The roar of the crowd
When your starting point is not ‘how can I make money?’ but ‘what can I do to solve this problem?’ remarkable things may happen
Monday, July 12 2010 || Comment || BY David Slack
My gym trainer said to me: “You know how a guitarist can play just the first two chords of a song, and everyone goes mad? Do you think you could do that with a speech?”
We were talking about It Might Get Loud, a film that brings together Jack White, Jimmy Page and The Edge to talk about the electric guitar. They play their guitars; it gets loud. We hear the original four-track rehearsals for ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’, then we see The Edge on stage. He plays the famous chords and everyone goes mad.
Try to do that with a speech. Try to do it with one they’ve heard before.
Journalists on the election trail get to know The Speech by heart; the self-deprecating quip, the touching anecdote, the rousing killer line. By the end of the campaign, all that’s left of the magic is the lady sawn in half.
Modern business is choked with speech making and presentations. So very much of it is bad. When the magic is gone, the slides and the tired cliches just keep on coming. Out of the hat comes the tattered rabbit. Again. And again. And again.
“Boat, bach, BMW.”
“Punch above our weight.”
“Think outside the box.”
“Step change.”
These were arresting ideas the first time someone said them. Today they are hollow husks. The weasel has been at the egg, and the yolk is gone. All that’s left is the bullet point on the slide, and a presenter with 15 minutes to go. You could quite forget that there are people in business with remarkable things to say.
Congratulations, then, to Kea — the organisation that connects New Zealanders who want to go global with people who already have — for offering something better. Their World Class New Zealand programme in March put six highly accomplished and celebrated New Zealanders in front of an audience of entrepreneurs, students, managers and business owners.
I was glad to be there; I was glad to be reminded how damned exciting business can be.
Craig Nevill-Manning is a key player at Google. He studied computer science at Canterbury and Waikato. He drew us a picture of life in Silicon Valley. You try a new idea, you get it wrong. “They’ll say: ‘Oh yeah,
Pets.com. I blew that up.’” You burn $40 million, you try again. You fail, you try once more. And you come up with a blockbuster.
In a field where everything is novel, things will blow up; you would be foolish to act as though they don’t. You would also be foolish to stop trying, at speed,
and often.
Ray Avery, the scientist, the inventor, the New Zealander of the Year, told stories about making lenses affordable to the poorest of the poor. He described his method: he observes what the world is crying out for, and he invents it. When your starting point is not ‘how can I make money?’ but ‘what can I do to solve this problem?’ remarkable things may happen.
Too few remarkable things are happening in our economy. Too many people are doing the same thing they’ve always done.
I was eight years old when New Zealand held a National Development Conference and said ‘we really need to diversify’. Jack Marshall came back from the EEC negotiations and said ‘we really need to diversify’. Mike Moore became our trade minister and said ‘we really need to diversify. Here — have a lamburger.’ But here we are today, and the numbers are still wrong. Too few people are earning export dollars, and what is being earned is concentrated in a few sectors.
Perhaps we are listening to the wrong people. True talent is authentic, fresh, unburdened by cliche. We cheat ourselves when we settle for a substitute.
Steve Jobs can play two chords in a speech and make the crowd go mad. He will report the Apple results, announce an unremarkable new product or two, offer some concluding thoughts, and make the fading sounds of a speaker getting ready to leave the stage. But then he’ll affect a sudden recollection and say the magic words: “but there is one more thing...”.
What follows has become the stuff of legend. One year it was the iPod, another the iMac; a couple of years ago, the iPhone. You should hear the crowd roar.
David Slack is the internet adventurer behind Speeches.com, and a passionate cyclist
