Leadership and great speeches: The 15 Minute Class

1. BE YOURSELF

Extra credit. This clip takes 20 minutes. Think of it as pleasurable homework. Get yourself a coffee, settle down with it and watch it if you have the time. Or ignore it or come back to it if you want to stick to the 15 minute class and jump to points 2 and 3.

Learning point from this speech: Naturalness. You just know Sir Ken Robinson talks like this to you in person as well as to a mass audience on a stage. And humour! (or ‘humor’ if you are in the US). 

 

2. USE FAT WORDS OVER THIN WORDS

‘Fat’ words are heavy with meaning. Words like ‘life’ ‘love’, ‘liberty’ and ‘the pursuit of happiness’ are fat with meaning and speak to people’s hearts.

‘Thin’ words like ‘agenda’, ‘plan’, ‘structure’, ‘organization’ are big in meaning, yes, but thin in terms of resonance – the emotions they evoke in people.

Here’s Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, just 272 words, but acknowledged as one of the greatest speeches ever heard. It is laden with ‘fat’ words.

Pullitzer prize winner and former Yale Professor Gary Wills calls these 272 words “The words that remade America�. He says:

"272-word address: All modern political prose descends from [it]. The Address does what all great art accomplishes. [I]t tease[s] us out of thought." he makes a strong case for his argument that the concept of "a single people dedicated to a proposition" has been overwhelmingly accepted by successive generations of Americans.

Nov. 19, 1863

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

"Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it, as a final resting place for those who died here, that the nation might live. This we may, in all propriety do. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow, this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have hallowed it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here; while it can never forget what they did here.

It is rather for us the living, we here be dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."

This version of the Gettysburg Address has been verified against the version on display at the National Archives.

Note also Lincoln’s use of the Law of Three (see the 60 Second version of this class): “we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow, this ground.� We remember better in threes. And we communicate better in threes.

More on This:
Book - Lincoln At Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America. Gary Wills


3. DON’T OVER-RATE THE IMPORTANCE OF SPEECHES IN LEADERSHIP

“This leadership was not confined to fine speeches. In private meetings, King was generally quiet. He listened while others argued, often angrily and at length, and then he would calmly sum up the debate and identify a way forward. From the outset of his career in Montgomery in 1955, right through to his death in 1968, King had a remarkable ability to get people who would otherwise be constantly feuding to work together. He was consistently reluctant to sever or sour relations with anyone who might help the cause. This was particularly important because a by-product of racism was a pronounced tendency to factionalism inside the black community. King became the vital centre - a point of balance and unity.�

From a challenging analysis of Martin Luther King’s style that gets beneath the usual hagiography and focus on speeches and includes an assessment of his strengths AND weaknesses by King’s biographer Dr Peter J Ling Martin Luther King’s Style of Leadership starts off looking at ‘The Great Leader Myth’. It’s five pages at about 60 seconds a page and a number of learning points on each page, plus further reading at the end.

And here is the I Have A Dream speech as text if you want a refresher.

NOTE
This is just sample class content. We have enough source material for a class of up to an hour on this subject. It can be cut and shaped to meet your needs. And modules can include feedback and self-assessment tools so participants can say which bits of the class work and which they didn’t find useful and can assess their own performance afterwards.

Source: 15 Minute Class, Leadership and Great Speeches, a sample from the Communications Module, one of a number of development modules we can build for you within your own in-house version of The Leadership Hub. Email me for a quote for us to build you a corporate, private, version of The Hub, with or without learning modules and classes (they are optional). Or if you would like me to quote to create learning modules for an existing intranet-based development platform if you have one of your own already: Phil@60SecondLeader.com