Winning Friends during the Q&A of a Speech – With a Little Help from Harville Hendrix
July 13, 2015
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One of my favorite speeches of my own was the strictly ceremonial opening of an awards evening my client, Diageo North America, the US and Canadian operations of the world’s leading total beverage alcohol company, was conducting for its wholesalers several years ago. Presented by Guy Smith, Executive Vice President for Corporate Relations, the speech used the place of the event to set the tone and theme of the evening, the awarding of the 2008 Golden Bars for exceptional performance.  In the speech, the place became not simply the stage and backdrop for the evening; it became the evening’s controlling metaphor.The place was the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, home to the Hayden Planetarium and exhibits whose origins date back to the contributions made by Teddy Roosevelt, son of the museum’s founder.  The museum encompasses the whole history of life on this planet and, through the planetarium, the life of the cosmos.  And the words of Teddy Roosevelt provide a commentary on what it means to be part of that history – and any history of human endeavor.  The magnitude of the setting and the words of Roosevelt were both humbling and inspiring, the complex tone we sought for the evening.

Here’s a sample:

We are surrounded, not just by the whole history of humankind, but the whole history of the universe.  A few floors above us you can stand right next to an 80 million-year-old fossil of a creature that became extinct 65 million years ago.  In the Hayden planetarium you can watch the future of our Milky Way Galaxy unfold, producing a giant new galaxy billions and billions of years from now.

Makes our own ambitions for reaching our strategic goal of 2011 seem kind of modest, doesn’t it?  I mean, if that little 2-foot critter now residing on the fourth floor can get himself from 80 million B.C. to 65 million B.C., then I think we are a pretty sure bet for getting from 2008 to 2011, the year we’ll achieve our current strategic ambition.  After all, we have the whole story of life on this planet, told in this museum, as our teacher and guide.

If you are like me, that story can make you feel humble, but not diminished.  It is a big story, but each of us has a part to play in it to keep it going. If you make a difference, if you help the story unfold, then you will be remembered — in a museum like this one or with the kind of accolades that we are going to bestow tonight.

Helping us remember our common story and our individual parts in it is what Theodore Roosevelt Senior had in mind when he helped found this museum in 1869. Certainly his son Teddy understood that lesson.  I hope you all saluted him this evening when you came in through the grand reception hall.  He was the one with the hat, not the tall bony one.

Teddy knew he was part of a far bigger story than himself.  But he also knew that he, like everyone else, had a duty to enlarge the story.  As he once put it, “A man’s usefulness depends upon his living up to his ideals in so far as he can.”

If you think that makes him sound like an old fuddy-duddy, he was not.  He once told a group of schoolchildren in Oyster Bay, his hometown, “There are two things that I want you to make up your minds to: first, that you are going to have a good time as long as you live — I have no use for the sour-faced man — and next, that you are going to do something worthwhile, that you are going to work hard and do the things you set out to do.”

Teddy would have felt right at home with this group tonight. You certainly know how to have a good time, to celebrate life, as we like to put it at Diageo.  And you certainly work hard to do the things you set out to do.

In a few moments, we are going to honor those among us who have distinguished themselves by the vigor of their hard work and their passion for helping others celebrate life.  They, like our previous Golden Bar winners, have enlarged the shared story of our industry.

What I like about that opening is that it took one of the common elements of any speech – the place where it occurs – and found in the place a meaning for the event that otherwise it might not have had.  I try to remember that lesson for any speech.  Before writing for a speaker “I really am glad to be here this evening,” it’s a good idea to find out where “here” is.  You just never know what you may discover that will serve your speaker, the speech, and the audience when you do.