Articles in Forbes

How To Give A Great Speech

By Helen Coster, 08.16.10, 05:15 PM EDT (republished 8/16/2011)

Deliver a clear, relevant message, and tell a few great stories to illustrate it.

Future public speakers of the world, take note. You don’t have to be a Silicon Valley billionaire to deliver a great speech. The best speeches include a clear, relevant message and a few great stories to illustrate it. Forget fancy PowerPoint presentations and loads of data. Instead, keep your speech simple, with a clear beginning, middle and end. Focus on one theme, and eliminate everything else. “Speeches are an inefficient form of communication,” says Nick Morgan, the president of Public Words, Inc., and author of Trust Me: Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma. “People don’t remember much of what they hear, so focus and keep it simple.” More

How To Win An Argument Without Words

By Nick Morgan, 07.28.10, 01:09 PM EDT

Overpower with body language.

Leadership often involves negotiating very tough deals, or handling strong objections, or getting a reluctant team to agree to some difficult course of action. To accomplish such things, we employ all the verbal means at our disposal, yet most of us give little thought to our nonverbal actions while these verbal activities are going on. We miss some of the most powerful means of persuasion humans have when we don't consciously use nonverbal gestures to support our arguments.

In this Forbes article, Nick Morgan provides three basic steps for winning the nonverbal argument when emotions are running high. More

The Five Basic Stories That Can Give Your Speeches Power

By Nick Morgan, 05.12.10, 11:19 AM EDT

Tell one of these, and you'll always succeed.

The culture we’re all immersed in together gives you a great gift as a presenter — a wealth of stories that already lie deep in any audience’s consciousness. Use these stories to give your speeches power and to connect immediately and deeply with your audience. More

Almost Everyone Gets PR Wrong

By Nick Morgan, 03.15.10, 11:40 AM EDT

Including both Toyota and President Obama.

Executives usually think about public relations as if it were a matter of keeping score. You get good points for favorable press mentions; you lose points for bad ones. But these executives miss a deeper, two-fold problem because of a basic misunderstanding of how public awareness of a brand or a company or an institution actually works. More

Leadership Is All About Emotional Persuasion

By Nick Morgan, 02.02.10, 12:00 PM EST

So you'd better understand both your own emotions and those of the people you lead.

The communicating a leader does is all, essentially, persuasion. That’s what leaders do. They persuade people to work together, to achieve more than they ever thought they could, to reach for apparently impossible goals, to put personal interests aside (at least temporarily) in favor of some larger group purpose. In this article, Nick Morgan explains why a leader’s job is to change minds, and they can push followers to make new decisions. More

Three Big Myths Of Executive Public Speaking

By Nick Morgan, 12.03.09, 03:43 PM EST

Do yourself a favor and don't believe them.

Nick Morgan debunks the myths that come up over and over again about how best to succeed at speaking in public. The three most common are: "I want to begin with a joke"; "Too much rehearsal is bad for me"; and "It's better to go right to Q and A." Let me debunk each one in turn, in the hope I may save executives and their audiences from future mishap. More