The Seven Strategies of Master Presenters - Lifecycle Performance ...

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places the participants in a real leadership situation, asks them what
they would do, and then lets them compare their answers with how
the actual leader in the story led at that critical juncture. An additional
benefit from this exercise is that the participants must present
their solution in a manner that would be appropriate for the president
of a large corporation, which underscores the relationship between
leadership skills and presentations skills.
5. The Story as Metaphor
Mark Brown, the 1995 World Champion of Public Speaking, used
a masterful metaphor in his World Championship speech. He used
the Disney movie Beauty and the Beast as the framework for his message
about ignorance, intolerance, and indifference. He first illustrated
how these negative attributes were depicted in the animated movie.
Then he smoothly shifted into a real-life parallel. He told a moving
story of a beautiful television reporter who went undercover as an
unkempt homeless person to illustrate how differently she was treated.
He said, “This beauty took on a beastly appearance.” Then as he described
what the camera saw, he illustrated each of the negative attributes
of ignorance, intolerance, and indifference in the reactions of
those who passed by her. The story of the movie was played out in
real life. And because of the power of his metaphor, the real-life story
had so much more impact.
Metaphorical stories capture the theme of the presentation, making
it real, concrete, and tangible. These stories reach out and grab
your audience’s attention. Harvard’s John Kotter, one of the world’s
foremost experts on leadership and change, artfully uses metaphor in
the following story: 9
In 1983, a new CEO put the company through a major transformation
process that was successful. By 1988, the old procedure manuals were no longer
used, replaced by far fewer rules and a set of customer-first practices that made
more sense in the 1980s. But the CEO realized that the old manuals, while
not on people’s desks, were still very much in the corporate culture. So here is
what he did.
When he took the stage for his keynote address at the annual management
meeting, he had three of his officers stack the old manuals on a table
next to the lectern. In his speech he said something like this: