Avinash Bansal

Conor Neill on the 3 best ways to start a speech (most people get this wrong): "I guarantee if you go to conferences, 19 out of 20 speakers will start in one of these ways: 'My name is Conor Neill. I'm from Tango, and this talk is about the latest trend in monitoring strategies.' But all of you are sitting with a piece of paper that already says who I am and what I'm going to talk about. By repeating what you already know, I'm giving a signal that it's time to get your BlackBerry out." Conor explains the three best ways to start instead: Third best: A question that matters to the audience. "How do you phrase a problem that the audience faces in a question?" Second best: A factoid that shocks. "There are more people alive today than have ever died. Every two minutes, the energy reaching the earth from the sun is equivalent to the whole annual energy usage of humanity. Does that change how you think about energy?" The best way: Start like you'd start a story to a child. "How do we start a story to a child? 'Once upon a time.' And what happens when you say once upon a time? My daughter leans forward, gets ready to hear, engages. We were all trained as kids to know when a story's coming. We also know when a teacher is about to deliver a 40-minute boring lecture." He explains the grown-up version: "In business, you don't hear Jack Welch saying 'once upon a time.' Steve Jobs doesn't start his speeches with 'once upon a time.' So there's a grown-up way of saying it: 'In October, the last time I was in this room, there were 120 people here. I was having a conversation with one of the world's experts on public speaking and he said something to me that changed what I think about what's important in speaking.' Now I can pause for 30 seconds, and you want to know what he said." Conor concludes: "Stories are about people. They're not about objects. They're not about things. If you want to tell a good story about your company, don't talk about the software talk about the people who built the software. What they do. How they are. What's important to them. What they sacrifice."