Andrew Hennigan's Blog

 In a 2013 post How to Deliver Impromptu Speeches Without Anxiety I advocated preparing in advance for predictable requests to speak. If you are a startup founder, an explorer or a novelist you can easily imagine what people want you to talk about and prepare in advance. Preparing in advance is immensely useful, but to improve your speaking skills to another level you need to master the ability to improvise on a broader range of topics. Clearly they have to be topics you know something about, so reading and listening to a variety of content will be useful. But that preparation alone is not enough; you will also need to improve your technique and there are three fairly simple rules that will help you do just that. Start With an Idea . A speech will be much stronger when it is constructed around a well-formed idea -- you might recognize this as being at the heart of the success of the TED/TEDx format. Just talking about a subject in general might be simpler but if you start w...

When Adobe demonstrated their Project VoCo at the MAX event in November the media focused mostly on the downside risks, though the tool potentially has many legitimate uses. All you have to do is feed this experimental audio workstation tool a sample recording of someone speaking then you can rewrite the text and the audio will be automatically corrected, even creating new words with the correct voice. For media production companies this kind of tool will be immensely useful, making it possible to correct voiceovers and dialog without having to bring the talent back into the studio. Actors might be less enthusiastic and will have to consider this possibility in their contracts. But much of the media coverage focused on dark applications of this technology. With this tool you can literally put words in someone's mouth, editing a speech so that someone appears to say something they didn't. Sooner of later someone will actually do this in the wild, but I suspect that the ...

At TED and TEDx talks, major product launches and other big-budget events you will notice that the presentation designers often opt for white writing on a black background. There are actually good reasons for this. To many people it simply looks cool and professional, but there are also practical choices that make this style appealing. One of the most compelling is that a white background adds a significant amount of light to the room. In a major conference where there are plenty of spotlights on the speaker and the room is professionally lit this does not make much impact, but in small and medium size events or in company meeting rooms you might notice that the brightness of modern projectors can be an issue. One way to deal with this problem is to have a fairly constant intensity presentation where there are no slides that are significantly darker, but this can be monotonous. If you blank to black the screen when the images are not needed the impact is even worse. Back in the ...

When the first edition of my book about professional networking, Payforward Networking , was first published in 2015  it was based on the workshops I did for business school students and focused mainly on the core concepts that could be taught in one day. So it explained why networking is so important, how it works and ways of doing it in real life and online, but it didn't focus so much on details like practical mingling tips or the needs of specific groups. But at the end of the book there was an extra chapter where I invited readers to ask about any other aspects of networking they were interested in. If the reader's question wasn't answered by the book I would, I promised, answer it either directly or through the writing of a new chapter. Many people took up this offer and asked questions that inspired new chapters. I sent a draft of each new chapter to the person who first suggested it. Now all of these additional chapters have been gathered together in the revi...

There are many people who dislike conventional face-to-face networking events, partly because they take up so much time but mainly because they are rarely enjoyable. Luckily there are also many ways to build a healthy professional network without ever attending any event that the organizers might describe as being primarily for networking. You may find that you get more and better connections elsewhere. Here are just a few ideas: Conferences : Attend selected professional conferences related to your field, a field you would like to work in one day and, occasionally, some business that you have no connection with today. Plan ahead and make good use of the opportunities and you will come away with some healthy new connections. For the conferences not in your field choose a short, free event close to your home base. It will feel strange at first to be with people in a different business but you will be surprised what useful things you can discover. Courses : Sign up for an MBA or ...

How do I make a presentation convincing? This is a question that keeps coming up in coaching sessions and speaking workshops. I suspect that some people are hoping that there is some magical secret known only to the experts. But there is no magical secret. There are many techniques that you can use to make your presentations more convincing but all of them involve hard work. There are no short cuts. What exactly are these techniques? To begin with you have to test all your ideas before you even start to create the presentation. You might have an idea in your head that you are sure is very convincing but it might not work with your audience. Perhaps they view it in a different context or there might be a step in the logic that is not clear. Test your ideas in conversations with colleagues and watch their reaction. Did they look unconvinced? Did they raise any objections? Did they disagree? Use this feedback to polish your ideas and keep testing. When your ideas pass this firs...

At the Nordic Business Forum in Stockholm this week the organizers made serious efforts to encourage networking -- one of the key value adds for conferences like this. Among other things they had a designated area for Brella meetups arranged through the event meetup app Brella , with prizes for the most active networkers and they took care to promote networking from the stage. Before the very first break the event moderator André Noel Chaker stressed the importance of being open to networking, displaying a diagram on the big screens showing how people should stand in open mingle groups to encourage other people to approach. This didn't work as well as it might. But he also told the audience to be open to meeting new people and invited everyone to commit to this. Borrowing from the "Commitment and Consistency" chapter of Robert Cialdini's classic textbook "Influence" he invited everyone to commit to this openness before leaving the room. Did it work? ...