the same time, money, and effort). Since I didn't know how my speech would be received and wasn't sure how the project would be implemented, I didn't spend any time thinking about how I could add more value to my listeners. That was a big, and avoidable, mistake. Let me describe what I could have done different as an example to you as you prepare your important talk.

Knowing what I do after 13 years of heading the 400 Year Project, I realize that many good opportunities were missed that day. For example, given that the project was aimed at helping everyone, I should have announced the project more publicly and invited others to join in after the announcement at our Four Seasons meeting.

Knowing how idealistic many young people are, I also should have invited interns from colleges and business schools to work on the project. It would have been a good idea to have had a Web site ready to go, for instance, to make continuing connections.

But, of course, there wasn't enough time to have done all those things. Despite that time limitation, I should have identified and opportunities and carefully evaluated which ones could and should have been done before the speech.

I also should have proposed worldwide contests to find solutions to key barriers to progress (as Goldcorp and Procter & Gamble later showed to be so effective for enhancing results many times faster than before). With such contests in place from the beginning, who knows what might have been learned earlier in the project?

But, unfortunately, that learning was still in the future, and no one knew those lessons at the start of the project.

Most significantly, I probably should have asked Peter Drucker to help me plot the path to success before announcing the project. Why didn't I do that?

I felt like I was supposed to do this announcement on my own; I have no idea why I had received that message. Perhaps it was just to make me feel more personally responsible for the results. In subsequent meetings, Peter, Carol, and I discussed the project many times. Peter made many important suggestions that proved to be crucial to the project's progress.

If I could sum up what I learned from my lack of preparation is that the bigger the speech, the more you should be prepared to have the speech gain a positive reaction. In other words, assume success and plan to maximize that success. You'll never go wrong that way.