THESE VITAL SPEECHES

6
CICERO SPEECHWRITING AWARDS
decade and a half later, the guy was
worth maybe a $100 million while Paul
was still living month to month.
“May I ask you a very personal
question?”
“Sure.”
“How much you make?”
It was Paul’s belief that he made
significantly more than other writers
in his business, mostly because he was
always working. Or, always had been.
“Mid to low six-figures,” he claimed,
exaggerating the top end only slightly
in the hope that it would sound respectable.
“That’s probably in line with others
in your field, I would think.”
Oh. Damn! Another bubble burst.
“So,” Sachs continued, “and I’m
speaking purely hypothetically here, if
one were to come to you and say, ‘Look,
Paul, I’ve got such and such an opportunity
for you and it’s right up your alley
and you’ll be bloody well paid for it,
your response would be …?”
Paul tried to gauge the level of
bullshit in the question.
“I don’t want to be in a position to
fail,” he said. “It’s easy to be seduced
by compliments and great offers and
get caught up,” he gestured to the car
around them, “in the excitement and
glamour of thinking, ‘I’ll be a big shot;’
it’s easy to think you could step in and
do something better than somebody
else, but it’s not so easy to do.”
You’re rambling, he thought to himself.
“All kidding aside, I really do not
want to be a failed CEO.”
The statement sort of hung there as
the smile on Sachs’ face broadened and
his tie seemed to grow more brilliant.
“Not even,” Sachs inquired sweetly,
“for twenty-five million?”
***
At first, I thought the novel was about
income inequality and the crazy-making
idea that if we can’t just work a little
harder and if we can’t lease a bigger
BMW and we can’t get the valets to park
it in front of the restaurant, then there is
something fundamentally wrong with us.
I was going to call it Affluenza and it
was as much about our nutty attitudes
toward financial status as it was about
the 1% vs the rest of us. But as I got
into the writing, it turned out there was
another story the character wanted to
tell, and that was about telling truth to
power and how hard that is to do, especially
when the power is yourself.
Because what would really happen
if any one of us was handed the keys to
the corporation and told we could take
it for a spin? What would really happen
if YOU had to sit in that seat and steer
the ship? Would your close proximity
to power and decision-making give you
the chops to do the job yourself and do
it as well as someone who … let me be
frank here … you may or may not find
to be quite as intelligent as you are?
Maybe, maybe not.
But the work we do every day can
give us powerful insights on the human
condition and how to coach people
to stand for more than just the quarterly
results of the company. Or how
the candidate is polling this week. Or
where the stock price is. And as I got
into the book, I found myself in the
interesting position of creating this
character, throwing him into this alien
world of being a CEO and then coaching
him through the experience as if he
were a real client.
I was able to do that by calling on
my own experience as a speechwriter,
obviously, and on my experience working
with executives. I mean, I’ve got clients
I started working with when they
were 35-year-old VPs and now they’re
CEOs. Like you, I’ve been alongside on
their journey. And that helped me write
about the development of this fish out
of water who finds himself in the CEO
chair and has to grow into it fast.
A man or woman in that position
has a lot of people who want to be
close to them but not many they know
they can trust. One of my coaching
clients confided in me that his biggest
fear was looking weak. CEO of a major
public company. And the fear isn’t
unfounded.
Even though the company is rocking,
his executive team wants him to
make the board do things it doesn’t
want to do. And the board wants him
to make the executive team do things
they don’t want to do. And he’s stuck
in the middle, trying to remember what
happens to his stock options if he just
says to hell with it.
So lesson one as a speechwriter and
speech coach: it’s personal. It’s not
about us and our skills at rhetoric and
clever copy. It’s personal.
It’s more than those five strategic
initiatives and EBITDA and where
the stock price will be in two years. It’s
personal.
It’s about a man or a woman and
their journey and helping them find
the Ninja power to move armies that
don’t want to move against targets
that won’t stand still. And it’s personal
because if they fail, they take a lot of
people down with them. It’s not about
the money. It’s about being there in
the arena.
It’s personal because it’s about the
promises they made and fear they
can’t keep them. And our job is to
be their Yoda and connect them to
the force of authentic speaking. If we
don’t, then we’re shorting them in
what we owe them.
***
Here’s a secret a speechwriter can
never forget: people don’t care that
much about strategy, or sales goals or
market share. They may say they do,
but that’s not it.
They want to be inspired. They
want to be part of something meaningful
and big. And our job is to show
them what that feels like.
Every speech is a hero’s journey. But
the hero isn’t the speaker up on the
stage. No, no, no. In our theater, the
hero is the man or woman out there
in the audience looking for something
that will stop them selling themselves
short and finally let them become the
person they long be.
I read a lot of cognitive science
because I want to understand what’s
going on at THIS intersection of a
speaker and an audience. What is this?
How do we make it resonate? How do
we make it more than a talking head?
Yes, it’s theater but what is theater? It’s
a shared experience of consciousness.
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