Ever find yourself shouting back at the radio when politicians relentlessly parrot their messages, skipping questions from breakfast-time interviewers? Ever found that although your own project is world changing, the pitch just won’t fly until you can truly get under listeners’ skin? Ever felt your true light shine failed to shine at an all-important job [ more » ]
Once upon a time, narrative was the word used to describe the compelling storytelling that garnered Oscars, made box-office hits, churned out literary page-turners and even underpinned brilliant business plans. But definitions change: These days the very same word is used to describe something that’s simply not true. Increasingly, narrative means a sequence of facts [ more » ]
Has President Donald Trump’s own distinctive delivery style rendered the formal prepared speech forever obsolete? For millennia, the business of public persuasion by princes, politicians and those in power, has depended on a deliberate construct based on the rules of oratory and rhetoric. Building up a chain of logical argument by means of tested ideas [ more » ]
So the white working class bet the farm on Donald Trump, in the process bringing out the *farm-boy deep inside every American male. In the week since the 2016 US presidential election, much of the focus has been on the tangible policies the president-elect may or may not have promised voters. But Trump’s extraordinary skill [ more » ]
Every speechwriter and every public speaker knows you should finish your talk with an inspiring call to action. That’s how leaders trigger real change. Sometimes it works – and sometimes it doesn’t. But the first rule is: always keep it short. So “Yes, we can” worked. So did “I have a dream,” and “We choose [ more » ]
Just as every hue in the rainbow can be traced back to a mix of primary colours, can human behaviours and the ways we communicate them, be boiled down to a recognisable pattern? Alas, humans don’t conform to colour theory. In fact, if there’s one truly consistent thing about human behaviour, it’s that people behave [ more » ]