Advice on public speaking of little help to would-be orators of today

BOOK REVIEW: The 100: Insights and Lessons from 100 of the Greatest Speeches EverDelivered By Simon Maier and Jeremy Kourdi; Marshall Cavendish; £12.99 (€14.30)

SAY WHAT you like about Hitler but he was great at giving speeches. I’m paraphrasing, but that’s essentially what Simon Maier and Jeremy Kourdi write in this collection of appalling truisms loosely based on what they claim are history’s best speeches, in which a fondness for genocide is no barrier to inclusion.

Lessons to learn from Hitler, in case you were wondering, include “describe current dilemmas and explain them to suit your argument”; “accentuate tribalism if you want to get people onside”, and “paint a picture of a brighter, better future”.

Oratory was Hitler’s first weapon, they point out, which is fair enough, although who doesn’t feel queasy at the thought of aspiring business executives studying fascist rhetoric before they fire up their PowerPoint presentations?

There is a structural problem with this book. Maier and Kourdi wax lyrical about how wonderful each of the 100 chosen speeches are, but only reprint the tiniest of extracts from each one, so it’s not always clear why these oratorical geniuses should be emulated.

In any case, the “lessons” are a bit silly. “Lessons from Bill Clinton” include “inspire confidence”, which of course is always a lot easier when you’ve got millions to plough into your electoral budget. Lessons from Aung San Suu Kyi? “Always be straightforward” – just in case you were aiming for convoluted and obtuse.

Here’s another truism (this time mine): the success, or otherwise, of public speaking depends on the relationship between the speakers and their audience, even if that audience is watching via the magic of broadcasting.

You could, for example, watch a YouTube clip of Charles Spencer’s eulogy to his sister Diana, but it won’t recreate the electrifying live-on-TV moment during which an audience of millions sat up and realised he wasn’t going to play nice.

It’s hard to see how swotting up on past masters can help any would-be orator more than the time-honoured tradition of practice makes perfect, but the URLs for the speeches are at the back of the book, if you’re bothered. However, if your head bleeds with the wishy-washiness of the author’s “lessons”, you can always invent your own.

From George Clooney, included for his characteristically blunt 2006 address to the UN on the subject of Darfur, we are supposed to learn that “sometimes creating guilt is effective”. My alternative lesson: “It helps to be gorgeous, as the TV cameras will record the event and everyone will be so mesmerised by the deep tone of your movie star voice, they’ll agree with whatever you say.”

From Steve Jobs, we should learn to “be yourself”, “be honest” (except when the disclosure of an illness might affect the share price) and “be modest – but recognise that there’s little room for false or excessive modesty”.

Can anyone really accuse Apple of that? To my mind, Jobs’s number-one strategy when it comes to speech-making is this: “People like consistency in a world gone mad, so always wear the same lame blue-jeans-and- black-polo combo.”

The authors are dismayed not just about the lack of craft in today’s speeches, but by the lack of interest people have in making them: “Executives, politicians, all of us . . . believed that all we needed was a short e-mail, a text, a blog or a Twitter.” (They mean a tweet.)

Soundbites that rely on classic techniques such as phrase reversals (“ask not what your country . . .”) and repetitive threes (“education, education, education”) are more important these days, they concede, but most are just “cheap shots with little inner meaning”.

But in setting up this opposition between the headline-and-memo brigade and long-winded, paid-by- the-minute speechmakers, they ignore the fact that the same people who are good at one are often good at the other.

Take a professional communicator such as Sarah Brown. On the one hand, she’s a political wife with a benign Twitter record and 958,000 followers. But she’s also adept at speech-delivering under pressure: two years in a row, her addresses to the Labour Party conference have prompted “Sarah saves Gordon”-style commendations.

Sarah Brown is not in this book – she’s not important enough. Neither is another compelling speaker, Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd (Twitter followers: 760,500), although he is in Maier and Kourdi’s “greatness omitted” list for his 2008 apology to Australia’s stolen generation. Rudd has a growing canon of parliamentary apologies, all delivered with admirable timing and tone, but he’s also good in short form: his emotional response to television cameras after the Victorian bushfires was a model of how to show empathy in the wake of disaster.

Maier and Kourdi, describing great speeches as “heart- warming, inspirational and spine- tingling”, lament the perfunctory nature of modern speech-making, especially in the lazy jargon of the corporate world. But they don’t discuss the wider reasons why inspirational words became a devalued currency.

Everyone knows that so-called leaders are frequently reduced to the status of autocue readers, their words written by a crack team of well-remunerated speech consultants. Earnest “come with me on this” oratory is largely the realm of the ludicrous self- anointed gurus of the self-help industry. It remains to be seen if Barack “yes we can” Obama is the beginning of the new sincerity or a super-charismatic aberration in a world that is (often correctly) cynical about language, however finely spoken.