A little book arrived in the mail recently:  15 minutes including Q & A:  A Plan to Save the World from Lousy Presentations, by Joey Asher, president of Speechworks, a communications coaching firm in Atlanta.  Let me say from the outset that I love just about everything about this book.  It’s a polemic against long, boring, over-PowerPointed business speeches, and that’s a subject I’ve been blogging about for 4 years now.  So what’s not to love?  More, within the polemic is some crisp, good advice for organizing brief speeches and delivering them. 

There are only a couple of points about those brief speech tips that I’d argue over with Joey, and I’ll cover those below, but overall he’s just about right on the money.  This is a great book for mid-level executives, speakers preparing to lead breakout sessions, speakers in internal meetings – the great silent majority of speeches given in a thousand companies around the world every day. 

Here’s my one main problem with the book:  because (as I’ve said many times) the only reason to give a speech is to change the world, our business as speakers is changing the minds of our audience.  Now, changing people’s minds is both an intellectual and an emotional exercise.  And to make a real, lasting emotional decision to change our minds takes more than 15 minutes including Q & A.  As I’ve seen in thousands of speeches over the years, changing people’s minds requires time because you have to take them down into the problem and wallow there for a while, before you can lead them back up into the solution.  Otherwise, we listen, and we even engage intellectually, but we don’t change our minds fundamentally.  If I’m going to come over to your point of view, then you’re going to have to stay with me a spell and show me you really get my problem, and that you’ve got a solution that’s worthy of my consideration.   

So if you have to change the minds of the audience about something important, something that matters, something that people care about deeply, you need more than 15 minutes including Q & A.  That’s a fact of psychology.  But if your speech is, say, a breakout session on “Maximizing the Online Marketing Impact of X,” or “Improving SEO Rankings for Local Real Estate Offers,” then this book provides an excellent template for your speech. 

And further, Joey raises a good point:  what justification do we have to take more than 15 minutes of people’s time these days?  I love – love – the implicit courtesy to the rest of us time-deprived people.  The only justification for taking more time is to have an issue that’s important to the audience, a point of view that’s sincere, and genuine respect for the audience’s need to make a decision for itself. 

The few minor points that I disagree with Joey about in his excellent little book follow.  First, his recommendations for organizing the 7-minute speech are fine, but they contain more recapping than I think is really necessary.  In that short a speech, you simply don’t need as many signposts as he suggests.  Second, his ideas for transitions are too simplistic; it gets a little tedious to say, “That’s point one.  Point two is next.  It is…..”  Good storytelling takes more than mere enumeration.  And finally, in the delivery section, he makes good (if rather basic) points about eye contact, but strays into dangerous territory when he tells people to “exaggerate” as a way of making your presentation more interesting.  That does work for some people, but for others it creates hilarious results.   Of course, it’s difficult to provide one-size-fits-all advice in a book, especially one this short, but nonetheless, I think the idea of exaggeration as the only fundamental approach to mention is wrong.  There are other approaches to bringing out your personal style that work better.   Imagining yourself talking to a close friend or family member, for example. 

Overall, I recommend the book highly as an intelligent, bracing polemic with a great deal of useful advice packed into a very brief space.  Nice job.  If everyone took Joey’s advice, the business speaking world would be a much better place.  And we could perhaps save the longer speeches for the ones that really matter.