You Can Be Great On Your Feet is a promise kept for those who read the book. "Take it to work, take it to bed, and take it to heart." Within this compact, down to earth, in your face paperback is the experiment and wisdom of a corporate spokesman who represented Fortune 50 firms throughout the USA and Europe and had faced hundreds of audiences ranging form physicians to philosophers and everything in between. He has coached over 200 top executives in speaking techniques and thousands of sales executives in making presentations.
You won't find Alan Clement's radical common sense approach to speaking in a textbook. He deals in reality. He has been there, and he fills the pages with techniques that work. Get ready to accept the fact that the most effective presentations at major meetings, for example, should be no longer than 10 minutes, followed by a 15 minute Q&A. That include the CEO's talk (no one is allowed to make a speech).
The book provides an opportunity for companies to improve the bottom line by improving the communicating skills of its people in place. That represents a 45% saving just sitting there waiting, because studies show that employees in the typical workplace are misinterpreting one another for more than half the time. No accident that the best way to improve their communicating is to show them how to be great on their feet.
Clement points out that most of us gather stuff to impress the audience rather than relate to the audience. The good presentation starts with the audience point of view, he states. Their objective determines what we say and how we say it.
Talk the talk is popular expression and also a good way to start your preparation. Thesmart speaker visualizes one person who reflects the audience objective and speaks to her or him, maybe in the car on the way to work with the pocket tape recorder asking it in strange idea? We're ending up in the spoken-word medium; why not start there?
This little book is filled with ideas that at first may strike us as strange, but on reflection make perfect sense. They were borne out of experience.
The reader will be treated to a series or original techniques, as evidence by the chapter titles, such as: Making Meetings Make Sense, Deck the Slide Deck, the Q&A is the Hammer, Reinforcing with Visuals, Making Sense of Humor, and Listening to Send a Message.
Take this book to work, or take it to bed, but take it to heart and see how quickly You Can Be Great On Your Feet.