Why doesn’t Romney catch on? And why has Cain so quickly climbed the popularity ladder?

These are a couple of key questions that provide important insight as to the value of the debates – perceived authenticity. Perception is in the eye of the beholder.

If the presidency was to be typecast, the perfect candidate is Mitt Romney. He looks good, has great political and business experience, is giving stellar debate performances – but people don’t seem to take to him. Plastic is a word that comes to mind.

I’ve often mentioned that Romney should muss up his hair a little to be real, but that’s just symbolic for doing SOMETHING to appear, and ‘be’, authentic. He DOES look like he’s playing a role. He’s careful and measured. We wish we could see him with more of a ‘forward lean’ – not so posed and ‘nice.’ Bluntness would be refreshing, and way out of character. Yet it would give some important authenticity points.

On the other hand, Herman Cain is almost a polar opposite – blunt, brash and bold. In this recent debate that was his favorite word for his ‘9,9,9’ plan – BOLD. We have no question he means what he says – we do not question his authenticity. And most importantly, he smiles often in his bluntness. We tend to like him. He is authentic. We trust him.

We trust and believe and follow those who are authentic. Authenticity is primarily established by behavior, not by message. But it has everything to do with whether our message will register on the listener (or voter in this case.) It has everything to do with leadership.

Everyone (well, many) wanted Chris Christie to run for President. Why? Because there is no question Chris Christie is a leader. And he is the poster child for authenticity. Many may not like what he says, but they believe what he says. He just endorsed Romney this week. Perhaps Romney hopes that some of his refreshing candor will rub off. It doesn’t work that way. What Romney needs to do is express his own brand of refreshing candor. That would be refreshing.

He can get away with jumping on a soap box, and that’s for one main reason: he’s a great communicator. Yup, we’re talking about Matt Damon. Sure he’s popular, a talented writer and performer, etc., but so are many actors. This guy knows how to use specific communication tools to rally an audience and most importantly, come across sincere.

So here he went again, hitting a homerun while speaking at the Save Our Schools March a few days ago, not only to support his mother (a teacher and fellow activist), but all teachers who are fighting standardized test score-based funding. Regardless of how you feel about the subject, anyone can appreciate Matt’s ability to pump up the crowd.

Check out this clip so you can see what I’m talking about (or see the whole thing here).

Matt artfully matches his behavior to his content to come across genuine. Here are my keepers and improvements (have to keep it balanced feedback!).

Keepers:

• Story (one of our SHARP principles) – he weaves the point of his speech around his experiences in public schools. This personalizes the message, gives him credibility, and is memorable. When listing out all the growth he experienced in school, he brought it back to the point by saying, “None of these qualities that have made me who I am can be tested.”
• Concise – he’s up there for about five minutes, but but still gives a memorable and meaningful talk. No need to go on and on if you can do it succinctly.
• Vocal variety – he speaks clearly, with plenty of variation to avoid the monotone. He also takes time to pause and pace himself, which is especially important when speaking over a mic to a large audience. He gives them time to hear the ends of his sentences, and ups the ante.

Improvements:

• A lot of I, I, I – common mistake in messaging is to talk a lot about yourself when you’re proving the value of your idea, product, or service. To be the most influential and affect change, take every opportunity to make the message about your listeners.
• Reading – at the end of the day, when you look down to read, you’re breaking connection with your audience. It’s best to organize yourself and speak off the cuff while using eye communication with your listeners (we need to get him a Decker Grid!).
• Nonwords – um’s and uh’s creep in there. They chip away at the experience you create when speaking. Better to pause instead of inserting a filler word.

High hopes for Matt as a communicator going forward, even a Top 10 spot! (Maybe not as high as Michael Moore suggesting he run for President in 2012, though.) Anything stick out to you, in terms of what went well, and what could be improved?

Last year’s list featured Captain Sully as the Best, while Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was hands down the Worst. There was quite a stir from readers as Sarah Palin was listed among the best, and President Obama among the worst.

Two shoo-ins for 2010: Sebastien Piniera, President of Chile looks to be leading the pack on the best list. And one of the worst (if not THE worst)…Tony Hayward, now former CEO of BP.

What about the rest of them – communicators from business, sports, entertainment, and politics? How did communications make or break them?

• Is Mark Zuckerberg among the best or worst?
• Will Steve Jobs land another spot on the best?
• It’s been a political year…will Obama and Palin repeat, and on which list? Who might join them?

As always, you can expect some obvious and some obscure, but all will have a key teaching point around communications for all of us.

In the meantime, we’d love to hear from you. Weigh in with your thoughts. Who’s in your 10?

First of all I want to confess I’ve not reviewed Obama recently because he basically is the same. In delivery. Think of teleprompter, predictability, cadence, professorial, etc. See here and here for a lot more detail. But tonight I was challenged by Michael Hyatt on Twitter, who said;

@MichaelHyatt: I’d like to hear @BertDecker ’s analysis of the President’s speech. It’s difficult to comment apolitical.

Now Michael is a friend, and a HEAVYWEIGHT (sorry for the caps) in the blogosphere and Twitterland, as well as respected CEO, so I couldn’t refuse. Otherwise I would have passed it by again.

Content

It IS hard to be apolitical, as I try to stay away from the politics of the content in most reviews. But in this 19′ speech anyone could have said “What’s the point.”

• An apolitical comment would be that he wanted to be front and center, use the Bully Pulpit, and declare the war over and reshift our priorities as a country. Did he? I don’t think so.

• A political comment (that I heard elsewhere) would be that he wasn’t really as interested in Iraq and America at war as he was about changing the domestic agenda of the country. I’m not sure that’s true, but his manner would probably reflect this view more accurately.

The Obama Experience

Here are the opening few minutes of his speech in good quality. For experiencing the communication of the President, you really only have to look at the first minute. It doesn’t change. (But look here to get the entirety in less quality.)

• Boring – He has no passion or emotion. Granted he is talking policy and he will be quoted and dissected, but a little passion in voice and face now and then would help his believability and influence immeasurably. And he had no stories or SHARPS that would make his message stick.
• Cadence – Ever since Fred Armison on Saturday Night Live got his cadence down while playing Obama, I can’t look at the President himself and not think of Armison. It is a rhythm that becomes sing-song, and contrived, and does not lead to a feeling of conviction and authenticity. Which leads us to…
• Professorial - It’s not just me that see’s our President as more and more professorial (academic, informational and aloof) in both demeanor and presentation, it is becoming widespread. Professorial is fine in the classroom, not so fine on the playing field. That is not the communication of a leader.

I could go on, but this is already too much politics for an ‘objective’ communications blog. But thanks for the prompt Michael – this get’s the juices flowing.

More importantly, what do YOU think?

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I want my life back,” wails BP Oil CEO Tony Hayward. Well, he really doesn’t wail, but he might as well have. Leaders lead, they don’t plead.

The BP Oil disaster on the Gulf Coast needs more than a good communicator, it is a terrible tragedy no matter who is at the helm. But BP does need a good communicator to make the best of an awful plight. Unfortunately, they have CEO Hayward, who has been his own worst enemy.

CEO’s have to be ready to lead with authenticity – where one’s perceived behavior as well as focus really counts. This CEO fails on both accounts.

Authenticity – what you say and how you say it

Hayward has been off from the beginning.  A month ago he appeared aloof – look at his manner in this clip (and above) at an early press conference.

I was appalled at his apparent smug and arrogant behavior. I don’t know him, but if that’s his natural style, I’m surprised he’s CEO. Then again, this is a company that made $10 billion profit last quarter! So where were his advisors? Where were his coaches? Why wasn’t he trained in advance so he knew how to act when the pressure was on. This was not the way.

“I Want My Life Back.”

So here we have a multi-millionaire CEO ‘wanting his life back’ in the face of the families of 11 people killed on ‘his’ oil rig, and tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands who will lose their economic life because of his oil. OK, not ‘his’ oil, but he has to speak as if it’s his oil. And he has not. What he did have to do was apologize for his remarks. The problem was, and is, we believe he meant it – that he cares only as it affects BP and himself.

Defense is not the best offense

Throughout these first 40 days of the disaster, Tony Hayward was the spokesperson – yet almost all of his statements smacked of defensiveness. First he says the effects will be very, very modest. More recently, in response to the fact that those cleaning the beaches were getting sick from evident oil fumes, he inferred that it could be “food poisoning!”

His appearances, and performances, were so bad that a national Cable News show ended their newscast with an editorial excoriating Hayward and saying, “Act like you care!”

It was just announced that Admiral Thad Allen will now make all the updates on the Gulf Oil disaster. (He’s good by the way.) Although politics are no doubt also involved, it is not surprising that both BP and the administration wanted Tony Hayward off the air. He did nobody any good, particularly himself.

Lessons for us all

We will all be called upon to speak under pressure in important circumstances. Be prepared. It is not just the CEO’s like Hayward that have to be ready, though the stakes might be higher in his case. It’s all of us. In this video and social media age, we are all on television. If we don’t know how we come across, and where our heart and our message is, we may be doomed to fail when it counts the most. And it doesn’t have to be.

No doubt that Tony Hayward would like his life back. And I bet he’d like to start this communications experience over again – after maybe a heart check and a little training too.

First the debate:

Meg did well, but Steve probably did better if this was an equal contest. But it is not – Whitman has a 30-40 point lead on Poizner, and the debate did nothing to change that. On June 8 Meg will win in a landslide.

Bring on Jerry Brown:

Jerry Brown

Where this gets interesting is in the general election this summer/fall, between past Governor, Presidential contender, now Lt Gov. of California Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman. It’s one stiff-communicator against another in a race for a prize that’s dubious at best. The state of California is in the worst shape of it’s long history. Can Meg Whitman convince voters she can change that? (We’ll leave Jerry Brown’s communication content and style for a later post.)

Communicate To Influence, Not Just To Inform:

Look at these cogent words from yesterday’s incisive Business Week article on Meg Whitman:

“The most gifted politicians manage to turn scripted “messaging” into stirring stump material, but there is nothing Churchillian in Whitman’s delivery. Says former colleague Rajiv Dutta, former eBay CFO and PayPal president, now a managing director at Elevation Partners: “Clearly she doesn’t have the practiced ease of appearing to be intimate in front of millions, which career politicians have spent their lives perfecting.”

About 80% of the voters are biased and will vote accordingly. For Meg to get those 20-30% undecided to vote for her she must influence, be trusted (and likable) and inspire vision. She’s not there yet. She still speaks in PowerPoint Speak – bullet points and logic statements, and cluttered. Fine for her as a former CEO directing employees, not so great for inspiring voters of a new vision for a collapsed economy. Leaders must inspire, not just inform.

Behaviorally Meg Whitman must loosen up, engage the media, and at least look like she is having fun. She is smart and capable – these are just behavioral habits that she could change with some coaching.

More importantly perhaps, she needs to create sticky messages.

God knows there is enough material in the collapsed state of California to have vivid examples, metaphors, SHARPS and memorable language to help make HER colorful, and much more memorable. She needs messages that are ‘made to stick,’ for example:

• The union pension fund obligations are like a tsunami that are about to engulf our great State of California
• Government spending is as out of control as the BP gusher that is polluting the Gulf of Mexico. It must be brought under control.
• 40% of California’s public school budget is for admin and overhead. If I ran eBay like that I wouldn’t be here talking to you tonight – I would have been fired.

Stay tuned. This is going to be an interesting general election here in California, and could be a microcosm of what’s to come for the country.

I hesitated blogging on Scott Brown’s acceptance speech because I just got back from Las Vegas and it’s late and it’s too political – but after seeing him on Tivo I couldn’t resist. What Barack Obama did in 2004 in his speech at the Democratic convention, Scott Brown just did in 2010 in his victory speech – burst upon the national scene.

Here’s why:

• It’s a national stage – this was a very important election politically. The world was watching – the race and the speech, but even more so the clips of the speech that will be televised and blogged over the next few weeks. And because of his surprising and excellent communicating he is immediately a force to be reckoned with.
• He packages and uses symbols well (SHARPS in our language). The obvious political phrase “We can do better” became a repeated litany. But probably the best is his iconic and populist green truck that has 201,000 miles on it, and which he made a point of driving and referencing throughout the campaign. Well publicized, he referenced it several times, causing the chant “Drives A Truck, Drives a Truck…”
• He is humorous – making several jokes – playing basketball with Barack Obama, a sign on supporter’s lawn, and even joked about his daughters’ being ‘available’ (maybe not politically correct however.)
• Focused on his issues. He appropriately thanked Massachusetts for electing him, and emphasized the independents, but he immediately went to national issues. He was articulate in speaking to his view on the Health Care bill, and what he was going to do about that, as well as his views on spending, taxes and the war.
• He can turn a phrase. He actually turned many phrases, but perhaps one of the best lines he had was talking about terrorists and saying, “our tax dollars should pay for weapons to stop them and not lawyers to defend them.”
• His use of the teleprompter was excellent. President Obama could take lessons from him.
• And the importance of a smile – it served Ronald Reagan very well, and it serves Brown. He is energetic, attractive, personable (spontaneously related to many on stage) and confident – important communication attributes.

But above all, his victory speech created a communication experience, and not just for the enthusiastic, and very large, crowd of supporters. For the viewer the image of confidence, strength and purpose was powerful. Although there’s a lot of water yet to go under Scott Brown’s bridge, right now, like him or not politically, he is a force to be reckoned with.