Having worked on a team doing TVC-punctuated speeches for Kevin Roberts at one end through to a recent CE who would only use 40+ OHTs (and a long stick as a pointer) wouldn’t it be great if all of the points Jason raises here were “issued by the SSC” as a must-aspire-to, rather than the bland and safe chaff that most managers generally exect and are safely satisfied with (what does that say?)

Another ideal that is side-stepped for most speeches is to start out with an agreed outline, one page of key points max, where the person delivering the speech is actually involved before empowering the drafter to “go for it”! Having a licence to do more than kill the audience with bullet points thereafter would be great, if only the conventions surrounding this were more open-minded to doing something other than each speaker being a ‘talking head’.

Talking of which one Talking Head has found that Powerpoint does have some artful uses… see: http://www.davidbyrne.com/art/eeei/index.php