Sometimes they try to bring the audience through the circuitous thinking they had to go through to get to their final point. Listen, people get up on stage all the time and wander all around their message, trying not to offend anyone, or trying to soften its impact to make it palpable to all viewpoints in the room. This imperative is only possible, incidentally, when you know what you want to say and have a strong conviction about it. But simple, as in not over-complicated and entirely graspable.

But from a very personal perspective, allow me to share my three rules of success. Now, hundreds of books and articles, if not more, have been written about the “art of public speaking,” so I know I’m not inventing gravity here. I believe this so deeply, in fact, that we now dedicate much of a semester to effective presentations at the Jack Welch Management Institute. You are what you say your communication approach is your fingerprint, both professional and personal. Making your case in writing is increasingly a thing of the past.

At the same time, I’ve come to believe a person’s skill in public speaking – be it in front of a crowd of 1,000 strangers or a meeting with five close associates – is essential more than ever. I love it, and having been out in front of more than one million people in audiences around the world in the past fifteen years, I’d like to think I’ve come a long way toward getting it right. Today, giving a speech or a presentation is one of the most fun things I do in life. Regardless, my rank inexperience in front of a crowd, combined with my self-consciousness about my lifelong stammer, made me a complete wreck, and without getting specific, let’s just say I spent a lot of time “feeling ill” the day of the big event, which ended up being, as you might imagine, an exercise in endurance for both me and the audience. Weeks beforehand, I meticulously wrote out every word I was going to say and practiced reading it out loud what felt like a thousand times. It was 1964 in Cooperstown, NY, and I was a 29-year-old project manager at GE who’d been asked to present a new plastics venture to a group of 300 high-level corporate types.

Jack welch 6 rules