You're wondering what I have been up to in May. I have been rushing around like a whirling dervish.
Thus:
• a presentation on Difficult Conversations to the senior management of a distinguished school
• a talk at my old school on Lessons for Life
• fielding a group of Americans who passed by on a Downton Abbey tour
• giving a presentation on Speechwriting to the European Speechwriters Network
• joining a New Statesman panel discussion at the British Library on Propaganda
• travelling to Stockholm to give a masterclass on Presentation Skills to a leading European energy Corporation
• then to Warsaw to give Polish officials are masterclass on Negotiation Skills
• and on to Torun to address the latest YoungMarkets conference on the always engaging subject of Taxonomy
• back to Northampton yesterday to give a local business group a punchy presentation on The Business of Diplomacy
• and then on down to London for a fascinating meeting with Philip Blond, after a ‘challenge session’ with the FCO on some high-level EU questions
While all that has been going on I have helped with a couple of significant speeches and prepared myself for departing tomorrow on a cruise around the Baltic Sea for two weeks, during which I'll be giving four presentations on My Role in the Downfall of Communism and associated subjects.
On return from the cruise I dash to Amsterdam for some masterclass work with the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, then back to Warsaw for further Negotiation Skills masterclasses. Then I stagger back to England and collapse.
I have three tasks while bobbing around the Baltic Sea in the next two weeks (other than delivering those four sparkling presentations).
I have been commissioned to write a major essay about the Serbia/Kosovo problem. Then I need to write for a US website a review of Charles Moore’s biography of Margaret Thatcher.
And, above all, I need to see if I can crank out my first book, a masterpiece on the general subject of Speechwriting and Speechmaking.
It turns out that here on this website I have produced a pretty large bloc of work already on the general subject of speechwriting/speechmaking. Mrs Crawf has been sweating blood helping me copy everything under the rubric of Speech and Other Writing into a single Word document that I can use as a quarry for parts of the book.
One result of this mind-boggling exercise has been a Word document of over 600 pages. I can run a word-count and tell you with unerring precision that since I started this blog in 2008, I have written 321,587 words about different aspects of speechwriting and analytical presentation skills. That is almost 5 books-worth in itself.
So, you have a choice.
If (as you do) you want and need my many and varied opinions on public speaking, speechwriting and general executive communication, you have two choices.
You can scour this blog and work your way through over 300,000 words. For free.
Or you can hope and pray that in the next few weeks I managed to lick all this material into shape and produce it as a cheap but excellent nicely paced book, full of vivid examples, that you are delighted to buy.
These examples are going to be good. Not least because thanks to the miracles of FOI I have asked the Foreign Office for telegrams I sent back to HQ following memorable speeches from different world leaders that I witnessed as a British diplomat, and the FCO obligingly have unearthed quite a few of these and sent them to me. Interesting to see how my reporting at the time does or does not coincide with how I remember those events now.
Why bother with another book on speechwriting? Aren't there plenty of them already?
Yes there are. Most of them, funnily enough, are written by speechwriters.
But not all speechwriters are particularly good themselves at public speaking. And most speechwriters have little experience in organising top-level speaking occasions.
I have done all these things and more. My conclusion is that it is a subtle and mysterious task to link together the speaker and the speaker's words to the audience and the venue and the context of the occasion itself. I have seen so many examples where one or other of these elements was out of sync, leading to unhappy if not ruinous results - even for senior people. The book should have plenty of examples of things going wrong, as well as things going right.
Internet access during this cruise is going to be insanely expensive, so what with that and then my subsequent manoeuvres I'll be off air here until early July.
Be good while I'm out.