S1:Ep84 Storytelling Lessons from the TEDx Stage: Connecting Technology with Meaning

In today’s episode, we dive into storytelling lessons from the TEDx stage — exploring how to connect technology with meaning — with my amazing Australian guest living in Stockholm, Sweden - Malcolm Larri.

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.

🔑 Key Discussion Points:

✔ Discover what makes a story truly unforgettable in 2025 and beyond

✔ Learn how to translate innovation into emotion and meaning that connect

✔ Uncover common storytelling mistakes even visionary leaders make

✔ Hear the TEDx moment that moved an entire audience and why it worked

✔ Explore how to turn facts and features into messages that move hearts

✔ See how storytelling helps AI and innovation leaders simplify complexity and inspire change

✔ Find the right balance between authenticity, vulnerability, and authority in leadership stories

✔ Get practical insights on how to land and deliver a TEDx talk that stands out

✔ Gain powerful advice on crafting stories that influence, inspire, and shape the AI-driven future.

💡 Whether you're a CEO, founder, people leader, or future-focused innovator, this episode will challenge you to reframe success and rediscover your humanity as your greatest leadership edge.

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

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Episode Setup
• 1:28 About Malcolm And Career Evolution
• 5:14 TEDx Coaching And Behind-The-Scenes Prep
• 5:58 What Makes A Talk Unforgettable
• 7:37 Bridging Technology To Human Value
• 10:30 Disruption, Jobs, And The Value Of Communication
• 14:44 Leaders’ Storytelling Mistakes And Trust
• 19:15 Ethos, Pathos, Logos In Action
• 24:23 AI As Tool, Human As Final Editor
• 27:03 Leading With Human Value In Tech
• 31:15 Authenticity, Boundaries, And Authority
• 37:07 Landing A TEDx: Passion, Focus, Fit
• 43:52 Scope Your Idea: Narrow Then Expand
• 49:18 Final Advice: Practice And Invest In Speaking
• 52:39 Closing Reflections And Subscribe

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:00

Hello and welcome to Digital Transformation and AI for Humans with your host, Amy. 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. In this episode, we dive into storytelling lessons from the TEDx stage, exploring how to connect technology with meaning, with my amazing Australian guest living in Stockholm, Sweden, Malcolm Loring. Malcolm is the founder of Brave Personal Development, a TEDx host and conference host, a course director at Bearst School of Communication, an IHM Business School, and a thought after leadership and culture transformation consultant. Welcome, Malcolm. I'm happy to have you here today. How are you?

SPEAKER_00: 1:02

Good, good. Thank you for having me. It's really exciting to be here with you and discuss all these interesting things that I'm so passionate about. So thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_01: 1:12

Amazing. 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. 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 below. Malcolm, to start with, it's such a great pleasure to have this conversation and such an exciting topic. Could you tell us more about yourself, about your journey, about your passions, about how you came to arranging those events?

SPEAKER_00: 2:04

Yeah, so my background is actually I started as a coach back in 1997 before coaching was even a thing. I studied NLP, Neurolinguistic Programming, and became sort of a therapist and coach, a bunch of people. And I worked for a long time just on an individual level. And then over time, what happened was I was working with individuals and they said, Could you come to our company, maybe talk to my team? And this started happening. So then I added that to my business. And then when I started talking to teams, people said, Could you come and talk to our whole company? And then I started working with organizations. So over a 25-year period, I had this sort of natural evolution from personal coach to being a consultant around leadership and culture for big companies, some of the biggest companies in the world have used my services. You would know their names and you know, have lots of their apps on your phones, et cetera. But for me, one of the things that was very, very interesting was how my ability as a speaker allowed me to move quickly into the business world and move up a lot of levels very quickly, far beyond my education, because I actually didn't finish high school. I didn't go to university. But my communication skills actually allowed me to move out of, you know, starting working factories, actually, running a welding machine in a factory when I was 16 to being in Borgrounds of some of the biggest companies in the world. And it was actually communication skills that allowed me to do that. And then when I moved to Stockholm 15 years or so ago, you know, really started to spend much more time as a speaker coach helping startup companies with their pitches. And I became involved with TEDx Stockholm, which was a fantastic experience. Hosted TEDx Stockholm, just hosted another event for them, uh pre-event, which was fabulous, had a really fun time, such great people. But what happened over the recent years is a lot of people started coming to me behind the scenes to help them prepare for their TEDx events. Now, TEDx have their own speaker coaches. So when you get accepted into TEDx, you know, you get a couple of speaker coaches given to you. Great people like Andrew Hennigan, who's one of the best uh speaker coaches, really admire Andrew, he's a fantastic person and coach. But what I found was people were coming to me behind the scenes uh before they applied to try and develop a talk, to try and develop a topic, and um and that's kind of you know where I spend you know some of my time now helping people develop and and work out how how do I get a topic into shape to give to TEDx and then the speaker coaches at TEDx takeover from there.

SPEAKER_01: 4:58

That's exciting, amazing that you've been a part of those beautiful events. It's always inspiring, and I want to learn much more today and share it with our listeners and viewers, of course. So, as you've coached and created today's speakers on some of the biggest stages, in your view, what makes a story not just interesting but unforgettable in 2025 and beyond?

SPEAKER_00: 5:27

Undoubtedly a passion for the topic. You know, if somebody is really passionate for the topic, that is the central point that you need to build the talk out from. And most people want to speak at TEDx because they're passionate about something. They have a particular passion, a cause, something that they think is, you know, really important for people to know and understand. And from that central point of passion, it's such a great starting point. Because if you want to do a talk on business development, you don't necessarily have to be incredibly passionate about it. You have to know a lot about it. You have to have a lot of understanding and maybe a lot of depth of knowledge about it to be an effective speaker. But when you're in TEDx, people are there because they want to get information that they think is interesting, but they want to get it wrapped in a package of inspiration. So once you get to the TEDx stage, you have to be really combining those two things. And the speakers that I've worked with and the speakers that I've seen on the TEDx stage, especially in the TEDx Stockholm stage, the ones that have been really, really good, at the heart of it, they've had a real passion for what they do, you know, or what they do they want to talk about. And often it comes from a professional experience or a personal experience. Um and so there is a grounding there of why they're talking about it. But that passion is the secret ingredient, and I think that's really something that people are expecting from a TEDx talk.

SPEAKER_01: 7:05

Passion is so important. Actually, no matter what you are talking about, it becomes so much easier to connect when you feel that passion and you see that the person cares. And of course, it was also about that knowledge. Many founders, tech leaders, and change makers struggle to translate their innovation and their knowledge into something that emotionally connects. What is the bridge between technology and meaning?

SPEAKER_00: 7:37

Yeah, look, I think that technology is overrated. That's what you need to really understand. For the audience, technology is really overrated, and technology itself, you know, is interesting for a few minutes. But what does the technology do? What does the technology allow? What is the transformation the technology creates for humans? And actually understanding the human value of any technology, if you're going to present it to an audience, like a TEDx type audience or the general public, it's your job to translate that technology into a human story. And if you can't create that bridge and you only talk about the technology, whether it's you're talking about it from the positive or the negative, like AI is going to save the world or AI is going to kill the world. If you can't translate it into human value, uh the audience is going to lose interest pretty quickly unless they're a technical audience. Now, if you're an AI person and you're talking about AI to AI experts, you can talk about the technology all day long because they want to know the nuts and bolts. But a general audience really doesn't care. Almost nobody listening to this understand how a light bulb works, really. They don't understand the technology that makes a light bulb or electricity work in their house. They just use it all day long to make their lives better and easier. And so, from my perspective, how quickly can you go from talking about the technology to talking about the humanity? That is what actually connects an audience. And especially now, I mean, I've got students at university who never knew a time before the internet. I spent 25 years before I heard the word internet. You know, like someone I actually remember a phone call. A friend called me when I was like 26, maybe 27. Hey, have you heard about this new thing, the internet? And I was like, ah, that's not going to be a thing. Right? So I spent like 25 years pre-internet, but for a lot of my students that I work with now, they don't remember a time, they've never lived in a time where the internet didn't exist. They didn't ever live in a time where email didn't exist. Or even some of them, you know, I'm working now with people who are coming into the world of work post-pandemic, and they have never known working life without Zoom, without Google Docs and shareable documents and all of these amazing tools that we have. And so for them, it's sort of like if you want to talk about tech, it's just like what's interesting about that? It's not interesting at all. It's just, it's just like, I don't know, it's just like this computer mouse or this pen, this pencil. Like, what are you telling me about? And so that ability to connect to the human value of any technology, how it affects humans, good or bad, that is what you need to be thinking of if you want to engage the audience in 2025. And I see, you know, reels and uh TikToks and stories about AI all day long, and some of them have interesting facts. Saw a story on uh Instagram, and it was like a one-minute thing talking about how China has built this new completely automated dark factory that can produce a mobile phone every second without a human ever touching it. Wow, that's amazing. But I mean that fact is only interesting for a few seconds, and then it's like, and so yeah, I think it's really taking whatever technology you're talking about and making it putting it in a much more interesting setting for the audience to understand it and relate to it and interact with it.

SPEAKER_01: 11:46

Thinking about that dark factory, I saw that picture right in front of me, and actually it's going to impact the development of humanity so brutally. And um well, there are positive and negative sides with it, of course, but it needs more development to the thoughts, to the connections, human communication, and I totally agree that that is already a next step, and we have to take it.

SPEAKER_00: 12:18

As someone who's 56, you know, I've had the opportunity to live a pre-internet life and a post-internet life, and you know, we we can see that technology takes jobs on one hand, but it creates jobs on another. And I host a lot of conferences, and I host as a company that I work with that runs cybersecurity conferences, and I host this year, I'll host seven cybersecurity events across uh the Nordics and uh Amsterdam, Germany. And, you know, cybersecurity, I mean, just that is a whole business and sector and skill set that only exists because of the internet. You know, we didn't need it before, and so as much as we see jobs taken out on one side, there will be thousands and thousands of jobs. MIT estimates 90 million jobs created over the next five years from AI. And so, you know, it technology takes on one hand and gives on the other. It's the transition between that, you know, from one space to another where the disruption is. And this is where we can also think about making impact, creating value in that disruption. How can I leverage that disruption or how can I maximize that disruption for my benefit or to be of service to others during that time? Now, we've recorded another podcast on sharing value and communication and all of those things. And as I said in that podcast, I think human communication is going to become more valuable. And so you being able just to communicate well is one of the ways that you can manage that disruption that we're talking about that's coming. But yeah, but I think again, technology, it's what we do with it and how it affects us that's interesting.

SPEAKER_01: 14:12

Actually, we are that unique generation who have been through so many transitions and disruptions that we have the experience of navigating the unknown in a much better way than some others who have seen only a part of this journey as it is already now. So we can also share our experience from different perspectives, which is invaluable. Malcolm, what are some common mistakes you see even smart visionary leaders make when trying to tell their story, whether on stage, in a pitch, or on social media?

SPEAKER_00: 14:57

Yeah, well, one of the things that I think is a really critical mistake from leaders, and I'll focus here just on leaders, is that they spend way too much time reporting. You know, they're reporting facts, figures, numbers. This is this is what happened. And I think that in leadership, you have to make a distinction between management and leadership. Now, lead literally has the word lead in it, which means from the front, uh to move from the front. And from my perspective, you you spend a period of your life in management where a lot of it's task focused. But once you move into leadership, that means you need to spend a really strong proportion of your time leaning forward into the future and bringing people forward into the future with you. And so I spend a lot of time with leaders on this, and I just worked with a leadership team, and you know, I really talked to them about this senior leadership group of six people saying how much time are you spending on strategy versus operational things? And we really had a strong conversation about pushing them from being task focused into strategy focused and giving them the goal of being 70 or 80 percent focused on strategy and leading from the front. And then when you bring that down to communicating, it means that as a leader, you need to be talking about this is where we are, this is what's next, and really spending much more time on the what's next part because AI is going to give us all the tools to know what's happening, when, and how in real time, we'll have a dashboard for everything. Facts and figures will not be interesting, you know, to hear from your senior leadership, except for as pillars of storytelling about what can happen and what we should be doing in the marketplace. And if leaders can understand that anytime you have your audience's attention, this is a very precious opportunity for you to build trust and brand for yourself. And that as a leader, when you're communicating, you're either building or breaking trust. And so everything that you put out into the organization, out into the marketplace, should be building both trust and certainty. And if you have that as your actual goal for the communication, it's going to radically change what you talk about and how you talk about it. And when leaders come to me for coaching, one of the first things we do is we really sit down and talk about what their communication is supposed to do at their level in the company, at their level of seniority, and just number one, getting clear on that. And so once you understand why you're supposed to be communicating and what you should be communicating at based on where you are in the company, then you can start to build your actual talk, your actual pitch. But if you don't have a really strong why, like at the core of your leadership communication, you end up often just talking about things that people could read on a PowerPoint, and it would be just as informative and not inspiring people and not leading, actually, just more managing, which is a huge lost opportunity, I think.

SPEAKER_01: 18:33

Brilliant. And I must admit that it's difficult to live without knowing your why, no matter what you are doing, and on which level you are doing it.

SPEAKER_00: 18:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 18:43

Because clarity means so much. But I want to hear more about how you are guiding speakers to go from facts and features to a message that resonates with people's hearts and minds. It would be so good to hear some stories, or maybe from your work with TEDx Stockholm, what is one talk or moment that deeply moved you and what made it so powerful?

SPEAKER_00: 19:15

Yeah, one talk that I when I hosted TEDx in Stockholm, I think it was 2019, there was a lady named Carolyn Soldhoir who did a fantastic talk. I didn't coach her, you know, Andrew and uh another speaker coach worked with her. She did a fantastic talk on sort of accidentally becoming an activist. And I think that that talk, you know, is a really good example of balancing elements of storytelling, passion, logic, and reason, and putting those three things together. And, you know, Carolyn's talk was the last talk of the day, got a very long-standing ovation, which was well deserved. It was a very moving moment. And uh, but it was a great example of a message connecting with an audience, really, really powerful. And the experience that Carolyn had, she was able to share powerfully with the audience so the audience could experience it as well. And so for me, that was a sort of example of a TEDx talk being done extremely well and delivering on its promise, but also doing something extra. It didn't just inform, it also created emotion, it inspired. For me, it was a great example of a talk that delivered really powerfully. And again, if we look at the elements that bring it together, they fall into what is commonly called the rhetorical triangle, which is ethos, pathos, and logos, which is trustability. The audience trusts the person who's delivering the message as being uh a trustable and reliable source, and then great storytelling, which engaged emotion, but there was also a lot of logic and reason there that stopped it being just a passionate rant. It grounded it in reality and gave people some perspective on what they could possibly do that could be similar. There was also a call to action in that talk that I think was really powerful. And so every talk that you see that engages you is one that has the rhetorical triangle in good balance. And I've broken down myself with my students at Burke School of Communication, IHM Business School. You know, we look at different TED talks, TEDx talks, great talks by business leaders. We watch videos and then we break down the elements. How did they show us they were trustable? How did they deliver emotion? How did they deliver logic and reason? And you'll see in every talk that has ever gone viral, they are very, very balanced between these three elements. And you need to have those three elements in balance if you're going to bring the audience on a journey with you, and if you make any of those things unbalanced, the talk doesn't work. The talk does not land with the audience. And so it's it's really common, I think, for people to lean too much into data and information and not enough into insight and storytelling. And when you have an audience's attention as a speaker, data is really useful as a tool to maybe deliver some impact. But giving them lots of spreadsheets, lots of data often overwhelms them, hard to understand, doesn't really lead to insight rarely for most of the audience. And so it's very important to balance these elements if you're going to be successful at delivering a message at a business meeting, a TEDx, uh being interesting on a date. The same rules apply.

SPEAKER_01: 23:13

I agree. The same rules apply. And I've been also thinking about the fact that sometimes the negative facts are grabbing attention in a much more powerful way. And it's easier to connect through negative emotions because they're hitting stronger. And at the same time, how can we develop and grow up ourselves as human species, as human beings to become more human and connect equally powerfully with positive facts and be equally touched and engaged without being disrupted, because that's not something that can keep going, you know. We have to develop and upgrade ourselves when technologies are developing so fast and they can help us become more powerful in a beautiful way.

SPEAKER_00: 24:12

Yeah, and as a professional speaker, I'm using AI to help me all the time, you know, find examples like Yes that I asked, give me an example of a an inspiring business transformation where the company was almost bankrupt and turned it around. And it gave me a great example. And I told that story at a talk that I did to business leaders. So, you know, as a research tool, as a help, you know, it's extremely helpful. And you could even input your script into a AI and say, does this balance, you know, the rhetorical triangle really well? You know, ethos, pathos, and logos. Please analyze and give me feedback, and then it could give you some feedback like you know, there's not enough storytelling or not. At the end of the day, though, I think that human communication is a human endeavor. And as much as the AI tools can help us create a first draft or a good working document, at the end of the day, you're gonna have to put yourself into it to make it sound authentic and sound human. And both of us, you know, before we started recording the podcast, were commenting that we can already see posts from people that we know that are coming across more and more inauthentic because they're using AI to create that content. And you can there's something about it that just we can feel is not right, and even though it might be quite perfect content, there's something about it that doesn't feel authentic, and we can detect it, and it makes us feel a bit uneasy, maybe a little bit uh wary of trusting that content. And so I I think that the human still has to be the last decision maker in the chain, the one that actually oversees things and thinks because I think humans have an astonishing ability to understand context and that AI can't at this point in time. And for that reason, the human has to be the decision maker, you know, at the end, and the person who does the final work and creates something special out of it with human emotion, human insight, human awareness. So, yeah, the tools are amazing, but humans are astonishing when it comes to communication.

SPEAKER_01: 26:51

That sounds very positive, and I couldn't agree more. For leaders working with AI, innovation, or emerging tech, how can storytelling help them influence, inspire, or lead more effectively in this world that often misunderstands complexity? Out of everything you mentioned before, I would like to focus a little bit more on this part because I find it crucial and sometimes it's not activated enough.

SPEAKER_00: 27:22

Yeah. So what I would say is that I'd like to, you know, just reiterate what I said in the beginning that the technology isn't that interesting if you're not a techie, you know, like working on it, if you're not a programmer or a coder or AI prompt expert or whatever it is. But I think that it's really important that people who are talking about tech now talk about it in the most human, simple way possible. What will this tool do for you that you didn't have before that will add value to your life as a person or a professional? Now, I did a workshop recently for leaders around AI and talking about how AI can help them in their leadership and accelerate their leadership from the human perspective. And so we we had a discussion and we we did some exercises and we talked around what things are you doing as a leader right now that are high value and low value, and how many of the low value things could you, you know, over the next one, two, three years give to AI to do so that you could spend much more time on your high value items, like connecting with people, coaching people, being visionary, sharing a vision, communicating, all these things that you know leaders are supposed to spend their time doing rather than admin reporting, things like this. And so if you just take that example, if you're a leader talking about AI and talking about technology, yes, tell us about what it can do, tell us about the new features and benefits, but you have to ground it into human values. What is the value for the human on the other end of that piece of tech that gives their life a higher quality, more meaning, more efficiency that get, you know, and that efficiency translates to work-life balance. At the end of the day, everybody buys something because it does something for them, it moves them, it either solves a pain that they have or gives them a gain that they want. Every single thing that we buy only solves a pain or a gain. And so looking at that, what does your technology do? What pain does it solve? What gain does it give? And spend 80% of your time talking about that and 20% of your time talking about the tech. Because I promise you, the tech is not that interesting to most people. I don't care how Chat GPT works. I really don't. I just care that it works. Yeah. And that is going to be the case for almost everybody on planet Earth. Whether it's a water filtration system, AI, an app that finds discounts for you at different fashion houses. All of them are providing human value. Otherwise, they wouldn't exist. And so, yeah, let's lean into that. Let's make sure that as a leader you're leaning into that as the thing you talk about the most.

SPEAKER_01: 30:35

The interesting part is that I think really there are so many things which are working and we don't need to know exactly how it works. And I believe that if you ask 100 people about how the electricity works, everybody is using it. But far from 100 will be able to explain it to you how it works, right? For real, or how our body works. Same thing. So but with AI, I feel that, however, it's nice to understand a little bit about how it is set up so that we can collaborate and co-create and develop together with AI in the right way because it becomes such a huge part of our existence, and it is going to impact our future in such a powerful way.

SPEAKER_00: 31:30

Yeah. I agree with you on that. And I think the challenge there is, you know, as I said, talk about the human value, either good or bad. And then, you know, like you need to understand this because it could negatively impact your privacy if you're inputting this information. I think people are interested in that. But again, that crosses over quickly into what I'm talking about, which is the human value. And when we talk about the tools and co-creating things, I think that's really interesting, but I don't think that's any different to how business has been run for the last 10,000 years. Oh, you make clay pots and I've got a wagon. What about if you make clay pots and I put them on my wagon and I go around all the village and sell the pots? Two kinds of technology coming together to create business opportunity. I don't think this is any different than anything that we've seen really, you know, in human history. What I think could be really interesting, though, is for people to understand how, and this is one thing that I think is different with AI, is how we can personalize AI to our advantage and to create a more authentic voice of ourselves out to the marketplace. But again, that's just exactly what I'm talking about. You talk about the pluses and minuses for humans of the technology, but the technology itself is, yeah, as I said, you know, I don't think most people are interested or care. But also, so much of the technology is just getting integrated into platforms we're already using, so that we don't even really have a choice about using it or not using it. Because I mean, even like when I open my Microsoft Outlook now, it's doing much more predictive text, it's reminding me of things. This email has been in your inbox for three days and you haven't answered it. So a lot of the interaction and things that are coming from AI is coming into tools that I'm already using, and I don't really have a choice to turn them on or off because it's just the evolution of the product. So, from that perspective, I think that yeah, we're a little bit like a frog in water getting boiled.

SPEAKER_01: 33:50

We are all in a way, those frogs, and the water's getting warmer, so let's see what's next. And that leads me to the questions of authenticity and vulnerability in leadership and in storytelling. What's your take on them? How much is too much, and how do you find the right balance between openness and authority?

SPEAKER_00: 34:19

Yeah, I think that um it's been interesting over the last couple of years. I had one of the biggest tech companies in the world come to me and ask me to put together a program for them on professional authority, you know, how how to have authority as a leader in a group. Because what they'd found was they'd created this incredibly connected culture, but the leaders didn't feel like they were above their people and were really reluctant to give their people instructions. And so this is often called, you know, professional presence or leadership authority, different names for it. But I think in business, you can share anything that's authentic and relevant with your audience and have them connect to it and think it's you know, if it's good. But I think sharing for the sake of sharing is not a good idea. I don't think you should just be sharing, hey, I was an alcoholic when I was in my 20s and uh had an affair when I was 18 and I did this, and like just for the sake of sharing it. Like, why are you sharing that? Uh, I think that, especially in business, I think there is a professional presence that we should have, and we should treat our professional lives as separate from our personal lives. They're not the same thing. When I come to work and I do my job, I'm there to deliver value, and that is the most important thing, that I deliver that value. And then if I on top of that, I need to be a good moral and ethical person so that I've got trust and respect or you know, trust and connection. But, you know, I don't think the CEO of Disney, you know, really needs to talk about his heartbreaks and things to be an effective CEO. I think what he needs to talk about is the business, his understanding of the business, being transparent enough with his audience about what's happening in the business that they trust him. But I don't really think that people at Disney care that much about his personal life. That they might know a little bit about it, but I think they're really much more focused on is this a trustable leader or not? So when it comes to being authentic, I think that, yeah, I think you should be authentically yourself. And that means that you live and work in a way that matches your values, morals, and ethics. And I don't think you should compromise on those because I think that is a recipe for personal disaster, just personally. Like whatever success you have, if you give up your values, is not a good whim. But in terms of how much to share in authenticity, I think there has been a lot of bad information given out on LinkedIn and some of these platforms promoting a kind of authenticity that doesn't really work and doesn't scale that well. I think you should be yourself. I think you should not pretend to be somebody you're not. I think you should be as transparent as you can be with your audience about what's happening. But beyond that, I think your job is to generate, especially as a leader, is to generate certainty and to give people a vision to work towards and to work in a way that matches the values of the company and the organization so that you're role modeling for people. But I think there has been a lot of I call it sort of LinkedIn mythology, where so some things get very trendy, but in practical reality, people don't stop and ask what's the point of that. Yeah. And so, yeah, I I would like to feel that the person I work for and the person that runs the company is a good person and a good human, but I'm much more worried about them being very confident and very professional, first and foremost. And so, yeah, share, be authentic, be yourself, share appropriately. And if you're going to share something, share it for a reason. Don't share it because you think that you have to share because LinkedIn says good leaders share everything with everybody all the time. It's not true. And I have noticed a sort of moving back from that big organizational culture. And this company that asked me to come and work with their leaders is like you need to get these leaders to move back from their people enough so that these people can tell people what to do and feel comfortable to move people in and out of their teams as required. And so I think professional distance is an important skill to have. And I and I was watching a podcast on YouTube with Professor Scott Galloway, and he said, you know, like we really move people leaders have moved away from calling their companies families because they're not families, they're constellations of professional people who come together to deliver value, you know, and make money together. And I think that that trend is a good trend, actually, because it's more honest and more authentic to say, you know, you're here to do a professional job. These are what this is what we expect for you, these are the values of the company, so we can interact well as humans. And um, yeah, and I think that that that's a good trend. It's a good balance that we're hitting now between authentic and professional, I think.

SPEAKER_01: 39:58

And this is a very interesting part of our conversation, and actually, I feel like doing another episode just on developing this balance is a very fine line between failing and winning this game, but at the same time.

SPEAKER_00: 40:15

It's a moving target, and it's a moving target, so you're always balancing that those two things.

SPEAKER_01: 40:20

I think coming back to the idea about sharing your experience, your value, your thoughts, your messaging on a TEDx stage. I want to understand better. If a founder, business owner, or executive wants to land a TEDx talk, what should they focus on? What are the exact practical steps they should take from the idea when they are probably watching another TEDx talk and get inspired and they feel that they have something so valuable to share that they would love to stand on that red carpet and share their message. So, where do they start and how do they move in terms of practicalities and also in terms of those important parts they should pay attention to?

SPEAKER_00: 41:20

Yeah, well, the first thing is to recognize that you know TEDx and TED Talks are a very specific kind of talk. They have a you know a format that they use that's sort of repeated. And so the first thing to do is just go and watch the the top 20 most watched TED talks and just sort of have a look at the frameworks that they they you know each speaker has used and built their talk on. So, you know, success leaves clues, right? And there's even a book called Talk Like TED, which breaks down the key elements of um, I think it's by Vincent Gallo, if I remember correctly, that book, Talk Like TED, but you know, breaks down the elements that people use in different successful TED Talks. But I would say one of the main things is that I see a lot of people using TEDx and TED Talks now to just try and promote their own businesses and use a TEDx as a sales funnel. And I think that everybody on you know TEDx community is really aware of this, and they're much more interested in people who actually have a passionate message they want to share rather than sort of wrapping a little message around the business that they have, you know, you know, and so and and it's become sort of quite transparent, you know, in the in the people when people come to me and say, I'd like to do a TED talk, and it's you know, I could could you coach me to so when I make a submission, it's going to be a winner. You know, one of the things I say is, you know, I don't do it if you're doing it to promote your business. Do it to promote something that you think is really interesting, that you're really passionate about. Talk about something you're really interested and passionate about. It m probably does relate to your professional life, but it can't be an advertisement for that. So that's the first thing. Please don't use TEDx as a sales funnel. Use it as a sounding board or a platform for you to talk about something that you think is an important topic and message that more people need to hear about. And then from there, it's really about starting with a as I said before, there are all the great TEDx TED talks, TEDx talks come from a place of passion. And I often look at a talk by Sir Ken Robinson with my students called Do Schools Kill Creativity? It's a great TED talk. It's quite old now, it's about 15, 16 years old. But you know, he obviously has a passion for what he's talking about. And I think when people are connected to a genuine passion for a topic, then the audience is really willing to trust you, and you can take them on quite a long or wide journey to land on the message, and they'll be willing to go the distance with you. So, one of the other things that I often talk about with my students, because when I teach at Berg School of Communication, all my students have to do a, you know, six or seven minute talk as part of their final exam. And one of the things that I talk about is that you need to have a topic that's big enough that it can go the distance. And a lot of people come to me with an idea for a talk, and it's not an interesting enough topic on its own to be a whole TED talk. And so then we develop it and talk about maybe there's like three or four tangents that that, you know, little journeys that that talk can go on to make it into a fully formed talk. So let me just give you an example. A young lady at my school, uh at the school I was teaching at did a talk on potato pancakes. And she thought, I'll do a talk on potato pancakes, and it'll be it'll be funny and cute, you know. And it was and it was, it was really funny and cute, but only for about two minutes. And then it didn't have enough sort of substance to it to go the extra time. And so, yeah, don't talk about potato pancakes for more than two minutes because the audience is gonna think it's cute and funny for about that long. But if we were to talk about a topic like AI as a TEDx talk, firstly, that topic is too big, it's like it's way too wide. So the first thing we have to do is like discover what part of AI do we want to talk about, and then how do we magnify that out? So I'll give you an example that I often give to my students. If I was to talk about feminism as a TED talk topic, that would be really enormous. Like, what do you like? Where would you even start? What does it even mean? You know, you could spend a whole TED talk just defining feminism, you know, in the self. And so what you need to do is to make a topic small enough and focused enough that you can talk about it a lot. And so I call this strength and expand. And so the first thing you have to do is take the topic and put it into a niche. So I would take feminism and I would put it into a niche like I want to today, I want to talk about feminism and women's rights, but specifically I want to talk about how it applies to hiring practices in large organizations. And so I take a big topic and I shrink it down and we're gonna look at it in one key area. How are women treated when it comes to hiring and job interviews in large organizations? And then I could zoom in on that, and then I could talk about different topics around that area that would make it into a fully filmed talk, if that makes sense. And so for me, one of the things is okay, you're passionate about the topic, that's great, but now you've got to put it into some kind of focus that will allow you to do a fully formed talk, that'll allow you to have several chapters to the talk. How did we get here? Now that we're here, what does it mean? What does it mean in the next 20 years for my son and my daughter? So all of these things you need to be thinking about at the beginning. And when people do come to me for coaching, I take them through what I call a speech map. We start to map it all out, start to think about the topics that could be there, the topics you know, that could be subtopics of the main topic. And so, yeah, you really have to think through it if you're going to be successful. But most of all, I think the central idea has to be a powerful one and one that is interesting and personal enough that it makes sense that you're the person telling that story. Because when you're on a TEDx stage, there has to be that credibility and that connection from you to the topic that will make you, you know, be selected and be chosen.

SPEAKER_01: 48:36

It is very inspiring. And uh I feel that now you were presenting this roadmap as an architect of those roller coasters where you are taking listeners and audience to those exciting journeys. Beautiful. Thank you for sharing those uh tips and uh advice. And uh I'm looking forward to see more today's speakers after this conversation. Hopefully, they will be inspired enough to uh want to try and take a step toward practicalities. Marco, what's the most powerful advice you would offer to leaders who want to tell stories that move people, elevate their message, and make a real impact in this fast-moving AI and performance-driven era?

SPEAKER_00: 49:35

I think it's all about commitment. Practice, practice, practice. I think that most leaders are only concerned about being a good speaker whenever it's time to speak. And they should actually be working on their speaking skills, their communication skills all the time. I think that in the age of AI, human communication is going to explode in value. In the age of AI, every leader's spoken word and stage presence, it's going to be much, much more valuable than before. And so it's really critical that leaders and any professional who's listening to this really sees speaking skills and communication as an absolutely critical part of their professional toolkit that they're developing constantly, that they're investing in and that they're working on. You know, there's lots of good, you can go and join uh Toastmasters in any city and learn speaking skills. You can get a speaking coach, you can watch videos on YouTube on speaking. You can look on Masterclass, you know, and and look at all the great speaking courses they have. You know, you can reach out to somebody like me in your area and get one-on-one coaching. After I finish recording here, I jump in a taxi and I go and speak to a founder business owner, giving them speaker coaching. So people are investing in this and they're seeing it as a more critical part of their influence as business leaders. And I would say, please, you know, I was just telling a group of leaders, please be committed to learning AI and using AI tools. You do not want to be the last person in your company to be using AI and experimenting with it. But equally, the human side, the human value that you have is going to increase. And your ability to communicate that value, your knowledge, wisdom, and experience is going to be so, so critical in the next phase of business life as AI comes along and takes away other tasks that gave us value. So please invest in it, be committed to it. It's really, really important.

SPEAKER_01: 51:55

Thank you so much for sharing this. And I absolutely love this powerful advice. And we couldn't choose a better apart today's conversation because it is about empowering humans through technologies and creating that combo which is going to create a better future for all of us. So thank you so much for being here today, Malcolm, for sharing your wisdom, your experience, and I truly appreciate our conversation, and I appreciate you. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00: 52:32

Thank you so much. Honor to be here.

SPEAKER_01: 52:35

Thank you for joining us on digital transformation and AI for humans. I'm Amy, 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.