Today the Supreme Court ruled that corporations can spend as much money as they want influencing American Elections.  If I lived in China or Russia, I'd be pretty happy.

The Supreme Court is made up of justices who demonstrate no understanding of how profoundly the world has changed due to changes in business, technology and communications.  Not surprising, since the average age of the justices is 67, with several members far older than that.   I suspect none of these justices ever worked in a global company.

Corporations today do not belong to any geography.  They belong to their investors.  And those investors can come from anywhere. 

I'm not too happy over the US Supreme Court allowing corporations to spend what they want in elections. The scenarios I built were all pretty local, though. This analysis from Fast Company takes a much more global perspective. Read the whole post for a scenario that isn't very pretty.

23 January

It's not taking long to find evidence for the scenario just imagined.

How to be passionate (when you open your mouth)

Vijay recently asked in the comments on a recent talk:

Thank you for a great presentation.  I noticed that your energy was explosive and  there was absolutely no point in the presentation where I could detect a lull. I am interested in learning if you have any secrets or techniques in  maintaining the focus of not just the audience, but also  yourself as I often space out even when I am working on something that I am passionate about.

Explosive energy makes me think of being a drummer in Spinal Tap. Perhaps I should tone it down.

There are four things going on.

1. My life is at stake.  I have bet I can make a living on my ideas and my ability to express them. I have no guarantees, no salary and no pension. Every time I write a blog post, a book or a give a talk I’m basically an entrepreneur. I’m not half invested. This isn’t a side project. THIS IS IT. I need people to buy my books, hire me to speak, and to tell others about me. When you’ve invested your heart in something, it’s much easier to appear passionate about it, because you are.
2. I believe what I say. I really hate phony people. I hate people who water things down, intentionally mislead, or pretend they care about things they don’t. How much of what is said at work do people truly believe or care about? I think very carefully, and long, about most of what I create, and so when the time comes to give a presentation, or write a book, my points are things I truly believe.  And I’ve worked hard to make them concise. I’m not holding much back because I know it’s easier to get excited about things you deeply believe, especially if they’ve been boiled down to their essence. If you asked me to talk about my favorite tax software, or which 401k forms I liked the most, passion would be hard to find.
3. I’ve extended my range.  If you can only play one note on your guitar, you can’t do very much. Musicians, especially singers, practice to extend their range. Most speakers have a narrow range. They only know how to get from volume level 4 to 5. If you practice, and listen to other great speakers carefully, you’ll notice how wide their range is. They can whisper (volume level 2) or almost holler (volume level 7).  You also have a range of gestures, and postures, and facial expressions. The wider your range the more tools you have to express passion, or curiosity, or humor, or anything. You extend your range through practice and coaching. I never want to be too passionate, as it’s easy to sound like a preacher on cocaine or Billy Mays. Instead my goal is to be at high level of enthusiasm  without crossing over into annoying.
4. I have great respect for anyone who voluntarily listens to me. Speaking and writing are very subjective, and I know that reasonable people might not like me, or what I have to say. But their sense of how much energy and effort I put in is something undeniable. I never want to be dismissed by people for not being sincere. They can hate me, prove me wrong, heckle me, whatever, but at the end of the day I don’t want anyone leaving the room, or finishing one of my books, feeling like I gave half an effort.  Frankly any speaker is burning way more calories per second than any listener, but that’s often forgotten by most listeners, it’s a consumer’s market when it comes to things to consume.

Hope that helps. Let me know if it doesn’t.

Seems like this should be called Words for a Speaker to Live By. Scoot Berkun has been gaining a lot of visibility lately as the author of Confessions of a Public Speaker. This gives a pretty good idea why.

This column is about leading change and that's what I elected Barack Obama to do. I am one of the milions of independent voters who embraced Obama in 2008 and still have high hopes for him. Scott Brown is our next message to Washington. I hope Barack is listening.

I've seen this position cited since Tuesday's election, but never with such clarity or fervor. We send people to Congress for a reason. I want to see them governing and leading needed change instead of mouthing a party line and giving us a bunch of tired ideas.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882) American Essayist, Philosopher, Poet

“Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel.”

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

My enthusiasm for Emerson is tempered by this post I read the other day, Giving Emerson the Boot. "Other than the odd English major, virtually every student encountering Emerson for the first time (there's almost never a second) gains very little from the exercise other than a rough appreciation for what it must be like to sit in the company of a boorish deity." Geez, that's a little severe.

Even the best of the speech is lackluster. Now turn to Cicero's Philippics, as translated by the wartime code breaker DR Shackleton Bailey 30 years ago, and published late last year by Loeb. Though much is long, and embedded with subclauses, vivid phrases abound:

From a post at Forbes by Trevor Butterworth. I disagree with the point he ultimately draws--Twitter may be, in many ways, absurd; but it may also hasten the inner ear to the voices and glories of the past.--because as much as I wish I could speak as Cicero must have, I don't necessarily think that we have to sound like Cicero every time we speak. If we could all be Shakespeare, we'd certainly appreciate a break from the rhetoric from time to time, and it's the writing i another style that would gain impact. Read the whole post to see what you think. I did appreciate this paragraph about imagery because earlier today I appreciated Martin Shovel's post about imagery in Martin Luther King's speeches. I confess that I must have been anticipating this thought

There is no question that President Obama has revived political oratory from a sorry state, one that indicts Democrats as well as Republicans, and one dictated not just by the cutting power of television sound bites, which shrunk presidential aspirations from 42 seconds in 1968 to seven seconds by 2000, but also by the willful abandonment of the debating chamber for chatting in the committee room. But many commentators pointed out that President Obama did not seem particularly happy giving his speech at West Point, and no wonder, when he had to declaim entire passages that vary so little in length and meter.

when I was disappointed with my own writing this afternoon precisely because the sentence patterns were so repetitive and monotonous.

Just by chance I turned to Tom Peters after I read Butterworth's post and found this appreciation of Twitter limits and style

The "mea culpa" refers to my absorbing "distraction" (attraction) during the trip. Namely, Twitter. First, I like Twitter as a communication tool, though I plead guilty as charged by some in terms of mostly using it as a one-way communication vehicle—no small sin. Second, I find the 140-character limit a magnificent challenge! I am in the "beginner's mind" mode—and I am definitely learning anew that "practice makes better," or so I assume and hope. I believe that one can have a full-scale "opinion piece" on a serious topic that occupies 140 characters or less. Hence, I am choosing mostly to use Twitter as a straightforward opinion registry, and am leaving the mega-link practice to many many many others. In short, there are a host of things I really really give a shit about—I've been saying my piece in as many settings as possible for over 35 years, and I'm not inclined to stop; as I recently tweeted, my "live stuff" has absorbed about 5 or 6 million miles and about 9,000 flight legs since 1973.