Page 147 - The New Articulate Executive_ Look, Act and Sound Like a Leader

138 DELIVERY

no question. But working together I see no reason why we can’t
accomplish whatever we make up our minds to accomplish.” By ton-
ing down the rhetoric we have recast a message of hope into lan-
guage and terms that people can identify with.
You know you’re hearing peacock language when someone says:
“It’s not the money—it’s the principle!” (You know that person
already has got a hand in your pocket.) Or “To be honest with
you . . .” (What has that person been the rest of the time, dishonest?).
Or when the CEO reminisces about “my best years” spent on the

factory floor. Or when the speechwriter has the CEO say: “Profi ts
are secondary! What we’re really interested in is people.” Or the

limousine liberal who flies in from his summer house in the Hamp-
tons to tell an audience: “I can’t sleep at night thinking about the
plight of blacks in America.”
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To be credible, you also must accept the notion that one simple
unembellished truth in the right place can carry more weight
than a whole marching band of half-truths, euphemisms, unrealistic
projections, and promises you know you can never keep. By contrast,
just one phony line can drag down the integrity of all the honest
lines in the rest of the speech.
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We’ve gotten so used to superlatives, exaggerations, and misrep-
resentations—especially from political people—that it almost seems
natural to stretch the truth. For example, speechwriters often stray
from the believable by having principals say things like: “This is the
greatest experience of my life,” when, of course, it is not. One of the
greatest, maybe; that is unarguable. But the greatest strains credibility
and tends to taint the rest of what the speaker has to say.
Sometimes exaggerated writing begins to sound like the equiva-
lent of elevator music. We know it’s there, but it’s so bland we hardly
notice it: “The next twenty years will be a time of great economic