Whatever your role – leader, manager, parent – it’s a fair bet that influencing is one of the skills you’ll be using most today. Whether it’s getting your manager to back your idea or encouraging your teenager to knuckle down to their studies, influencing is a core skill. And it’s become… Read More »Under the influence: nine tactics for persuasion (1)
Standing out amidst the crowd of communication chatter is getting ever harder in today’s world. How can you make your message memorable? In Resonate, Nancy Duarte suggests giving your audience a STAR moment – ‘Something They’ll Always Remember’. Often involving some kind of physical prop, it’s part of your presentation… Read More »Create your own STAR moment
‘Presence’ is an almost intangible quality. Some people have it, some people don’t. But those who do have presence have more impact, and get remembered. It’s easy to think that presence is a natural quality, something effortless. But presence is a quality you can most definitely develop. The authors of… Read More »Three ways to make a bigger impact
Last month the media was full of stories marking the anniversary of one of the greatest speeches of all time, Dr Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ address in Washington. What makes a speech resonate to such a degree that it is still celebrated 50 years later? The ‘I… Read More »Nine keys to an extraordinary speech: Amistad
Change is at the heart of leadership. And making a compelling case for change is essential. But what if people are happy with how things are, and don’t see the need for change? That’s the situation faced by British politician William Wilberforce and his abolitionist colleagues in the late 1700s,… Read More »Leading change: lessons from the abolition of slavery
With the release of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, interest in the famous American President has never been higher. In Lead like Lincoln, I highlighted five key leadership lessons I personally took from the movie. Many other writers have identified additional lessons, both from the movie and the man himself. Mark Crowley’s… Read More »More leadership lessons from Lincoln
Watching Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, it’s striking how little America seems to have changed politically in 150 years. Two diametrically opposed ideologies still lie separated by a narrow middle ground. Similarly, it’s distinctive how relevant Abraham Lincoln’s leadership is for our contemporary world. Here are five lessons from Lincoln’s struggle to… Read More »Lead like Lincoln: leadership lessons from honest Abe
There aren’t many movies based on Powerpoint presentations. So it stands to reason that Al Gore’s slide show on climate change, the subject of An Inconvenient Truth, is just a little bit special. Gore shows that if you create a compelling story around an important issue, a presentation is as… Read More »10 ways to make your presentation memorable