Here is a review of Talk Like TED in the London Evening Standard.
Article transcript:
Do you speak Silicon English — the inspiring but meaningless sentences of the tech set? Richard Godwin investigates the rise of TED talk
RICHARD GODWIN
Published: 10 March 2014 Updated: 13:14, 10 March 2014
Once upon a time in California, there lived a guy named Ted. OK, there wasn’t really a guy called Ted — TED is actually an acronym for the Technology, Entertainment and Design conference where people like Sheryl Sandberg, Bill Clinton and Alain de Botton make speeches that get shared a lot on the internet. But help me out here. According to a new book called Talk Like TED: The 9 Public Speaking Secrets of the World’s Top Minds by Carmine Gallo, I need to “Master the Art of Storytelling” if I want to engage you people — and a great way of doing that is to give my audience a figure to identify with. So guys, meet Ted.
Ted had a simple idea. “Wouldn’t it be great,” said Ted, “if I could harness the inspirational power of the world’s leading thinkfluencers and ideapreneurs for the YouTube generation?”
Everyone told Ted it couldn’t be done. “Why would anyone sit through a lecture on start-up connectivity when TMZ.com has footage of Katy Perry tongueing Miley Cyrus?” they said.
But then Ted did something crazy. He released a thousand spiders into the audience! There were spiders everywhere. There were spiders in people’s hair; there were spiders on people’s legs. Everyone was like: “WTF, Ted?”
“Interesting fact,” said Ted. “Although people are statistically more frightened of spiders than death, you are actually more likely to be killed by a champagne cork than by a spider. And no one’s afraid of champagne!”
“Oh neat!” said everyone. And they laughed at themselves for getting so freaked out by the spiders just now. And then they listened in rapt attention as Ted explained how Ted.com gets 1.5 million hits a day, there are TEDx conferences in 130 countries and Ted has now become one of the most successful intellectual brands in the world, a sort of people’s Davos.
Of course, none of the above really happened — and I’m not sure it really made sense — but it’s a pretty good indication of how Gallo’s book would work if he delivered it as a TED talk. He has made a close study of genre and concluded that you must stick to the “18-minute rule” (18 minutes is the average attention span); teach your audience something new; tell a few jokes; and centre your speech on a “jaw-dropping moment”. The most famous example was when Bill Gates released a scourge of mosquitoes into the crowd to make a point about malaria.
For a more amusing take on the cult of Ted, you could look up the wonderful parody that opened Danny Boyle’s Channel 4 police drama, Babylon. “They say that your Ted talk is the most important 18 minutes of your life!” declares the fictional head of Instagram before launching into the full range of thinkspirational clichés. For all the learning and intelligence in those Ted talks, there’s an awful lot of hocus-pocus.
Of course, the abuses of language in the corporate world have produced a rich seam of humour, from Nikolai Gogol’s Diary of a Madman to Ricky Gervais’s The Office. We smirk at such terms as “let’s circle back on that one”. We shudder when we realise we are no longer human “beings” but human “resources”.
However, this language is constantly evolving. If the prevailing influence of corporate speak 10 years ago was management consultancy (with its “downsizing”, “outsourcing” and “core competencies”), now it is the Utopian chumminess of Silicon, with its “intrapreneurs”, “crowdsourcing”, “data-modelling” and “connectivity”.
What was once the arcane jargon of Silicon Valley is now heard in the corridors of power. David Cameron’s former special adviser, Steve Hilton, was a notorious blue-sky thinker, much misunderstood at No 10. He was beautifully parodied as Stewart Pearson in The Thick of It: “I like the plasmic nature of your data modelling”, “Let’s imagineer the narrative”, etc.
It turns up in the unlikeliest places. The Daily Telegraph has recently replaced a straight-talking editor with an American “digital change agent” (and Ted talk veteran) called Jason Seiken. “It’s really inspiring and everything but no one really understands what he’s talking about,” confided one reporter who was baffled by what they’re calling “Seikenese” in the news hub.
It is interesting how hopeful a lot of the new business terms are, how much they emphasise imagination, creativity and connection. We no longer “touch base” (a competitive, sporting metaphor). We “reach out” (a humane gesture redolent of God touching fingertips with Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel). Indeed, so many of our computing terms are touched by the divine. “The Cloud” sounds so much more transcendent than “a bunch of servers in a warehouse somewhere”.
While we have ascribed divine powers to our computers, we have in turn made ourselves a little bit more like computers. Digital companies often talk of the need to “hack”, to somehow break into the code of non-digital life and alter it — including our own code. A “lifehack” is a way of making your day-to-day existence that bit more efficient. We use terms such as “bandwidth” to describe our own cognitive powers.
Talk Like TED is full of this sort of shift. Before your speech, you need to put yourself into an “On” state. (Double espresso?) To ensure you make a memorable appearance, you must locate “the brain’s natural ‘save button’”. It is a sort of a reverse anthropomorphism — a way of describing our own synapses and cells in terms that would make sense to a programmer. It doesn’t always require arcane coding terms either — perfectly ordinary language will do the job. “Stories are just data for the soul,” as a person called Brené Brown said at a TEDx conference.
Still, lurking beneath all this airy talk of connection is an implied threat. This is the digital revolution, after all. “Disruption” is a popular term in start-up circles — the entrepreneur’s dream is to “disrupt” a given industry in the way that Spotify has “disrupted” the music industry, or AirBnB has disrupted hotels. The highly influential Lean Startup by Eric Ries is full of sentences like: “The unit of progress for Lean Startups is validated learning — a rigorous method for demonstrating progress when one is embedded in the soil of extreme uncertainty…” Of course, when you do find yourself embedded in the soil of extreme uncertainty, you need a little reassurance. Take a look at the world’s most popular blog, by a digital marketing guru named Seth Godin. It’s supposed to be about business but it reads much more like self-help. “The second leap is deciding how to take your project to an entirely new level,” he told his millions of readers recently… “The first leap is deciding to be the kind of leader willing to make precisely that sort of leap.”
You are left excited, intrigued even, willing yourself to be the sort of visionary they tell you you can be… but none the wiser as to how to achieve it. Reading this stuff is a little like being invited to a party where the host forgets to tell you the address and then asks you a week later why you didn’t come. I’m often left with the same sense of deflation after watching Ted talks, fun though they often are. OK, I’m inspired! But I’m not sure I’m all that informed…
But I think the overall message of Tedspeak is this: if you are left behind or turned off by the brave new digital world we are creating… well, ultimately it’s your own stupid fault.
(Carmine Gallo is an independent, objective communication expert not affiliated with TED Conferences, LLC)