Page 98 - The New Articulate Executive_ Look, Act and Sound Like a Leader

HOW TO CAPTURE YOUR AUDIENCE 89

2. Present your case. Write down some ideas. Set up a logical course
to follow. Detail the steps you plan to take; then set your notes aside.
With your ideas all in a row and fresh in your head, stand in front
of a mirror or a portable TV camera and start talking. Allow your-
self not even one second more than three minutes.

3. Now take one minute off your time, and do the same thing in
two minutes. Then go to one minute, thirty seconds, twenty sec-

onds, ten seconds, and finally eight seconds.

GRACE UNDER PRESSURE

One of my clients, whose name happens to be Grace, found herself
unable to land in Bangkok because of violent monsoon weather.

She’d been sent from New York by her firm to make a presentation
to civic and business leaders in Thailand for a contract worth tens
of millions of dollars. By the time her plane landed two days late,
other firms had made their pitches. The Thai offi cials had pretty

much made up their minds and were reluctant to see her. Finally, a
committee agreed to meet with her, for twenty minutes only, in a
hotel lobby.
Any hope of a proper presentation went out the window. She
knew she had to abandon her original game plan. Forget the deck
and the PowerPoint. Forget the carefully groomed script. Now it
was quick thinking, mental discipline, rapid regrouping and reor-

ganization, streamlining, editing, and refining. Everything had
come down to just a few minutes face-to-face with a bunch of com-
plete strangers.
All this with a case of jet lag that made her feel like she’d been
up for two days—and she had, almost. She felt oddly tipsy, a little
punchy. But the stakes were too high to yield to sloppy thinking. The
company’s immediate future and her career, she knew, hung in the