Ram Charan once was the best-kept secret in the business world. Only the CEOs of companies like GE, Verizon, Novartis, Dupont, Honeywell, KLM, and Bank of America had heard of him. Today, thanks to his speaking, his books, and his articles in BusinessWeek, Harvard Business Review, and Fortune, which described him as the “most influential consultant alive,” he’s widely known as one of the world’s top management gurus and advisors to CEOs. Forbes pegs him at #13 on its list of the world’s 50 most essential management gurus.  His recent book, Leadership in the Era of Economic Uncertainty: Managing in a Downturn, came out in December 2, so we have to credit him with a good sense of timing at least.

But how good a speaker is he?

You can see him speaking here to a Fortune writer on what to do in a downturn http://tinyurl.com/y8vla5g:

And here, talking about the 6 building blocks for business success: http://tinyurl.com/yjwkmka
(the video quality is poor, but it will give you an idea).

Charan speaks with a good deal of authority, but he has the bad habits that all too often seem to come with that authority:  he’s not as clear as he thinks he is, he’s unselfconscious to a fault, and he paces through the audience with a disconcerting lack of direction.  The non-verbal confusion mirrors the verbal confusion. 

Despite all that, he is a very smart man giving solid, commonsense insights into successful business practices.  He makes the listener work harder than one should have to, however, because of his lack of discipline as a speaker.

What many speakers frequently forget is that paying attention is both hard work and a great gift.  Just ask your teenage children.  Speakers owe their attention-paying audiences the discipline to be as clear and as thoughtful about their messages as humanly possible.  Not many measure up to this simple, yet essential standard.