The best speakers challenge assumptions, share hard-earned lessons, and give leaders something worth taking home.
There is a particular kind of keynote speaker who can command $20,000, $30,000, or even more for an hour of work and leave an audience feeling inspired without having told them a single thing they didn’t already know. I find this fascinating. If I knew I could get paid that kind of money to repeat things people have heard a thousand times before, I might’ve chosen a different career path.
You know the type. The well-dressed middle-aged guy (yes, it is usually a man for whatever reason), with a fresh haircut and some brand new, very comfortable shoes bounds onto the stage to thumping music, tells a story about some adversity he overcame, quotes Good to Great as if Jim Collins just wrote it yesterday, and explains how his high school football coach or his grandma who really raised him taught him the importance of teamwork, perseverance, and never giving up. Somewhere along the way, we get a reference to The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, a lesson about getting out of your comfort zone, a quote from Henry Ford, and a reminder that winners never quit and quitters never win. By the time the closing music starts, every cliché known to mankind has been dragged out, dusted off, and presented as a profound new insight into human performance.
And the audience loves it.
I’ve sat through enough business presentations over the years to know that there are some genuinely terrific speakers out there. People who have actually done something, learned something, made mistakes, and have something useful to share. They can make you laugh, challenge your assumptions, and give you ideas you can put to work on Monday morning. Those people are worth listening to. My complaint is with the enormous supply of speakers who seem to have figured out that the easiest way to make a living on the speaking circuit is to package common sense as revelation and deliver it with enough enthusiasm that nobody notices the difference.
Part of the problem is that the keynote business rewards entertainment, not necessarily substance. Meeting planners want a room full of happy people, favorable evaluations, and attendees who leave talking about what a great event it was. Nobody wants to hear complaints that the speaker was boring or depressing. So the safe choice is often the person who knows how to work a crowd, tell a heartwarming story, get everybody clapping, and leave the audience feeling good about itself. Whether anything changes after everyone goes home is apparently a secondary consideration.
I think this is particularly unfortunate in the AEC business. We have real problems to solve. Firms struggle with profitability, project management, recruiting, employee retention, succession planning, cash flow, and the difficult business of growing without losing control of what made them successful in the first place. We don’t need somebody telling us that “teamwork makes the dream work.” We need somebody who can explain why we aren’t selling the work we really want to do, why our projects aren’t making money, why our best people are unhappy, or why we keep promoting technically excellent people into management positions without teaching them how to manage.
Tell me something I can use. Show me how to improve my business. Explain what you tried, what went wrong, what you learned, and what you would do differently if you had to do it again. Give me an idea that makes me uncomfortable because it challenges something I’ve believed for 30 years. I’m perfectly happy to be entertained in the process, but entertainment without substance is a pretty expensive form of amusement.
It also drives me nuts the way a lot of these speakers present themselves as original thinkers while repeating the same material everybody else on the (speaking) circuit is using. The vocabulary changes a little, the slides look different, and the personal story gets a fresh twist, but the underlying message is usually the same. Believe in yourself. Build a great team. Embrace change. Be resilient. Lead with purpose. It’s not that any of these ideas are wrong. It’s that repeating them doesn’t make somebody an expert on running a business.
So why do audiences eat this fluff up? I suspect part of the answer is that inspiration is easier to consume than information. It feels good to hear that success is possible, that we’re capable of greatness, and that all we have to do is believe in ourselves and work hard. It’s considerably less comfortable to hear that our pricing model is wrong, our overhead dollars are not being spent well, our principals aren’t doing their jobs, or our business practices need a complete overhaul. One message makes us feel good about ourselves. The other might require us to change something.
I’m not against motivation or even motivational speakers. But I am against pretending that motivation is a substitute for knowledge, experience, or hard work. Sometimes people need a kick in the rear, a fresh perspective, or a reminder of what they’re capable of accomplishing. A good speaker can provide all of that. But the best speakers I’ve encountered don’t rely on recycled quotations and sentimental stories to make their points. They have something original to say, and they have the experience to back it up.
If you’re hiring a keynote speaker for your next conference, ask yourself a simple question: Will this person leave our audience with anything more than a warm feeling and a notebook full of quotations they’ll never read again? If the answer is “no,” save your money. Buy everybody a good dinner somewhere cool instead. At least they’ll get a full belly and maybe some good memories out of it.
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Mark Zweig is Zweig Group’s chairman and founder. Contact him at mzweig@zweiggroup.com. |
