S1:Ep71 Powerful Pitching in the AI Era: Sell Your Professional Value with Clarity and Confidence

In this episode of Digital Transformation & AI for Humans, we explore the importance of Powerful Pitching in the AI Era. 

Join me, Emi Olausson Fourounjieva, in a powerful conversation with Malcolm Larri – an Australian thought leader living in Stockholm. Malcolm is the founder of Brave Personal Development, a TEDx Host and Conference Host, a Course Director at Berghs School of Communication and IHM Business School, and a sought-after Leadership & Culture Transformation Consultant. 

Today Malcolm is going to share how to Sell Your Professional Value with Clarity and Confidence.

🔑 Key Discussion Points:

✔ What separates an average pitch from one that wins the room, the deal, or the opportunity

✔ The most common blind spots when pitching value

✔ What AI can’t it do when it comes to pitching

✔ Non-negotiable human elements for real impact and resonance

✔ How to evolve the pitch without losing the depth of the story

✔ Smart positioning without diluting clarity or confusing the audience

✔ The key to delivering a pitch that lands - fast, clear, and powerful

✔ A real-life transformation story when a leader rewired their pitch, shifted their presence, and unlocked a new level of success, visibility, or opportunity

✔ The most powerful advice to founders, business owners, or execs ready to own their voice, refine their message, and pitch themselves with bold clarity in this new era of AI

🔗 Connect with Malcolm on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/malcolmlarri/

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 2:03 Malcolm's Journey and Professional Background
• 4:52 Value Proposition: The Missing Element
• 13:56 Blind Spots in Leadership Communication
• 21:17 Human Elements AI Cannot Replace
• 31:04 Balancing Perfection and Connection
• 40:07 Powerful Communication Techniques
• 51:10 Final Advice: Trust and Human Connection

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hello and welcome to Digital Transformation and AI for Humans with your host, Emi. In this podcast, we'll delve into how technology intersects with leadership, innovation and, most importantly, the human spirit. Each episode features visionary leaders who understand that at the heart of success is the human touch nurturing a winning mindset, fostering emotional intelligence and building resilient teams. Fostering emotional intelligence and building resilient teams In today's episode, we will reveal the secrets of powerful pitching in the AI era to help you sell your professional value with clarity and confidence, Together with my fantastic Australian guest, now based in Stockholm, Sweden, Malcolm Lari. Malcolm is the founder of Brave Personal Development, a TEDx host and conference host, a course director at Beres School of Communication and IHM Business School, and a sought-after leadership and culture transformation consultant. Welcome, Malcolm, it's a great pleasure to have you here in this studio.

Speaker 2: 1:03

How are you? Thank you so much for the invitation to be part of the podcast. I'm really excited to answer your questions and share whatever knowledge, wisdom and experience I have with your audience. So thank you, thanks for having me.

Speaker 1: 1:17

I'm so looking forward to it. Let's start the conversation and transform not just our technologies, but our ways of thinking and leading. If you are interested in connecting or collaborating, you can find more information in the description below. Subscribe and stay tuned for more episodes. I would also love to invite you to get your copy of AI Leadership Compass Unlocking Business Growth and Innovation the Definitive Guide for Leaders and Business Owners to Adapt and Thrive in the Age of AI and Digital Transformation. Find the Amazon link in the description. Malcolm, to start with, I would love to hear more about yourself, about your journey, about your passions.

Speaker 2: 2:03

Yeah, well, I think you know you have a good introduction. One of the things that you know happened for me was back in about 1997, I studied NLP Neuro Linguistic Programming which is a form of cognitive psychology based on language, and that really opened a door for me and I moved into coaching, and back then coaching wasn't really a thing. It was more closer to being a therapist than being a coach. The coaching hadn't really become a thing yet and I started working with individuals. Those individuals wanted me to work with their teams. Working with teams led to working with organizations, and so my career really unfolded in a very natural and logical sort of evolution of moving from individuals to teams, to organizations.

Speaker 2: 2:49

And then, over time, what I discovered was there were the very, very common patterns in terms of people's behavior, in terms of their communication, in terms of their success.

Speaker 2: 2:59

And then I started to be able to put that all together and go out and sell my services as a consultant to you know, some of the biggest companies in the world, companies that you would know you've got apps on your phone that have these companies and also working with individuals from those companies, leaders. And also one of my passions when I moved to Stockholm was I started working in the startup community and I work as a pitch coach for about 150 startup companies a year and that has given me also a great insight into how to pitch value in a really compelling way, and I came up with a package of how to do that and you know now I spend my time. I'm very blessed to spend my time professionally. You know, sharing what I know with a very, very broad audience of people across Europe working in the USA as well, and you know, proud to have now spoken to people in, I think, 42 countries, four continents, and I'm just getting started Four continents and I'm just getting started.

Speaker 1: 4:05

Amazing, that is so impressive and so inspiring, and you are one of those blessed ones who are working with what they burn for, what they love and what they enjoy, so it sounds like a reference for so many of us. Thank you so much. However, I must admit that I'm also one of those, because I absolutely love what I'm doing and I'm helping others to find their path to their North Star as well. Malcolm, in a landscape shaped by AI, extreme pace and short attention spans, what separates an average pitch from one that wins the room, the deal or the opportunity? Can you reveal the secrets to success?

Speaker 2: 4:56

Yeah, I think that one of the things that I would say is that you know when we talk about, you know speaking or communicating in the age of AI.

Speaker 2: 5:06

The template for how to be a compelling speaker really hasn't changed in 2,500 years, the kind of template that we use to train speakers to be a compelling speaker. This is all the things that Aristotle was talking about 2,500 years ago. But I would say, in the modern you know communication economy that we're going through, one of the things that I would say is a really clear differentiator of a compelling pitch and let's just talk about pitching and presenting, because they're separate things and not the same thing. But when it comes to pitching an idea or getting an idea out into the marketplace, value proposition is absolutely critical and I'm constantly amazed how few people even know what a value proposition is, let alone how to use it in a compelling way. And I think that it's really important, if you're going to go out to the marketplace and get some kind of foothold for your product, your service, your idea, that you really understand the value of the idea and constantly share the value of the idea to the audience, because that is actually more important than the idea itself. So the idea itself is usually the vehicle for the value. Now, one of the things that really is a very constant thing that I come up against, especially in startup world, is that people really know their product, but they don't know their value, and so they're selling the wrong thing to the audience. They're really talking about their product and why it's the shiniest and the brightest and the fastest, but they're not telling the audience how their life's going to be changed by using the product and service, and that's the value that needs to be sold. And this transfers over to being a compelling leader or, you know, visionary inside a company that you have to sell a message that really resonates with the audience and understand what's valuable to the audience.

Speaker 2: 7:21

And when I'm doing my workshops, you know at, you know, burke School of Communication or IHM Business School one of the first things we do is separate what is a pitch and what is a presentation.

Speaker 2: 7:34

So a pitch is sharing an idea with the audience in a way that allows them to understand its value and want to take part in what you're offering.

Speaker 2: 7:46

I'm going to say that again A pitch is sharing an idea in a way that allows the audience to understand its value as a first critical point and then it makes them want to take part in what you're offering, and so there's a real connection between the value and the audience saying they want to take part in that value and they're willing to participate in it and even potentially invest money into it as either an investor or a customer.

Speaker 2: 8:17

But a presentation has a bigger space that it takes up and, even though it still needs to convey value, the value it can convey can be less pointed, less directed, less call to action. So a pitch and a presentation have separate components that make them successful, but at the heart of both of them is a clear message and a clear value that they want to communicate. So I think that in the age of ai short attention spans you having clarity about what that value is that you want to communicate has become much more critical, because you're only going to get a few seconds of people's attention before they decide that they want to listen to you or not. It's a very competitive attention economy that we're living in now, amy.

Speaker 1: 9:16

Fantastic and I couldn't agree more. Everything you mentioned is so relevant, and thank you for exploring and taking a closer look at the difference between a keynote, the presentation and the pitch, because those are truly different. But sometimes it's easier to see it from the outside than from the inside, when you are already on the spot, right, so it is amazing yeah, I'll just share a quick story.

Speaker 2: 9:47

You know, I was working with two female founders recently who contacted me and I'd been recommended to them, which is really nice, and they came to me and they said we want to show you our pitch. And then at the end of their pitch, I said it's really nice, but it's not a pitch, it's a presentation, and so we need to, like you know, take the all of this nice storytelling that you're doing, which is informing the audience but not guiding the audience towards making a decision, and and flip it around and and they they actually we spent know a few hours together taking their presentation and moving it into more of a pitch format, and they came back to me like two weeks later and said we've had such better meetings and such a better business conversation since we moved it, and so even the same story and the same ideas in a different structure have a completely different effect on the audience. So I think differentiating pitch and presentation is a really critical skill and piece of knowledge to have in 2025 for sure.

Speaker 1: 10:57

And that's a great reference and example of how it is applied in real life in practice. It also makes me think about my breakthrough clarity sessions, when in 60 to 90 minutes, a person gets from blurry picture and just being somewhere between different options, different ideas and so many doubts into the place where they have so much more clarity and a defined path to where they really want to go Not somebody else, not as it was predefined before and then the circumstances changed and it's not relevant anymore, but everything becomes so crisp, so clear that procrastination and everything just falls off by definition, because there is no reason to hold yourself back and the only one desire you have is to move forward toward your North Star and get what you are dreaming about and wishing so much. What you are dreaming about and wishing so much.

Speaker 2: 12:04

Yeah, and you know, one of the things that I would just say is you know, with clarity, clarity becomes confidence, and that's a really important thing that you do for people. And you know, when you give them that clarity and you take away all the noise, you're actually creating a space for confidence and certainty to be there, because confidence is nothing more than a state of certainty. And when you actually give people clarity, that immediately becomes certainty and that certainty transfers emotionally into a sense of confidence that allows them to make better decisions, move forward less procrastination. And so I see these things as very, very connected, because the power of language and this is what I learned back, you know, back in 1997, 1998, the power of language, which is how we make models of the world, to make extreme differences in how we think and how we behave and how we respond, it can't be underestimated. So language speaking skills, clarity around your language, all of these things have a domino effect, first on yourself and then on the audience.

Speaker 1: 13:24

Totally. Let's dive a little bit deeper into this. You already mentioned that there are some situations where you have to differentiate what you are doing, how you are presenting, but I would like to dive even more into the topic of blind spots, because you've trained hundreds of leaders, as you mentioned before, from startup founders to c-level execs and business owners. What are the most common blind spots you've seen even the smartest ones struggle with when pitching their value yeah, well, the first thing is that most people aren't pitching value, they're pitching product, services.

Speaker 2: 14:08

And if this even transfers over into you know, I was working with a very large organization recently, has 17,000 people in it and they said, can you come in and talk to our leaders about how to share new initiatives into the organization? When the company has a new policy, a process or initiative, how should the leaders communicate that? And the first thing we did was really talk about value proposition again and go back to the beginning and say, as a leader, if you're bringing in a new, announcing a new HR policy, or let's say, you're going to centralize all of your it departments, you can't sell that to the audience you know that you're speaking to, unless you've decided or unless you've identified rather, what is the value for them of having centralized it, what is the value for them of this new HR policy? And then, speaking from that position and I would say one of the biggest blind spots I see is that in a lot of business communication.

Speaker 2: 15:17

So let's break it up into a few categories. Firstly, selling let's break it up into a few categories. Firstly, selling Way too much. Selling of the product's benefits rather than the value that the customer will have from having that product. But then I would say, in terms of leadership, one of the things that I see way too much, especially in senior leaders too much, especially in senior leaders, as leaders move up the ladder from manager to true, you know, c-level executive, is the c-level executives continue being reporters of what's happening in the business instead of actually pushing forward a vision of what the business can and should be.

Speaker 2: 16:03

And this is a really critical pivot that especially leaders, as they, you know, develop and move up in seniority that they need to make this really critical pivot.

Speaker 2: 16:16

Because when you're a manager, you're often very task focused, reporting on what's happening, but as a senior leader in the company, you really need to be pushing forward the vision of what the company can be.

Speaker 2: 16:32

You need to be pushing forward the potential of what the team can achieve. You need to be really engaging in what potential you can unlock in the people in the organization. And so there's a real shift that happens, and the blind spot I see is that so many leaders do not make this transition. They stay in the reporting, managerial mode in terms of their communication, instead of taking that pivot and realizing oh, the organization needs something completely different for me now. I have other people reporting. They can read the company figures anywhere. I need to be the person that's bringing insights and excitement and possibility to my communication so that people know what to do with that information and how they should think about the bigger picture moving forward. So I would say that for me is one of the things that I really help a lot of leaders with now is to help them push them up the communication ladder to the level they need to be at and moving from reporting to more evangelizing.

Speaker 1: 17:45

I would say I absolutely love that you mentioned this, because I see exactly the same thing from the perspective of mindset and vision that it's missing and it is about time to exactly take the next step. And it is about time to exactly take the next step, take the leap and transform into who you are supposed to be, because the roles are changed, but the mindset is still there and it prevents them from creating that magic. They are actually there to create and the opportunities are truly limitless there to create and the opportunities are truly limitless once you understand that you can create such an amazing growth and transformation around. So thank you for highlighting the potential and and opportunity.

Speaker 2: 18:44

Yeah, I mean, I think this is also a really important part of you know, in the age of AI, also recognizing that a lot of the information as a leader that you used to have to give to your team, your team is going to get on dashboards in real time. So much reporting side of leadership is going to just get taken away and not required. It's going to be insights about the information that will be critical and then taking those insights and pushing them into things that build confidence and motivation and vision. So definitely a turning point. Ai is really going to create a very strong turning point in this particular area that we've just been discussing very, very quickly and for me, I see this as a very, very exciting opportunity for leaders and the earlier they take hold of this opportunity, the better.

Speaker 1: 19:47

really that's how it is. And when you mention actionable insights, as a former leader who has been working with data analytics and insights, you know I exactly can refer to so many cases and examples where actionable insights were either in place and helped creating that change, or weren't in place, and then it was not meant to use the data as it was used. So the new way of running the processes and communicating in a data-driven way was needed, and many organizations are still there in terms of culture, in terms of cross-functional collaboration and communication, and it all rotates around the same critical points and once you understand them, you can just move forward at the speed of light, truly. But coming back to the artificial intelligence and I agree, we're living in amazing times and there are so many exciting opportunities. Ai can write bias, create visuals, decks, summarize resumes, and AI agents are creating so much magic around. But what can't AI do when it comes to pitching? What human elements must remain non-negotiable for real impact and resonance?

Speaker 2: 21:24

yeah, I think that, uh, what's going to happen with ai is we're going to get flooded with so many ai you know, created bio. All of these things are going to be so perfect. What I think is going to become really, really valuable, like much, much more valuable, will be real human communication, authentic communication. And so why do I think this? I think that if everything, if everybody let's take sales as a really good example I think that if everybody can create the perfect sales pitch, everybody can create the perfect sales documents and everything using ai, then the critical difference in selling will be the people and how those people communicate and relate to the other people who are part of the transaction. So human communication is going to be elevated in value hundreds of times, like it's going to be such an important, critical piece of your professional life that will gain value over the next three, five, ten years that not being able to communicate well in the marketplace will be a huge liability. And so I think that one of the things that is also often misunderstood is that let's take a startup company that's pitching investors. The investors are investing 50 in the company and 50 in the founders of the company they're looking at. Okay, this is a great idea, but can these people deliver the idea? And I've had investors say to me that was a fantastic product, fantastic idea, right time, right place. Wrong founder team. They're not going to be able to deliver on this promise. Critical to realize is that your ability to deliver that pitch that AI helped you create and perfect is going to be much, much more important than it was before, because every single person who's walking into the room for a job interview to pitch for investment, to get a promotion, to ask a girl on a date, they've all had help from AI. So it's going to be the delivery of that message, and people really underestimate how important human emotion is in actually getting a yes and or getting a great result.

Speaker 2: 24:06

And I have a example of this. I worked with two founders over the last. I've worked with them over a period of about on and off about five years, let's say and I met them when they were starting their company. They were in a startup incubator called Antler in Stockholm. I worked with them there and then I worked with them afterwards as well on their pitch Fantastic group of founders. And they came to me and said they came to me about three years in and said we're going for another round of funding and we're really struggling to get funding. Can you listen to our pitch? And you know I coached them a lot, so they were very good at creating the pitch and structuring the pitch, but they did their pitch for me and I was sitting there drinking my coffee and they did their 20 minute pitch and I said you know, everything about your pitch is fine in terms of structure, but where was the passion? Where was the excitement, you know, in your pitch? And because they'd pitched so many times to so many people, they and their business now was up and running, they had cash flow. So for them, their business was less of a passionate mission now and just more of a day-to-day reality.

Speaker 2: 25:22

And so we really worked on them bringing back their passion into their pitch, really being being passionate about the vision and using a lot of emotion and emotive words and hand gestures in their pitch. And they went back out, went out for another round of investor interviews and I think it was the second or third one. They got an investment and so the information by itself is only logic and reason. You have to add the human emotion to that well-packaged information for another human, to connect to it, and you cannot forget this that AI is an incredible tool. I use it every day. I think it's incredibly valuable, but don't forget that AI will actually take away some of the boring things that humans do, like spreadsheets and booking appointments and other things like this, but human connection is still going to be an incredibly important driver of all success and business and in life, and it's going to become more critical, not less critical. That that's my opinion and what, and it's actually what I'm already seeing in the marketplace.

Speaker 2: 26:43

Now I have just noticed a friend of mine who has a business. Over the last two weeks, their style of posting on social media really changed and I was like, hmm, this is really strange. And so I sent her a message. I said are you using ChatGPT now to create your posts? And she said yes, how did you know? And it was like there was something about the posts that was just not her and of course, I know her, so maybe that made a difference, but it was a very noticeable feeling of soullessness in those posts that she was posting.

Speaker 2: 27:28

And I said to her you know, your posts might be perfect for the algorithm, but you know you have to find some balance, because they feel very much manufactured, they feel very clinical and they also feel very inauthentic, and so this is a critical thing that AI doesn't really know.

Speaker 2: 27:50

Ai has never fallen in love, it's never had been heartbroken, it's never been for a job interview, it's never experienced what humans experience, and so no AI is going to know what it feels like to do anything ever Like. It's not going to ever know what it feels like to be human, and so we need to really create this, I think, a very precious balance between perfection and connection, and so that balance between perfection and connection is going to be the one, that tightrope that we're all going to walk over the next few years until we really understand how to do it well, and I think that the human connection is going to become more valuable, and our ability to connect is going to become much more valuable, definitely, and I can relate to so much of what you just mentioned because it's on my mind.

Speaker 1: 28:51

The last few weeks, exactly, I see the same trends, that the messaging, the posts, are becoming so inauthentic that you really see that it is created by an algorithm and there is no person in it anymore.

Speaker 1: 29:08

It looks soulless, it looks flat, looks shallow. Even if the content and the context is there, it's impossible to percept it in the same way and connect with it and relate to it in the same way. So we also have to put more energy into training those AI assistants and solutions to be more us-like, to think like us, to navigate in our style. And that's exactly what I'm including in my VIP assistant AI human assistant program, where it is about training and understanding better and communicating in the way so that it evolves together with you, because it needs to evolve. We are evolving and that communication, human to human, is becoming more and more valuable and precious, and it is definitely so. So I really appreciate that you mentioned it, because it's going to show up at such a speed and open up, just unfold in a matter of very short period of time and it will be a huge surprise for so many, but it's no surprise that it's coming. So please pay attention to the trends and get ready.

Speaker 2: 30:35

Put your time, put your effort into coming along with that change and preparing yourself in the best possible way with social media, we can get into a, you know, sort of a race to the bottom where it's like you, everybody's got the most perfect ai created post so that the algorithm connects with it and spreads it out, but none of the audience are connecting with it. And so, again, that balance between perfection and connection. How do we do that? And using ai tools, one of my she made an AI that was really. She really tried to make the AI as much like her as possible and, you know, gave it access to a lot of her blogs and things she'd written and, you know, to help create a language style.

Speaker 2: 31:23

I think all of these things are really really great. We're going to be able to replicate a lot of our personality through ai, uh, but at the end of the day, I think it's also a lot of things like video, us just speaking to camera. That's actually going to become much more valuable. And for things that are watermarked not ai, you know, uh, or when everything that is ai has to be watermarked that it's AI generated or AI created in some way then I think that people are going to start searching for the things that are actually just human and authentic, and a person speaking into their telephone. That might actually be the hack of 2020, 25 or 2026. We'll see. We'll see where it trends to. But yeah, perfection has never moved humans, ever. You know, all art is imperfect, all music, everything that's been created that's moved the world is full of imperfections and that gives it character, and character makes it valuable, and that value of being unique. You know, we have to be careful we don't lose that in the AI tools. I think.

Speaker 1: 32:40

That's amazing, that wisdom you are sharing here. I so appreciate it and thank you from the depth of my heart because really pointing out the fact that we have some kind of energy connecting us which is not available to the AI solutions, and it is going to get more and more support from different dimensions and become more and more evident. But for the moment, it is just about also keeping in mind that it's good to ask ourselves who are we, what do we feel and how do we want to feel when moving forward, and that's transformation. So let's talk transformation a little bit more. When a leader is rebranding, scaling or entering new markets, how do you help that person to evolve the pitch without losing the depth of the story?

Speaker 2: 33:46

Yeah, I mean I would say you know there's a lot to unpack here. I mean, when you're talking about a leader, if a leader is bringing a company into a new marketplace or area, one of the things that I think is very important is brands and organizations not to lose their brand promise when they're expanding and growing and moving into new markets. I see a lot of people forgetting why they started their business and what the core value of the business is as they try and pivot to a new market and it tends to dilute their offering, the connection people can make to it, because you end up sort of being everything and nothing. That's a real thing that I see happen and you know you've been to one of my pitch workshops. That's how we met. You know, I have a slide on my pitch workshops and it's a. It's a shop in america and it says you know, beauty parlor, chainsaw repair, nightclub, you know, and it's like somebody's put these three things together and made a really weird business out of it.

Speaker 2: 34:51

I think that as often as people expand their businesses, they start to add things that don't really make sense to the initial promise of the business, the initial value proposition, and this is why understanding and having a strong value proposition and a really strong brand promise at the beginning of your journey is really important, because you can add as many products and services to your brand promise and Apple is a really good example of this. You know they keep adding products and service and value to their customers, but there's a central promise there that is very much Apple and that allows them to stay at the premium end of the market. But for me, it's really important that as you get bigger, you don't lose focus. You have to get bigger at a rate that allows you to remain focused, and I think you know there's that old quote by Henry Ford where he said you know, if I asked my customers what they want, they would have told me they want a better horse, not an automobile. And so it's also being willing to go to market with a product or a service that you truly believe in and then finding the customers that resonate with that, rather than trying to get every customer by being everything for everybody.

Speaker 2: 36:12

I think that is the biggest issue I see. When you know, especially with startups, they start to expand, they lose. They lose their focus, they lose their soul. So be really clear about who you are as a person, as a business, so that as your success gets bigger, as as your circle widens, you don't lose your center of gravity, because once you do that, you're going to get eaten alive by the marketplace.

Speaker 2: 36:38

The marketplace punishes being vague and being general. You have to be specific and I think the great quote by Seth Godin, the marketing, be a meaningful specific, not a wandering generality. You know, that resonates around my head, that's tattooed on my brain since since I, since I read that several, maybe 10 years ago. But, yeah, I think expanding is a tricky business in the modern landscape because, especially the digital products, because digital products can scale very quickly and every company that's a SaaS company wants to get very big very, very fast and and that's you know, the beauty of those businesses and those products. But it comes with a built-in booby trap or a landmine of, yeah, of losing perspective and losing your center of gravity.

Speaker 1: 37:33

I agree, as many modern leaders wear multiple hats as visionary advisor strategists, what is your guidance for positioning this complexity without diluting clarity or confusing their audience?

Speaker 2: 37:50

Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I see a lot with leaders is that they don't speak enough, in the sense of they're talking a lot but they're not actually don't speak enough in the sense of they're talking a lot but they're not actually speaking and doing talks and speaking a lot. And so I get leaders that only speak really once or twice a year to the whole organization and the problem is is that they're not practicing being good communicators at that level and so when they get to their all hands meeting, they're in front of a thousand people. They speak the same way as they do at a Friday meeting at this amazing kickoff in a beautiful location that they're spending a lot of money on to be there. And generally I get called in to help CEOs prepare for these meetings and it's painfully obvious to me that they're not practicing how to communicate well, like how to communicate powerfully, on a regular enough basis that they get good at it. And I think that every leader of an organization needs to, once a week, or at least once a fortnight, have a communication that is very much prepared, very much purposeful, and that they in front of an audience and that they're connecting with that audience and practicing communicating at a high level. And of course you know I'm a speaker coach, so I'm going to recommend speaker training for every leader. But what other skill delivers as much value as quickly as being a good communicator and being a good compelling speaker? If you're at a high level there, you should not allow anyone to enter the c-suite unless they have had speaker training or speaker coaching.

Speaker 2: 39:43

You know, at some level, because as soon as you put people into that position of authority and power, their miscommunications can do so much damage to the organization's culture and brand. And so you know for me. You know every C-level leader needs to have a sort of driver's license around communication, and the first one being that they've had some speaker coaching. Every C-level leader needs to have a sort of driver's license around communication, and the first one being that they've had some speaker coaching, they know how to put a speech together, they know how to put a pitch together, and that they have some kind of format that they know consistently works. And when I work with C-level executives on these kind of kickoff talks, I have a template that I give them. This is how you do it. This is the model of what works. We know what works, because it's been around for thousands of years.

Speaker 2: 40:31

You know the rhetorical triangle ethos, pathos, logos of logic, reason and emotion that, for me, when I see leaders not communicating well to an audience, what I tell them is when you miscommunicate with an audience, you create an emotion in that audience that you now have to clean up.

Speaker 2: 40:59

You now have to go back and backtrack and do a lot of work to create certainty and trust again, simply because you didn't have the skills to communicate your idea or your message clearly, and so it is an extremely important thing that leaders know how to communicate messages well. They know how to communicate initiatives, company changes, mergers, all of these things in a really powerful and compelling way, because, as I tell leaders all the time, you only get one chance to announce something for the first time, and once that first chance is gone, you're either going to have created a lot of certainty and excitement in the audience, but you're going to create uncertainty, doubt and resistance in the audience, and so it's a critical skill to have, and I think it's really a non-negotiable skill in 2025, to be honest, especially with the amount of social media that you would be expected to do, the amount of time you'll have to spend in front of cameras recording messages. Speaker training is an absolute must.

Speaker 1: 42:10

It's a must-have part of your professional education at this point in time, for sure You're totally right about that and I feel like knocking the code a little bit. So you've seen so many times this situation firsthand the high stakes pitch moment, investor rooms, big stage deals or maybe even Fortune 500 intros. What is the key to delivering a pitch that lands fast, clear and powerful? A pitch that lands fast, clear and powerful. Maybe you can unpack it a little bit so that our listeners and viewers can learn those powerful techniques right here, right now. And, connected to that, could you share a real-life transformation story, a time when a leader revived their pitch, shifted their presence and unlocked a new level of success, visibility or a new fantastic opportunity?

Speaker 2: 43:08

Yeah, well, let me start with the second part. First, I was coaching a CEO who had to do a big speech and he came to me with his draft of the speech and very much as I was talking about before. He was still in reporting mode. He was just talking about the numbers, how much the business is growing, all of these things, and at the end of the 30 minutes I said thank you for the business report, but you haven't given me any insight or excitement or motivation and, honestly, everybody could read your PowerPoint and get exactly the same information as if you, you know, just emailed it to them. So you need to switch to actually taking a few highlights from this message, go from reporting to talking about what does this mean and where are we going. And so this CEO really got it and really understood. Oh yeah, this is actually what I'm here to do now. I'm actually here to create the vision for the next step of the journey and show how the numbers we currently have is a breach to that and, you know, create the excitement about the next chapter and what's coming up.

Speaker 2: 44:18

And so how did we do that? So the first thing we did was we looked at the rhetorical triangle which is, like I said it's 2,500 years old. It's not mine. I wish I had trademark on it. I'd make a lot of money. But you know ethos, pathos, logos, so the trustability of the speaker, logic and reason and emotion. And when you put trustability, emotion and logic together in this nice balanced way, the audience will always be engaged, because they trust you as a source of information. What you're saying makes sense to them, but it's also engaging emotion in them. Now, if you just have logic and reason, that's just a boring data dump. No one wants to hear that speech. And also, equally, if there's too much emotion, it sounds unhinged and not based in anything in reality, and so you actually have to really carefully balance those things. Logic and emotion need to be very, very carefully balanced. Balance those things Logic and emotion need to be very, very carefully balanced. And we've all heard speakers who were boring because they gave too much data. But equally, if you hear a speaker who doesn't have enough logic and reason, they start to sound like they're ranting or just you know that their ideas aren't based in reality. It's just much emotion. And so, for me, getting the balance of those things right and creating some structure around it and really looking at which key points in the talk do we need to lean on one thing more than another, and how much information can an audience take before you need to take a break from giving them data and then you need to give them a story, because the other part that you see a real transformation in is when storytelling comes in and leaders can really use storytelling to engage the audience in the direction of logic that they want to put out to that audience, so that key message they want to put out to that audience, so that key message they want to put out.

Speaker 2: 46:24

Storytelling is incredibly important. The human animal, you know, for most of human history we didn't have reading, writing and books. We had storytelling, and all information, knowledge and wisdom came through storytelling traditions up until a few thousand years ago, and so the human brain has actually developed as a storytelling engine and it actually works best when it's functioning around stories, because both hemispheres of the brain are engaged when it's listening or watching a story. So we are literally storytelling is human, our brain or watching a story. So we are literally storytelling is human. Our brain is wired for story. It's not wired for data at all.

Speaker 2: 47:10

And if you look at the studies on how much data the human animal can take in a presentation. It's really really small. You can give people a few minutes of data and then their brain starts to overload because it's almost like they're holding, they're juggling all this data and information in their conscious awareness and then trying to work out what they're supposed to do with it, and as soon as it gets overloaded, people actually start talking to themselves about that and then they actually stop listening and then they lose the thread and then they drop all of the balls of information and data that you've given them. And so the critical thing is to constantly loop back and forward between data and story, data and story, to create that balance and let people make sense of the information but also emotionally engage with it. So, yeah, I think that the leaders who are really transformative and the ones that we want to listen to they have the rhetorical triangle, you know, balanced really really well, and often when I'm teaching at business schools, I'll show videos and we break the talk down into how did the speaker do these three things, how did they build trust, how did they deliver logic, how did they deliver emotion? And we break some of the most watched TED Talks down in this way. We break down some of the best business speeches in this way and you can see they all follow this template speeches in this way and you can see they all follow this template.

Speaker 2: 48:47

So, again, the information has been around for a long time. It's what are you going to do with that information and are you going to train with it? And I think ai is going to. I already know of some speaker coaching tools using ai. There's a speaker coaching tool calledich that's just been developed by my speaker in Sweden and Finland, which is a fantastic tool where people can upload videos of themselves and AI does a great job of analyzing their speeches and their talks and giving them feedback on that. So that's an example of how AI is going to help in that way.

Speaker 2: 49:24

But I still think human speaker coaching will be around for a long time, because getting someone's personality to come out and match all of those things is also the icing on the cake in such regard. And sorry it's such a long answer, but it's you know something obviously passionate about, and I also think that if people can just understand, that's you know something we're obviously passionate about and I also think that if people can just understand that. You know speaking is an art form, but it's also a practice that you have to practice and be disciplined and work towards being a great speaker. To become a great speaker, you can't do it once or twice a year. You have to dedicate time and energy into it as a professional in 2025 and beyond.

Speaker 1: 50:10

I can't describe how much I'm enjoying today's conversation. It is so dense with all the valuable insights and actionable insights, and everybody who is listening to this conversation can find something they didn't know from before, and it is absolutely crucial. So right now we are creating such invaluable resource for so many leaders and business owners and I would love to continue asking different questions so that we can learn even more. But to wrap up today's discussion with something super valuable, what is the most powerful advice you would give to founders, business owners or execs ready to own their voice, refine their message and pitch themselves with bold clarity in this new era of AI?

Speaker 2: 51:10

Yeah, what I would say is that just recognize that human communication is about to become 10 times more valuable. Over the next two or three years, as AI comes in and does a lot of what we used to do, human communication is going to be like incredibly more valuable than it has ever been in human history, and for me, this is an astonishing opportunity to step into. And it's exciting as all these shiny tools are ChatGPT and Grok and whatever else you're using. They're all amazing, but just recognize that you, in a room full of other people, is still going to be the most powerful tool of influence that you will have in your professional life and all professional life, all success, is based on trust.

Speaker 2: 52:07

Everything you have in your life is because somebody trusts you. You have a bank loan. You have a house loan because the bank trusted you to pay it. You have a job because people trust you to come and do that job. If you're a business person, you have customers because those customers trust you to deliver on your promise, and so if you get really good at communicating, you can build more trust, which will lead to you having more confidence, lead you to having more customers, more opportunities, more promotion, whatever it is. But I really believe that your ability to connect to an audience is going to build trust and that trust will convert into success. But if you cannot get the people to trust you, if you cannot get their attention for long enough for them to hear you, long enough for them to trust you, you're going to have a difficult road ahead. So please invest in yourself in becoming the best possible communicator, in both pitch and presentation, and make it a priority. That's what I would say is the big takeaway from this session.

Speaker 1: 53:21

That's what I would say, is the big takeaway from this session. Brilliant Malcolm, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and your light with us today. It's been such a great pleasure.

Speaker 2: 53:32

Really appreciate it my honor. Thank you for having me and if anyone has any questions, please reach out to me. Happy to answer any questions and you know, please feel free to rewind-watch this a few times, make some notes, take this as a mini coaching session for yourself and get the best value out of it you can. And and again, emmy, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

Speaker 1: 53:54

I'm honored thank you for joining us on digital transformation and the eye for humans. I am emmy and it was enriching to share this time with you. Remember, the core of any transformation lies in our human nature how we think, feel and connect with others. It is about enhancing our emotional intelligence, embracing a winning mindset and leading with empathy and insight. Subscribe and stay tuned for more episodes where we uncover the latest trends in digital business and explore the human side of technology and leadership. Until next time, keep nurturing your mind, fostering your connections and leading with heart.