The End of Summer - with thanks to Steve Jobs & Flipron


At this time last year, I posted a video clip of audiences clapping out the conference season (HERE).

This year, I've produced a compilation of members of a conference audience listening in rapt attention (?) with musical backing from Flipron's The End of Summer (from their album Biscuits for Cerberus). Much admired for Jesse Budd's lyrics and Joe Atkinson's brilliance on the keyboards, this particular sequence neatly catches a suitable mood for marking the end of the party conference season.

And thanks to Steve Jobs - without whom...
When I bought my first computer in 1985, I came very close to buying an Apple Macintosh but chickened out and bought an Apricot (with two slots for 750K floppy disks).

About twenty years later, while staying with John Heritage in Los Angeles, I found myself being marched into the student shop at UCLA, where he made me buy my first MacBook.

Since then, I quickly upgraded to a MacBook Pro, have acquired a desktop MacPro and have been using an iPhone since the first week of its launch in the UK.

To expand on all the many virtues of being liberated from the familiar nightmares of using a Windows computer would be to risk a very long and boring blogpost. So suffice it to say that the incredible reliability and ease of using the iMovie program that's built into Macs has saved me thousands of hours in preparing demo clips both for lectures and courses and for posting as examples on this blog.

For example, preparing this particular movie - including retrieval of the music, selecting and editing the clips and aligning them with the backing - took less than half an hour.

And, as if that's not enough to be grateful to Steve Jobs for, he also stood out among CEOs as an extremely effective presenter from whom there was much that other business leaders could and should learn.

More from Steve Jobs:

Cameron's too good a speaker to be following Mrs Thatcher into the teleprompter trap

A couple of years ago, I posted some video clips showing how Margaret Thatcher's speech-making became less effective when she stopped using hard copy scripts and started reading speeches from teleprompter screens (HERE).

A few months later, I realised that I'd been mistaken in thinking that David Cameron was having problems reading from screens - as it turned out that he wasn't using an Autocue or any other form of teleprompter at that time (HERE).

Cameron follows Thatcher down the same hill
But yesterday Mr Cameron had not only taken to using a teleprompter for his leader's speech, but was also encountering the same kinds of difficulties that diminished Mrs Thatcher's effectiveness all those years ago.

When using a script on a lectern, she would return her eyes to the text, clear her throat and close her mouth after making an applaudable point, leaving no one in any doubt that the time had come for them to get their hands apart. But, when reading from teleprompter screens, her head stayed up gazing into space, with the result that her applause rate fell dramatically (video examples HERE)

And there were some rather long sections in Mr Cameron's speech yesterday where the lack of applause was noticeably absent

Here you can see see two examples of him falling into the same trap as Mrs Thatcher . In both cases, he sets up what's coming as an applaudable point. But in both cases, nothing happens for so long (2-3 seconds) that he's already carried on again by the time it finally does - at which point he has to break off.

Also in both cases he seems to acknowledge the glitch with a slight nod, indicating, perhaps: "yes, it is your turn and you should jolly well have started a bit sooner than that"?.


Given that Cameron is more effective than most of his contemporaries at speaking from scripts on a lectern, I'd advise him to ditch the teleprompter forthwith.

Or, if his aides have cooked up some reason that's convinced him it's a good idea, they should also convince him that he's going to need a lot more practice if he's to get anywhere near his effectiveness with old-fashioned scripts (or, for that matter, with no script at all, as in the 10 minute speech that clinched the leadership for him at the beauty parade in 2005).

Swim or sink with the president of the European Commission


Preparing for speechwriting course in Brussels this week, I thought it would be nice to include an example of a 'local' using some of the main rhetorical techniques in one of my demo tapes.

Such are the wonders of YouTube that it took less than a minute to find this little gem from the president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, which had been singled out for replaying in a news report on his 'state of the union' speech:

REPORTER: He said Europe has to move forward towards matching its monetary union with a real economic union among its member states:

PUZZLE: This is Europe's moment of truth.

SOLUTION: Europe must show that its more than 37 different national solutions.

CONTRAST (with swimming metaphor + alliteration): We either swim together or sink separately.

Not surprisingly, this selection of key rhetorical techniques worked well enough for it to be singled out by the media as a sound bite - but it didn't impress everyone.

Guess who doesn't want to be seen clapping
British readers may be interested to see that, of the five MEPs shown just before Mr Barroso starts speaking, the only one who doesn't join in with the applause is none other than Nigel Farage, leader of UKIP (the UK Independence Party).

Whether or not you're one of his supporters or opponents, it has to be admitted that his behaviour here is admirably consistent with his long-standing antipathy towards the EU.