Speaking Up

CHAPTER12Public SpeakingUnplugged

I sit through so damn many of these executive presentations. It is painful. There are two times when you are alone in life: one is when you die, and the other is when you present to senior management.

—Rick Wallace

As we’ve seen, C-level executives are very bright people living in high-stress, demanding environments with little job security and not much support. They can be abrupt and hard to please. Due to a “perfect storm” of personality variables, performance pressure, and environmental factors, top-level people are a very tough audience. Additionally, putting them in a room for a presentation costs the shareholders a lot of money. This is made even worse by the fact that more than half of the presentations ...