Bøger af Jim Anderson

Dr. Jim Anderson explores what product managers have to do in order to make their products a success. Dr. Anderson uses real-world examples from Microsoft, Dell, and Toyota to show product managers both what works and what doesn't work when it comes to capturing your customer's imagination (and their wallets). What You'll Find Inside: FORGET THE IPHONE: WHAT CAN APPLE TEACH PRODUCT MANAGERS? HOW TO MAKE THE BEST PRODUCT MANAGEMENT DECISIONS WHAT MEDICAL DOCTORS CAN TEACH PRODUCT MANAGERS THE 3 SECRETS TO CREATING GOOD PRODUCT REQUIREMENTS Product managers can get caught up in the details of their product. There always seem to be new requirements to create, product launches to schedule, and features to document. However, the secret to being a successful product manager is to realize that the job is really about having good communication skills. It's the people that you work with both inside of your company as well as outside of your company that will determine how far you'll go in your career. This book has been written to give you a helping hand. I want to get you to take notice of the day-to-day things that are going to play a role in determining the next step in your career. It's not going to be your technical knowledge or your understanding of your market that is going to help you to move to the next level, but rather how others perceive you. Contained in this book are the tips and tricks that you are going to need in order to take control of your product manager career. As you read each chapter, take a moment to think about how you can start to use the information in your job immediately. I think that you are going to be both surprised and pleased with just how much this information is going to help you take your product manager career to the next level!

When you start a negotiation, there is a great deal that you don't know. No matter how much homework and research that you've done in order to better understand the other side of the table and their position, there will always be things that you don't know. What You'll Find Inside: GOT TO KEEP 'EM SEPARATED - ROLES IN NEGOTIATING YOU WANT A BARGAIN? LEARN HOW OTHER CULTURES BARTER FUNNY MONEY AIN'T SO FUNNY WHEN IT'S YOUR MONEY TESTING THE WATERS: DOES THE OTHER SIDE REALLY MEAN THAT? This means that there will be a great deal that you will have to learn while the negotiation is going on. In order for this to happen, you are going to have to master the skill of exploring what is possible during the negotiation. Your goal during the negotiation has to be to use your exploring skills to seek understanding and possibility. You'll never know what the other side is going to be willing to agree to until you ask them. A key part of developing your negotiating exploring skills is to understand the different roles in every negotiation. Who has what roles may be influenced by the different cultures that are involved in your negotiations. If you don't take the time to fully explore what is possible in your negotiation, then you may not be able to reach a deal with the other side. All too often in today's business environment we read about major deals falling apart. We need to study these events and understand why they happened and how we can avoid a similar fate. There are vast arrays of negotiating tools that are available to you in order to assist you with your exploring. With exotic sounding names such as the "krunch" tactic, "nibbling", and even the "reverse auction" each of these exploring tools is available for you to use in order to get the best deal possible. This book has been written to provide you with a complete overview of what the negotiating skill of exploring is. We'll be taking a look at the benefits of exploring, the tactics used, and what kind of results you can expect. Read the book and you'll become a more skilled negotiator! For more information on what it takes to be a great negotiator, check out my blog, The Accidental Negotiator, at: www.TheAccidentalNegotiator.com

As though being a product manager was not tough enough, it turns out that not only do we have to manage our products, but we also have to manage our customers. Customers don't particularly want to be managed and so they are not necessarily going to make this an easy task for us to accomplish. What You'll Find Inside: PRODUCT MANAGERS NEED TO KNOW HOW MUCH TIME TO INVEST IN A PROSPECT PRODUCT MANAGERS NEED TO UNDERSTAND HOW TO UPGRADE CUSTOMERS PRODUCT MANAGERS NEED TO LEARN TO K.I.S.S. THEIR CUSTOMERS PRODUCT MANAGERS NEED TO MAKE THE PRODUCT PURCHASE PROCESS PERFECT In order to manage customers, first we need to have customers. What this means for a product manager that we are going to have to come up with ways to transform prospects into paying customers. Customers come with a lot of customer data. If we want to have any hope of understanding who our customers are or what they want, we're going to have to come up with a way to get all of that customer information into the same database. All too often product managers like to point out their most loyal customers as one of their most valuable assets. However, it turns out that these customers may not be very profitable. Instead, we need to allow all of our customers to show us how our product can become even better. Every customer starts out as a prospect. In order to turn them into a customer it is going to take both time and effort. The big question that product managers face is just exactly how much time is it worth to put into a given prospect in order to turn them into a customer? Once you've successfully landed a customer, they will start to use the current version of your product. When you upgrade your product to the next version, it's going to be the product manager's job to find a way to get your customer to also upgrade. In order for a customer to make the decision to buy your product, they are going to have to carefully evaluate all of the product information that they have. Successful product managers know that in order to speed this process up, they have to be careful to not give their customers too much information.

All negotiations have to come to a close. When your next negotiation reaches this stage, you want to make sure that you are going to be able to walk away with the best deal possible. In order to make this happen, it's going to be what you've done during the negotiations that will determine what your outcome is. What You'll Find Inside: QUICK CLOSE NEGOTIATING: 4 WAYS TO GET THERE FASTER WHAT DOES "TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT" MEAN IN A SALES NEGOTIATION? THE ULTIMATE SALES NEGOTIATING GOAL: A SHARED VISION WHEN "YES" MEANS "NO" AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT Some people believe that negotiations have to take a long time and that they can drag on forever. However, it turns out that a skilled negotiator can cause a negotiation to wrap up in record time. There may be times with the other side tells you to "take it or leave it". You need to understand what they are really saying and how to react. During a negotiation, the other side may decide that they need to bring in more senior people in order to get what they want. You'll need to understand how to deal with this in order to ensure that you'll get the deal that you want. We often believe that it's who we bring to the negotiating table that will determine the deal that we get. However, in some cases it's really who is not there that will control the outcome. Ever negotiation is not the same. The way that you look at a negotiation may not be the same way that the other side is looking at it. One of the best ways to get what you want is to make it what the other side wants by developing a shared vision that both of you can work towards. In every negotiation, there are many different moving parts. Your job as a negotiator is to keep track of everything that is going on because it's the details that will control the type of deal that you'll get. Remember that just because the other side has agreed to something does not mean that they really want it. They may change their mind later on. Almost every negotiation deals with money in some fashion and this means that negotiators need to understand what money looks like in all of its different forms. We can't always wrap up a negotiation by ourselves. Sometimes we're going to have to bring in a mediator to get the deal that we want.

When you are the one who has been placed in charge of purchasing things for your firm, it can be easy to forget just how much authority you have. The rest of the company relies on what you do in order to have the raw materials that they need in order to perform their job. Communication is a critical part of what you do. No matter if you are trying to get your ideas across to your team, your suppliers, your department, or perhaps even your entire business, you need to know how to say what you need to say. The ability to deliver a good speech is a critical skill that all of us need to have even if we've never been trained how to do it. What You'll Find Inside: "ONCE UPON A TIME..." - THE ROLE OF STORYTELLING IN BUSINESS COMMUNICATION HOW TO MAKE A TECHNICAL PRESENTATION RIVETING PERSUADE AN AUDIENCE USING 3 SECRETS USED BY PRESENTERS KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE: WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW MAY HURT YOU Just think of all of the great speakers who have gone before you Dr. Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, Steve Jobs, the list goes on and on. Now you've been give your chance to change the world! I can well image what you are feeling right now - fear, doubt, uncertainty. Don't worry about it. I've got some good news for you - all of those great speakers felt the very same thing. However, they were able to muster up the courage to go out there and give the best speech that they possibly could. They did change the world and you just might end up doing the same thing. However, before you go doing that, we've got to make sure that you've got a well-planned speech to work with. Planning a speech is the first step in creating and delivering a powerful and effective speech. In order to plan a speech you need to take the time before you start to write out your speech and think about who you'll be speaking to. When planning a speech you need to make sure that you understand the purpose of your speech. Why are you going to go to all of the effort to create and deliver this speech? After you know that, take the time to think about your audience: what do they want from your speech? You're going to have to choose what type of speech you want to give. You can choose to deliver an informative speech, a demonstrative speech, an inspirational speech, or a humorous speech. More often than not the speech that you end up giving will draw from all four types of speeches. The good news is that I know that you're going to give a great speech and it's all going to start with the planning. Take the time to read this book, learn what you need to do in order to plan a great speech and then go out there and knock 'em dead!

Just in case nobody ever told you, being a principal, teacher, or a parent is a tough job. You are the person who is ultimately responsible for the academic success of one or more students. Your every decision can have an immediate impact on a student, a class, and perhaps even an entire school. Now that we've arrived in the 21st Century you'd think that the job would have gotten easier, but it has not. The arrival of all of today's new communication tools such as mobile phones, Facebook, Twitter, and, of course, websites, just seems to have made things that much more confusing. Yes, by now the school that you are involved with probably has its own website; however, who is maintaining it and is it really doing anyone any good? What You'll Find Inside: JUST HOW IMPORTANT IS PARENTAL INVOLVEMENT IN A SCHOOL? CAN A WEBSITE HELP A SCHOOL KEEP ITS TEACHERS? HOW CAN YOUR SCHOOL WEBSITE HELP YOU WHEN THE RAINS COME? NEWSPAPERS ARE ALIVE AND WELL AND LIVING AT A SCHOOL NEAR YOU If there is any good news to come out of the current state that we now find ourselves in is that powerful and effective tools have become available for our schools to use in order to help make their students successful. If done correctly, these websites can make it easier than ever for parents to know what is going on at the school and to get involved. The Digital Bell service is an Internet-based content management system that allows schools (and school districts) to pour all of the information that they have about what is currently happening at their school into a single, easy-to-use online tool that will then process all of that data and create an attractive modern interactive website for the school. This is exactly what parents need! This book has been written to provide you with the insights that you are going to need in order to understand how your school and school district could best make use of a service like The Digital Bell. We'll be talking about what you need to take into consideration when you are planning on updating the websites that your school is using, how a school district can use its websites when natural disasters strike, how a school website can get students involved in creating content, and how to get some peace and quiet for office staff by creating a great website. For more information on what it takes to be solve this type of problem for your school, check out my blog, Bell Ringers, at: www.thedigitalbell.com/blog

How do you measure the success of a product manager? Ultimately it comes down to how successful their product is. The more units that get sold to customers who have decided that your product is what they really need, the better job you have done in creating a solution to your customer's problems. What You'll Find Inside: PRODUCT MANAGERS WHO WANT TO LOOK GOOD CAN LEARN FROM ESTEE LAUDER WHAT PRODUCT MANAGERS CAN LEARN FROM DISNEY'S PRODUCT VAULT WHICH FORMS OF SOCIAL MEDIA SHOULD PRODUCT MANAGERS BE INVOLVED IN? PRODUCT MANAGERS NEED TO KNOW 4 WAYS TO OFFER THEIR CUSTOMERS A "NEXT BEST OFFER" As product managers we always need to understand where our next product is coming from. This means that we need to be able to decide if we want to jump into an existing market and compete with everyone else or if we want to try to create a new market for our product. Getting customers to buy our product is a good first step, but how can we get them to buy even more? It turns out that the answer to this question can be found in a number of diverse places including at a monster truck rally or buried deep in Disney's vault. Social media has arrived and seems to be everywhere these days. This means that product managers have to figure out how to use it in order to boost sales of their product. Once sold, we need to figure out how to work with our sales teams to offer our customers a "next best offer". Where your next customer is going to be located is always a good question. Product managers need to start to think globally when it comes to selling their products. If we look around us, we may discover that companies like Apple are well positioned to show us how we can sell more products. Since we can't predict the future, we need to always be preparing for the worst. There's always a chance that one of our customers could impose a sequestration and we'd have to determine the impact that would have on our product sales.

As product managers, we all want to become better at what we do. However, sometimes we can find ourselves in a rut: we've solved the immediate problems, our product is doing well, and we've just lost that drive that we need in order to reach the next level. This is when the power of competition comes in. We all like a good challenge. When we are faced with a situation in which we might not be the best, or we might not know exactly what we should do, that's when we can become our best. What You'll Find Inside: TO BEAT THE COMPETITION, PRODUCT MANAGERS HAVE TO DO SOME HOMEWORK HOW YAHOO PRODUCT MANAGERS ARE KICKING GOOGLE'S BUTT CASE STUDY: WHAT TO DO WHEN A LARGE COMPETITOR SHOWS UP ON YOUR BLOCK HOW PRODUCT MANAGERS SHOULD GO ABOUT DOING BUSINESS RESEARCH Competitive situations for product managers can take on a number of different forms. They can be as simple as placing ourselves into a setting in which we are called on to network with others. Maybe it's as simple as challenging us to pay closer attention to what's going on - easy to say, hard to do. Mastering competition requires us to become experts at a lot of different skills. These include managing other people, finding mentors, and continuing our education. Throw in things like learning to stop multitasking and how to create an effective resume and all of a sudden you have some fairly challenging tasks ahead of you. The good news is that every product manager can rise to meet these challenges. No matter if it's learning how to find your next product manager job or how to deal with a situation in which you've been passed over for a promised promotion, your ability to deal with the competition that comes along with your product manager job will be the key to your long term success. For more information on what it takes to be a great product manager, check out my blog, The Accidental Product Manager, at: www.TheAccidentalPM.com

Anyone can manage IT employees. Due to the fact that the employees have agreed to work for the company, as their manager you hold the ability to fire them in your hands. If they don't do what you tell them to do, you have the right to terminate them. That's management, not leadership. What You'll Find Inside: 4 DRIVERS OF EMPLOYEE MOTIVATION THAT ALL IT LEADERS MUST KNOW IT LEADERS HAVE TWO OF THESE BUT DO THEY USE THEM? WHAT CAN COOL DESIGN FIRMS TEACH IT MANAGERS? IT MANAGER SECRETS FROM THE FOLKS AT PIXAR Leadership has to do with getting your IT team to WANT to do what you need them to do. When you are leading your team, when you are not around they continue to work towards the goals that you have established for the team because they believe in the goals and in you. Leadership is much more powerful than management. Leadership is also much harder to learn how to do. It has a great deal to do with understanding what motivates the members of your team and then finding ways to associate the team's goals with what each member of the team is trying to accomplish in both their career and in their personal life. Examples of how to be a better leader can be found in many different places. Not all of these examples come from within IT. As an IT manager you need to learn how to keep your eyes open so that you can spot and learn from the good examples of leadership that are all around us each and every day. Understanding the various members of your team is a key part of knowing how best to lead them. This requires you to be socially intelligent and to have the ability to be "tuned in" to their needs. This book will provide you with numerous examples of good leadership. I'll be showing you the skills and talents that IT leaders must have in order to do a good job of motivating their team. Creating a culture of leadership will allow your team to achieve more using the resources that are available to you. For more information on what it takes to be a great IT manager, check out my blog, The Accidental IT Leader, at: www.TheAccidentalITLeader.com

It turns out that most negotiations are over even before they begin. The team that has spent the most time planning for the negotiation, doing their homework, and collecting the data that they'll need is the one that's going to walk away from the table with the best deal. Wouldn't you want that team to be your team? What You'll Find Inside: THE 7 DEADLY SINS OF PREPARING TO NEGOTIATE DEALS THAT MAKE MONEY: HOW TO PLAN YOUR CONCESSIONS MAKE MORE SALES: UNDERSTANDING BUYER POWER & WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT SINGLE VS TEAM NEGOTIATION: WHICH IS BETTER? Planning is what happens before you sit down at the negotiating table. There are no negotiating tactics or tricks at play here. It's just a matter of you doing your homework. At the same time you hope that the other side is NOT doing their homework so that you'll show up at the negotiation more prepared then they are. Just committing to doing the planning that your next negotiation is going to require is not enough, you also have to know just exactly how to go about doing it. That's what this book is going to teach you. Every negotiation is different and so the planning that you'll have to do for every negotiation will be different also. The planning that is required for a successful negotiation takes on many different forms. These can include planning where and when the negotiations will be held, what concessions you'll be willing to make to the other side, and understanding who has what power in the negotiations. The end result of doing the planning that a negotiation requires is that when you sit down at the negotiating table, you'll have a sense of being prepared. You'll know what you need to know about the other side of the table, what their goals are, what their constraints are, and what they hope to be able to get out of the negotiations. This is exactly the type of knowledge that you're going to need in order to be able to reach the type of deal that will allow you to walk away from the table with a sense of accomplishment.

This book has been written with one goal in mind - to show you how you can make your product management career a success. It's not easy being a product manager so we're going to show you what you need to be doing in order to make you stand out and be successful! Let's Make Your Career A Success! What You'll Find Inside: HOW GREAT PRODUCT MANAGERS KEEP THEIR PERSPECTIVE SHOULD YOU GET AN MBA? #1 SKILL THAT A PRODUCT MANAGER NEEDS TO HAVE THE PRODUCT MANAGER'S READING LIST Congratulations - you are a product manager. Or you want to be one. No matter where your career is at right now, what we need to have a talk about is how you can take it to the next level. Being a product manager is a strange sort of job. It turns out that you don't actually "do" anything. Instead, it's your job to get a lot of other people to do all of the things that are going to be required in order to make a product or a group of products be successful. Needless to say this is a hard thing to do. However, as hard as that is, there is something else that you need to be doing at the same time: managing your career. Look, the success of your product is never only in your hands. Market conditions, what your competition does, and the whims of your customers will all conspire to either make your product a success or a flop. No matter what the final result is, and often we don't even get to stick around for the last chapter, you are going to want your efforts today to move your career forward tomorrow. What this means for you is that you need to understand what it is going to take to get the rest of your company to recognize the good work that you are doing today and the potential that you have for tomorrow. The good news is that this can be easily done. You just have to know how. Product managers can get caught up in the details of their product. There always seem to be new requirements to create, product launches to schedule, and features to document. However, the secret to being a successful product manager is to realize that the job is really about having good communication skills. It's the people that you work with both inside of your company as well as outside of your company that will determine how far you'll go in your career. This book has been written to give you a helping hand. I want to get you to take notice of the day-to-day things that are going to play a role in determining the next step in your career. It's not going to be your technical knowledge or your understanding of your market that is going to help you to move to the next level, but rather how others perceive you. Contained in this book are the tips and tricks that you are going to need in order to take control of your product manager career. As you read each chapter, take a moment to think about how you can start to use the information in your job immediately. I think that you are going to be both surprised and pleased with just how much this information is going to help you take your product manager career to the next level! Good luck!

As public speakers, the one thing that we all want to be able to learn to do better is to improve how we speak. The key to doing this successfully is to learn how to plan our next speech. The good news is that planning a speech is actually fairly simple. The first step in making this happen is to understand that the clothes that you wear when you speak will tell your audience a story. What You'll Find Inside: How to Rig a Speech to Get the Outcome You Want Every Time Public Speakers Want to Know: Are Handouts Your Friend or Foe? Ways to plan an effective speech Speaker: You are what you wear In order to make sure that your next speech goes well, you need to take action before your speech starts and introduce yourself to your room. This introduction can start long before the day of your speech thanks to today's new social media tools. The details of how your give your speech have a big influence on how you speak. From what topic you pick, to your decision to either use or not use handouts, you are in control of how your audience experiences your next speech. The most important thing that we need to do in order to become a better speaker is to make sure that every speech that we give has a clear point. This will happen when you know how to plan an effective speech. This book will show you how to plan your speech in order to transform it into something that is even more powerful than it is today. We're going to show you how to find out what you should be doing and how to create a plan that will boost the impact of your speaking. For more information on what it takes to be a great public speaker, check out my blog, The Accidental Communicator, at: www.TheAccidentalCommunicator.com

As product managers we know how good our product is. The problem that we are facing is that the rest of the world does not know this. The burden of somehow getting them to know the true value of our product rests on our shoulders - we need to find a way to make this happen. In the end, it all comes down to how good our communication skills are. What You'll Find Inside: INTERNET PRODUCT PROMOTION - 4 SECRETS FOR PRODUCT MANAGERS SEXY ADVERTISING: HOW TO GET YOUR PRODUCT NOTICED WHY ROI IS THE WRONG WAY TO MEASURE YOUR PRODUCT'S MARKETING PROGRAM 5 SECRETS TO PRODUCT MANGER SUCCESS AT YOUR NEXT TRADE SHOW In the day and age in which we are living, the internet plays a huge role in how we communicate with our customers. What this means for product managers is that we need to take the time to learn how to leverage this resource to our advantage in order to promote our product. At the same time we can't forget about the power of social media to get the word out about what our product can do. Before people can buy our product, they have to first notice the product. This can start with the product's logo - does it grab and hold on to the customer's attention? Next we need to take a look at the advertising that we are doing for our product. Is it sexy enough - does it capture our customer's interest and leave them wanting to find out more about the product? As we spend both time and effort on trying to get the word out about our product, the issue of trying to measure how successful we are being comes up. The traditional way, calculating a return on investment (ROI) does not always match what we are doing. What we need is a better way to capture the value of a product manager's communication efforts. The secret to good communications between a product manager and their customers is to provide the customer with the information that they want in the format that they want it in. What this means for the product manager is that they are going to have to create several different channels that can be used reach out to customers.

The first step in creating a speech that will allow you to make your point is to first determine how best to organize it. There are a lot of different ways to go about doing this, but you are going to want to make sure that you'll be able to connect with your audience. This means that you'll need to be able to determine what your emotional intelligence quotient is. What You'll Find Inside: SPEAKERS NEED TO KNOW WHAT THEIR EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE QUOTIENT IS NELSON MANDELA'S TIPS ON HOW TO CUSTOMIZE YOUR NEXT SPEECH HEY SPEAKER, WHAT'S YOUR ROOM IQ? WHAT HARRY POTTER CAN TEACH YOU ABOUT CREATING A SPEECH INTRODUCTION If we want to make sure that we've organized our thoughts in a way that will allow us to get our message across to our audience, it can be helpful to look for guidance from those who have done it well in the past. One fantastic example is Nelson Mandel who really knew how to customize a speech. Where you'll be speaking will play a role in how your audience interprets your speech. If you know how to use a room, then you and your message will be well received. In order to make this happen, you are going to have to employ your room IQ. When we agree to give a speech, we hope that we can provide our audience with an uplifting message. However, there are times that we are called on to deliver bad news. We still have an obligation to connect with our audience and we need to make sure that the bad news does not obscure the importance of our message. Organizing a speech involves more than just getting your introduction correct, you also have to manage your message. If you have been asked to apologize for something, how you structure your speech is going to be critical. Every speech that we give occupies a set amount of time. The time that we have allocated and the time that we use may be two different things. As speakers, we need to make sure that we fully understand the power of time and that we use it to our best advantage during our next speech.

Just in case nobody ever told you, being a school district superintendent is a tough job. You are the single person who is ultimately responsible for the academic success of a great number of students. Your every decision can have an immediate impact on principals, teachers, students, and parents. Now that we've arrived in the 21st Century you'd think that the job would have gotten easier, but it has not. The arrival of all of today's new communication tools such as mobile phones, Facebook, Twitter, and, of course, websites, just seems to have made things that much more confusing. Yes, by now every one of the schools in your school district probably has its own website; however, who is maintaining it and is it really doing anyone any good? If there is any good news to come out of the current state that we now find ourselves in is that powerful and effective tools have become available for school district superintendents to use. The Digital Bell service is an Internet-based content management system that allows schools (and school districts) to pour all of the information that they have about what is currently happening at their school into a single, easy-to-use online tool that will then process all of that data and create an attractive modern interactive website for the school. This book has been written to provide you with the insights that you are going to need in order to understand how your school district could best make use of a service like The Digital Bell. We'll be talking about what you need to take into consideration when you are planning on updating the websites that your schools are using, how a school district can use its websites when natural disasters strike, how a school website can get students involved in creating content, and how to get some peace and quiet for office staff by creating a great website.

In order to settle a dispute, Arbitrators, Mediators and Conciliators obviously have to know how to talk. However, as part of their job they are often called on to give speeches. These speeches can be to update interested parties on the status of discussions, it can be to peers to share best practices, etc. This type of talking is much different from the type of talking that we normally do and we can easily become overwhelmed as we try to figure out how to go about making a good speech. The good news is that this can be done and we're going to cover what you need to do in this book. What You'll Find Inside: "ONCE UPON A TIME..." - THE ROLE OF STORYTELLING IN BUSINESS COMMUNICATION HOW TO MAKE A TECHNICAL PRESENTATION RIVETING PERSUADE AN AUDIENCE USING 3 SECRETS USED BY PRESENTERS KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE: WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW MAY HURT YOU Just think of all of the great speakers who have gone before you Dr. Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, Steve Jobs, the list goes on and on. Now you've been give your chance to change the world! I can well image what you are feeling right now - fear, doubt, uncertainty. Don't worry about it. I've got some good news for you - all of those great speakers felt the very same thing. However, they were able to muster up the courage to go out there and give the best speech that they possibly could. They did change the world and you just might end up doing the same thing. However, before you go doing that, we've got to make sure that you've got a well-planned speech to work with. Planning a speech is the first step in creating and delivering a powerful and effective speech. In order to plan a speech you need to take the time before you start to write out your speech and think about who you'll be speaking to. When planning a speech you need to make sure that you understand the purpose of your speech. Why are you going to go to all of the effort to create and deliver this speech? After you know that, take the time to think about your audience: what do they want from your speech? You're going to have to choose what type of speech you want to give. You can choose to deliver an informative speech, a demonstrative speech, an inspirational speech, or a humorous speech. More often than not the speech that you end up giving will draw from all four types of speeches. The good news is that I know that you're going to give a great speech and it's all going to start with the planning. Take the time to read this book, learn what you need to do in order to plan a great speech and then go out there and knock 'em dead!

Let's face it, creating a speech is hard work. However, as long as we are going to go to the effort of creating a speech, it sure seems like we should do a good job of it. Now the difficult part comes: just exactly how does one go about creating a speech that works? What You'll Find Inside: SIZE MATTERS - SHAPING YOUR SPEECH TO MATCH YOUR AUDIENCE THE SECRET TO BECOMING AN EXPERT IN ANYTHING GET IT DONE: THINKING ON YOUR FEET AND BUILDING A SPEECH REAL QUICK 4 THINGS THAT YOU SHOULD NEVER TALK ABOUT We need to keep in mind the fact that we are never creating a generic speech. Instead, we're creating a specific speech for a specific audience. What this means is that we need to customize our speech to our audience. Our ultimate goal is to be able to create a speech that is so good that we are able to cast a spell over our audience. We want our audience to listen to what we have to say. This means that we need to find ways to get them to view us as being the experts on what we are talking about. If we want them to remember what we've told them, then we need to find ways to make them laugh during our speech. This is no easy thing to accomplish. In our hopes of getting our audience to listen to us, we all struggle with the same sets of questions. Will they believe us? This comes down to the age old question of if an audience will believe what you are telling them because of who you are or because of how you tell them. If you have not had time to prepare a formal speech, then you had better be good at thinking on your feet! The only tool that we have to work with when we are giving a speech is words. What words we use and how we put them together can allow us to create powerful speeches that can change how people think. When we are creating these speeches we need to keep in mind the fact that the best speeches often have a great deal of us in them.

It's always been known that the job of being CIO is a tough job. One of the reasons that this job is so hard to do well is because we stand on shifting ground. The technology that we use goes out of style and then gets replaced by new technology almost overnight. What You'll Find Inside: CRM NEWS: THE BUSINESS OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IS CHANGING PRACTICAL IT CLOUDS: WHAT TO DO AFTER THE HYPE UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS IS AN OPPORTUNITY FOR CIOS TO SHOW THEIR VALUE WEB 3.0 IS COMING - ARE CIOS READY? One of your tasks as CIO is to be able to take a look at new and emerging technologies and determine which of these will impact your company. Due to the size of this task, it is often helpful to go to outside sources to get help in evaluating all of the new technologies. Almost all of the emerging technologies involve massive amounts of data. How to store, process, and create results from this data is one critical new technology that all CIOs will have to master. In the world of IT, big projects make up a lot of what we do. Things like implementing new and novel customer relationship management (CRM) systems or special purpose applications like have been done for the London Stock Exchange are what we do. However, once done, we are then responsible for ensuring that our creations stay up and running. Decisions are a key part of being a CIO. No matter if it's trying to decide between an Apple based product or a Windows product, these are never easy decisions. As changes have rolled through the world of healthcare, CIOs have been drawn in and have had to make many different decisions about how systems should operate. Keeping your company out in front of the competition is part of the job of being CIO. What this entails these days is that you need to be able to implement complex-event processing and start to move key business applications to the cloud.

Dr. Jim Anderson explores what public speakers have to do in order to deliver great speeches. Dr. Anderson uses real-world examples of what works and what doesn't work when it comes to capturing your audience's imagination. What You'll Find Inside: "ONCE UPON A TIME..." - THE ROLE OF STORYTELLING IN BUSINESS COMMUNICATION HOW TO MAKE A TECHNICAL PRESENTATION RIVETING PERSUADE AN AUDIENCE USING 3 SECRETS USED BY PRESENTERS KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE: WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW MAY HURT YOU In order to create and deliver a great speech, you first need to start by planning how you are going to accomplish this. Planning includes identifying the purpose of your speech, understanding who your audience will be, and deciding what type of speech you are going to give. Once you've got all of this taken care of, you can then identify what the one thing that you want your audience to be able to remember from your speech needs to be. This book has been written to give you a helping hand. I want to get you to become comfortable with planning great speeches. I'm going to show you the various steps that you'll need to go through. I'll also point out things that you are going to want to avoid. Contained in this book are the tips and tricks that you are going to need in order to plan a great speech. As you read each chapter, take a moment to think about how you can start to use the information when you are creating your next speech. I think that you are going to be both surprised and pleased with just how much this information is going to help you take your speaking to the next level!

The job of a product manager is made even more difficult by the simple fact that it really does not come with any clear instructions on how to do it correctly. As product managers we are constantly searching for ways to become better. What You'll Find Inside: 9 WAYS TO TO BECOME AN INFORMATION PRODUCT MANAGER WHY PRODUCT MANAGERS NEED TO KNOW THAT COST PLUS PRICING IS WRONG, WRONG, WRONG WHAT IS A "PRODUCT VISION"? WEB 2.0 PRODUCT MANAGEMENT: IT'S ALL ABOUT PARTICIPATION One of the things that every product manager quickly realizes is that their career success is very closely tied to the financial success of their product. It is the job of the product manager to make sure that his or her product is meeting the needs of their customer. One of the most challenging aspects of creating a product that meets a customer's needs is to decide on what the right price to charge is. The goal is to charge as much as you can without exceeding what your customer's perception of the value of your product is. There are a lot of wrong ways to do this and just a few correct ways. One of the most important things that a product manager can do is to learn from the actions of other product managers. Not all product management programs succeed. We need to teach ourselves to keep our eyes open and watch and learn from both the successes and failures of other product managers. As though being a product manager was not hard enough, we also don't control the world in which we live. This means that we need to create plans to deal with events like product name changes, recessions, and irrational customers. This book has been written to provide you with the insights that you are going to need in order to develop your product management skills. We'll be talking about what you need to take into consideration when you are creating a price for your product, how to start your year off on the right foot, and how to create a vision for your product. For more information on what it takes to be a great product manager, check out my blog, The Accidental Product Manager, at: www.TheAccidentalPM.com

The job of an IT manager is constantly changing. The technologies that we used to use are now gone. The technologies that we use today will eventually go away. This means that we need to make sure that we are constantly aware of what new technologies are coming our way and what our teams will be able to do with them. What You'll Find Inside: BIG DATA REQUIRES IT MANAGERS TO THINK ABOUT BIG DATABASES 3 QUESTIONS THAT EVERY IT MANAGER SHOULD BE ASKING ABOUT CLOUDS WHY IT MANAGERS CAN'T BELIEVE ALL THAT THEY READ ABOUT SECURITY BREECHES WHAT EVERY IT MANAGER NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT THE HADOOP DATABASE SOLUTION The arrival of big data has turned the world of IT upside down. As our companies struggle to decide how they are going to make use of this new type of technology, we as IT managers need to make sure that we understand what types of databases we can use to handle all of this data. The way that we build the networks that our teams and our company use has been forever changed by the arrival of cloud computing. This means that we need to take the time to make sure that we understand what this means for us as well as any new security risks that comes along with it. The new technologies that we'll be using in just a few years take on a number of different forms. It could be the analytics that we'll all be using to process that big data or perhaps it will be the haddoop database that we may end up implementing to store all of that data. We need to keep in mind that storing data is one thing, backing it up may be something completely different. All databases are not created the same. The arrival of NOSQL technology has made the choice of what database to use that much more difficult. One thing that we can do to try to make good decisions is to take a look at what other firms, perhaps in healthcare, have done and learn from their mistakes.

The art of negotiation depends on your ability to successfully communicate with the other side of the table. An important part of this communication is your ability to signal to the other side what your intentions are. Likewise, they will be signaling to you what they want to accomplish. What You'll Find Inside: ESCALATION POWER: HOW TO USE IT, HOW TO DEFEND AGAINST IT THE SECRET TO DEALING WITH DEADLINES: WHAT NEGOTIATORS NEED TO KNOW SALES NEGOTIATORS NEED TO KNOW HOW TO WAIT 5 TIPS FOR MAKING PEOPLE SEE THINGS YOUR WAY This additional signaling communication channel provides a negotiator with a great deal of information and allows them to steer the negotiation in the direction that they want it to go. However, signaling is not easy to do and it can be difficult to learn how to do it well. Signaling in a negotiation is not just one thing, rather it is a complete collection of different actions that you can take to send a message to the other side. These actions can include body language, escalations, and the use of deadlines. Signaling is a subtle form of communication. It's not something that any of us are born with, rather we need to learn how to use this technique to express what we want to the other side. Our goal must always be to be using our signaling to show the other side how we can keep the negotiations moving towards an eventual deal that will be acceptable to everyone. In order to become better signalers, we need to take the time to observe how signaling is used in other negotiations. What we'll quickly realize is that signaling involves the ability to patiently wait and the ability to repeat ourselves over and over again just to make sure that we're able to get our point across. This book has been created to provide you with an understanding of both what signaling in a negotiation looks like as well as how you can develop the signaling skills that you will need. We'll examine how you can use signaling when making concessions and how to get the other side to see things your way. For more information on what it takes to be a great negotiator, check out my blog, The Accidental Negotiator, at: www.TheAccidentalNegotiator.com

People who work one-on-one with people to resolve issues are not normally thought of as public speakers. However, what you learn from the time that you spend helping people makes for some very valuable information. It's this kind of information, once obtained, that you can do so much good with by sharing with potential clients and other counselors. This is where the whole public speaking thing comes in. If you don't feel comfortable speaking before a group of people, don't worry. That's exactly the kind of counseling that this book is going to be able to provide you with. What You'll Find Inside: "ONCE UPON A TIME..." - THE ROLE OF STORYTELLING IN BUSINESS COMMUNICATION HOW TO MAKE A TECHNICAL PRESENTATION RIVETING PERSUADE AN AUDIENCE USING 3 SECRETS USED BY PRESENTERS KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE: WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW MAY HURT YOU Just think of all of the great speakers who have gone before you Dr. Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, Steve Jobs, the list goes on and on. Now you've been give your chance to change the world! I can well image what you are feeling right now - fear, doubt, uncertainty. Don't worry about it. I've got some good news for you - all of those great speakers felt the very same thing. However, they were able to muster up the courage to go out there and give the best speech that they possibly could. They did change the world and you just might end up doing the same thing. However, before you go doing that, we've got to make sure that you've got a well-planned speech to work with. Planning a speech is the first step in creating and delivering a powerful and effective speech. In order to plan a speech you need to take the time before you start to write out your speech and think about who you'll be speaking to. When planning a speech you need to make sure that you understand the purpose of your speech. Why are you going to go to all of the effort to create and deliver this speech? After you know that, take the time to think about your audience: what do they want from your speech? You're going to have to choose what type of speech you want to give. You can choose to deliver an informative speech, a demonstrative speech, an inspirational speech, or a humorous speech. More often than not the speech that you end up giving will draw from all four types of speeches. The good news is that I know that you're going to give a great speech and it's all going to start with the planning. Take the time to read this book, learn what you need to do in order to plan a great speech and then go out there and knock 'em dead!

Standing up in front of a group of people and giving a speech is not an easy thing to do for any of us. As we stand there with everyone's eyes on us, it can be very easy to become overwhelmed with nerves and fear. However, if we are going to be successful public speakers, then we need to learn to deal with our fears. What You'll Find Inside: HOW SPEAKERS HANDLE THAT FEAR THING... GREAT SPEAKERS AREN'T AFRAID TO STUMBLE ON THE WAY TO THE TOP TOO SHY, SHY - HOW TO OVERCOME YOUR SHYNESS AND BECOME A PUBLIC SPEAKER YOUR SPEECH IS NOT OVER WHEN YOU ARE DONE TALKING Fear and public speaking seem to go hand in hand. As we prepare to take the stage, it's all too common that we'll suddenly get an attack of the nerves. We fear that once we start our speech, we're going to make a mistake or say something wrong. Stage fright can take over. What we need to understand is that the people who are really good public speakers were once in our position. However, they moved forward. No, they were not always perfect - they stumbled just like we do. However, they learned from their mistakes and they become better over time. No matter what causes you to become afraid or shy, you can identify it and then you can overcome it. In order to master our fears, we need to be able to take a step back. We need to look at ourselves and understand how our audience is viewing us. It's only by doing this that we'll be able to become a better speaker. We also have to remember that if we can master our fears and actually deliver a great speech, our job is not over when we are done speaking. In fact, our interaction with our audience may just be beginning at this point in time.

As product managers, we are the ones who are in charge of developing a product that our customers are going to want and our competitors are going to fear. There is no one right way to develop a winning product, rather there is a particular set of skills that every product manager has to develop in order to create products that will be successful. What You'll Find Inside: PRODUCT MANAGERS NEED TO KNOW WHAT THEIR COMPANY'S COST OF CAPITAL IS THE SECRET TO CREATING A CUSTOMER-FACING PRODUCT ROADMAP HOW TO CREATE A PRODUCT TIMELINE THAT WORKS WHAT DOES THE INTERNET OF THINGS MEAN TO PRODUCT MANAGERS? It all starts with understanding just exactly how much a product is going to cost to create. Cost of capital is a term that the business side of the house uses to talk about such things and product managers need to understand what it means and how to use it. The teams that we'll assemble to create our products will be diverse in many different ways. One way will be age. This means that a product manager is going to have to get good at finding ways to have different age workers all get along with each other. When you start to understand all of the different things that a product manager has to do at the same time in order to develop a product, you'll start to understand why checklists are a product manager's best friend. Developing a product means that the product manager is going to have to know when the product will be ready to be sold. This means that a timeline for the product will have to be both developed and then adhered to. Just creating a product is not the end of the story. There will be more versions that will have more functionality. This means that a product manager will have to develop a roadmap and share with both the development team and existing and potential customers. As we enter the age of digital product management, product managers need to know that they don't have to solve all problems by themselves. They can look at other successful products, such as the iPhone, for tips and hints at how to develop products that will be successful. In some markets a single product starts to dominate that market. As product managers we'd all like to emulate this success and that's why it's important that we study brands such as ESPN in order to understand how they have been able to achieve the success that they have had. Change is a constant part of what it means to be a product manager and the arrival of the internet of things promises to change everything. This means that we need to understand what it is and how it will impact us. Communicating with our customers is a key part of being a product manager and the Twitter micro blogging service has become an important tool. However, as it continues to evolve we need to look closely at it to see if it is still useful for us. Entering new markets is how product managers can ensure that their products continue to grow. Amazon's recent entry into the grocery business can show us how to accomplish this. For more information on what it takes to be a great product manager, check out my blog, The Accidental Product Manager, at: www.TheAccidentalPM.com

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus is the one who is credited with saying "The Only Thing That Is Constant Is Change". In the world of giving speeches this is especially true. One does not just suddenly become a great speaker. Rather, what happens is that we start to give speeches and gradually over time we get better at doing it. However, we'll never get any better at speaking in public if we don't know how to change. What You'll Find Inside: IT'S AMAZING WHAT A SPEAKER CAN LEARN BY WATCHING YOUTUBE YOU HAVE MUCH TO LEARN GRASSHOPPER: WHAT THE GREAT COMMUNICATORS CAN TEACH US PRESENTATION PRUNING: HOW MUCH TO CHOP? A PRESENTER'S GREATEST THREAT: SELF-SABOTAGE! Change is all about being aware of what a great speech really looks like. There are a number of different ways that we can learn what good speaking really is. The simplest way to do this by taking the time to listen to great speakers. The best way to do this is by getting invited to one of their speeches, sitting in the audience, and watching how they connect with their audience. That's not always possible to do for a wide variety of reasons: they are too far away, your schedule is too busy, tickets cost too much, etc. That's when YouTube comes in to play. All of the really good speakers have had one or more of their speeches recorded and they are available for you to watch for free on YouTube. Part of the change process is making your speech more effective. As you deliver a speech you'll discover what parts work and what parts don't work. When you are preparing to deliver the speech again, you'll have to prune it in order to make sure that you just deliver the good stuff. What we are ultimately looking for is something called charisma. We all know that we want to have it in order to better connect with our audience; however, first we have to understand just exactly what it is and how we can get more of it. This book will show you how to change your speech in order to transform it into something that is even more powerful than it is today. We're going to show you how to find out what you should be doing and how to incorporate the changes that will boost the impact of your speaking. For more information on what it takes to be a great public speaker, check out my blog, The Accidental Communicator, at: www.TheAccidentalCommunicator.com

Every company wants to grow and become more successful. There is no magic formula to make this happen, but it is generally agreed that in order for this to happen the company cannot stand still. Instead, they always have to be trying new things and growing. What You'll Find Inside: HOW IT LEADERS CAN GROW GOOD IDEAS 3 REASONS INNOVATION DOESN'T HAPPEN IN IT IT TAKES A VILLAGE TO INNOVATE LIKE AN IT DEPARTMENT 3 STEPS IT MANAGERS CAN TAKE TO MAKE INNOVATION HAPPEN FOR THEIR TEAM In an IT team, in order to make this kind of growth occur, innovation has to be encouraged to happen. All too often the workers on the team can get too involved in their day-to-day tasks to spend any time thinking about innovation. That's where the IT manager has to step in. As the IT manager it is your job to create an environment in which your team that will not only encourage innovation to happen but will also help it to grow once it starts. A great deal of this has to do with how you communicate to the team what you want to happen. Innovation is something that we all know that we want to have happen, but just exactly how to make it occur is what often eludes us. As the IT manager you are going to have to identify the innovation strategies that will work with your team and your IT department and then implement them. It's possible that either innovation projects have been tried in the past and have not worked or, more likely, there is no innovation going on right now. It is your job to change this and make innovation take root and become part of everyone's daily routine. This book is filled with tools that IT managers can use to introduce innovation into their teams. These ideas range from learning to grow good ideas to doing more with what you already have. No matter what approach you decide to take, the goal is the same: cause innovation to take root and grow. Making innovation happen is not easy. By reading this book you will have the ideas and the techniques that you need to cause it to happen in your team. Once this happens, it can spread to the rest of the IT department. This is the kind of leadership that the company is looking for from their IT managers. For more information on what it takes to be a great IT manager, check out my blog, The Accidental IT Leader, at: www.TheAccidentalITLeader.com

In order for any IT manager to be a success, the team that you are managing has to learn how to work together. All too often what IT managers don't realize is that your team may not know how to work together and they are going to need you to show them how to do this. What You'll Find Inside: HOW CAN AN IT LEADER CHANGE AN ENGINEER INTO A TEAM PLAYER? AN IT MANAGEMENT NIGHTMARE: MANAGING TROPHY KIDS CHEAP & EASY IT MANAGEMENT: HOW TO USE SOCIAL-NETWORK ANALYSIS TO BOOST TEAM PERFORMANCE GOOGLE'S LESSONS FOR MANAGING TECH-SAVVY TEAMS Team building is a soft skill that too many of us have never had any training on how to grow and cultivate. It starts with understanding that every member of your team is an individual. This means that you're going to have to deal with team members who don't want to work with each other as well as members who are locked into destructive competition with each other. As though that wasn't enough for you to have to deal with, in the modern workplace there are multiple generations working together. One of the greatest challenges that you'll be facing is discovering how to manage the millennial generation - the so-called trophy kids. You need them to be a part of your team, but in order to get them to be an effective part of your team you are going to have to discover how they want to be managed. Managing in the 21st Century means that social media tools are available to help you connect with your team. You'll need to be careful how you use them, but these tools can help you to bring your team together into a single functioning unit. The good news is that the solution to building teams is not something that you have to dream up all by yourself. Other firms have faced the same set of challenges and you can learn from them by studying both what has worked for them as well as the things that have not worked for them. Once you are able to get your IT team to work together, you'll need to be careful to make sure that you are not affected by the downside of teams. Make sure that group decision making doesn't cause you team to veer off into the wrong direction. This book has been created to provide you with the soft skill training that you are going to need in order to effectively build teams. The goal is to use the skills and talents that each member of your team brings to the table in order to build a high performance team. For more information on what it takes to be a great IT manager, check out my blog, The Accidental IT Leader, at: www.TheAccidentalITLeader.com

As a curator you are the person who is the content specialist charged with your institution's collections and involved with the interpretation of heritage material. What this means is that you are the one person who knows the most about what your institution has, how it got it, the story behind it, and what its true meaning is. Your knowledge means that when it comes time to share this information with the outside world, you are the one who is going to be called on to give speeches. The good news is that just as you learned about your collections, so to can you learn how to give a great speech. What You'll Find Inside: "ONCE UPON A TIME..." - THE ROLE OF STORYTELLING IN BUSINESS COMMUNICATION HOW TO MAKE A TECHNICAL PRESENTATION RIVETING PERSUADE AN AUDIENCE USING 3 SECRETS USED BY PRESENTERS KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE: WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW MAY HURT YOU Just think of all of the great speakers who have gone before you Dr. Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, Steve Jobs, the list goes on and on. Now you've been give your chance to change the world! I can well image what you are feeling right now - fear, doubt, uncertainty. Don't worry about it. I've got some good news for you - all of those great speakers felt the very same thing. However, they were able to muster up the courage to go out there and give the best speech that they possibly could. They did change the world and you just might end up doing the same thing. However, before you go doing that, we've got to make sure that you've got a well-planned speech to work with. Planning a speech is the first step in creating and delivering a powerful and effective speech. In order to plan a speech you need to take the time before you start to write out your speech and think about who you'll be speaking to. When planning a speech you need to make sure that you understand the purpose of your speech. Why are you going to go to all of the effort to create and deliver this speech? After you know that, take the time to think about your audience: what do they want from your speech? You're going to have to choose what type of speech you want to give. You can choose to deliver an informative speech, a demonstrative speech, an inspirational speech, or a humorous speech. More often than not the speech that you end up giving will draw from all four types of speeches. The good news is that I know that you're going to give a great speech and it's all going to start with the planning. Take the time to read this book, learn what you need to do in order to plan a great speech and then go out there and knock 'em dead!

If teaching people about wellness was easy, than anyone could do it. As health educators you spend your time developing and implementing strategies that will improve the health of not only individuals but also of communities. As you do this you learn what works and what does not work. This means that you have valuable information to share with both your customers and your peers. One of the best ways to share this information in an effective way is by giving speeches. This may not be something that you are currently comfortable doing, but with the help of this book we can get you positioned to help your message of wellness go viral. What You'll Find Inside: "ONCE UPON A TIME..." - THE ROLE OF STORYTELLING IN BUSINESS COMMUNICATION HOW TO MAKE A TECHNICAL PRESENTATION RIVETING PERSUADE AN AUDIENCE USING 3 SECRETS USED BY PRESENTERS KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE: WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW MAY HURT YOU Just think of all of the great speakers who have gone before you Dr. Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, Steve Jobs, the list goes on and on. Now you've been give your chance to change the world! I can well image what you are feeling right now - fear, doubt, uncertainty. Don't worry about it. I've got some good news for you - all of those great speakers felt the very same thing. However, they were able to muster up the courage to go out there and give the best speech that they possibly could. They did change the world and you just might end up doing the same thing. However, before you go doing that, we've got to make sure that you've got a well-planned speech to work with. Planning a speech is the first step in creating and delivering a powerful and effective speech. In order to plan a speech you need to take the time before you start to write out your speech and think about who you'll be speaking to. When planning a speech you need to make sure that you understand the purpose of your speech. Why are you going to go to all of the effort to create and deliver this speech? After you know that, take the time to think about your audience: what do they want from your speech? You're going to have to choose what type of speech you want to give. You can choose to deliver an informative speech, a demonstrative speech, an inspirational speech, or a humorous speech. More often than not the speech that you end up giving will draw from all four types of speeches. The good news is that I know that you're going to give a great speech and it's all going to start with the planning. Take the time to read this book, learn what you need to do in order to plan a great speech and then go out there and knock 'em dead!