Tag Archives: pitchcoach

Encore the Haka..

The Haka, subject of my last post, continued to make news several days after the rugby itself, a relief for English fans. A colleague, Richard Myers, who happily combines the talents of creative director and rugby coach, had this to say;

“I was at Twickenham and I thought the raucous, full-spirited Swing Low was effective and partly dulled the edge the Haka can create.

On one level the Haka is a piece of hokum theatre. It would have more of a genuine role if all 22 All Blacks were maoris, but they started using it when the heritage of most of the players was farming in Scotland and Wales rather than repelling said Euros from the two islands. Today’s players are a mixture of Euros and Pacific Islanders (who have their own version of the Haka) with a few maoris making up the numbers. Incidentally, the tradition is that the Haka is indeed led by someone with maori blood in their veins.

Today, I think the Haka works less as a ‘challenge’ to the ‘enemy’ and more of a call to teamship for the All Blacks, a timely reiteration of what being an All Black means, that the shirt is priceless and that winning is all.

Applying this to business pitching (ahead of the pitch) and you would have a powerful ritual, instilling a oneness of purpose and the parking of egos, and creating an invisible but compelling feeling for the pitchee that here is a group of people who want your business and deserve it.”

Thank you Richard.

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“Flutey insists he can hack the haka”.

Over the last two weeks, the ‘haka’ has been the subject of more news coverage than the rugby. It started in Cardiff a week ago. Usually, at their home ground, the Welsh team can rely on a combination of massed male voice choirs, Land of our Fathers and Katherine Jenkins to give them the psychological edge-except against the All Blacks.

They have the haka. Performed immediately before the whistle, for maximum impact, The Maori war chant once came before battle where ‘exaggerated grimaces are used to throw fear into the hearts of the enemy’. Today, ‘it animates the players combative spirit’. As Sean Fitzpatrick, legendary All Black captain, said on television “the haka is about us”.

Last week the Welsh tried to undo the haka by standing still and tall. Mid-week, English players were quoted, ” Your dreaded haka doesn’t frighten me” said Nick Collins, “Flutey insists he can hack the haka”. Yesterday, the crowd at Twickenham tried to counter it with a raucous ‘swing low sweet chariot’. It was fun but the All Blacks were always going to win.

The point of all this? Pitching, whether in battle, on the field or in the office is about performance. How you start matters! A powerful, surprise opening is critical. It lifts you up. It lifts your audience. It fires expectation.

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Apparently, the world’s most influential thinker agrees with Pitchcoach!

Over the last few days it has been difficult to escape news that Malcom Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point and Blink, is in town to promote his new book, Outliers: The Story of Success. Amongst the sometimes eulogistic coverage, was a three pager in last Sunday’s Observer Review headlined, “Is this the world’s most influential thinker”?

Whether you believe this or not, he certainly provokes thought and this evening will be talking to an audience at the Lyceum Theatre, where for a day he replaces the less demanding Lion King. It was in an interview in Time Out, discussing his talk, that the areas of agreement were apparent.

A recurring theme here has been the encouragement to use storytelling more and powerpoint less. Discussed in the last post ‘ Please tell us a story’ and in the Best Practice Guide, Staging and Content. This is what the great thinker had to say:

“I won’t be singing” Gladwell confirms, “I will tell a story unadorned. No visual aids.” A firm believer in the axiom “Power corrupts, PowerPoint corrupts absolutely,” Gladwell favours old school narrative tecniques where performance is concerned.

“PowerPoint has destroyed storytelling, so I pledge there will be no PowerPoint. It’s going to be very nineteenth century………..We’ll try and tell a story with a beginning, a middle and an end.”

Great minds..

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Don’t blame the audience!

To continue the theme of the post before this, storytelling, I checked out Nigel Rees’ Dictionary of Anecdotes for a relevant story. This one caught my eye.

Oscar Wilde was once asked by a friend how his latest play, Lady Windermere’s Fan, had gone. “It was a great success,”he replied, “but the audience was a total failure,”

If you have the wit of Wilde you can carry this off. If you are as humourless as the self-congratulatory judges of Strictly Come Dancing you can’t. Blaming the television audience, who have made John Sargeant an unlikely folk hero, was not an astute move.

The same goes for a pitch. When the eager question, ‘how did it go?, is met with, ‘they didn’t seem that interested, ‘ or, worse still, ‘ they clearly had another agenda’, then you know the audience is being blamed.

The pitch may well have contained great insight, a killer strategy and a perfect solution. It deserved success! But if the performance was difficult to follow, lacked surprise and failed to engage, don’t blame the panel when they don’t vote for you.

Worth remembering also, that unlike the ‘Strictly’ panel who do claim expertise, people judging pitches may not be experienced in receiving and evaluating a pitch. Not an easy task when much rests on the decision.

All this leading to the unsurprising, oft repeated, advice that you rehearse before an ‘audience’. See if they get it, and enjoy it.

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“Please tell us a story, pleeeease….”

Anyone with young children will have heard these words. Rapt attention and eager anticipation, your reward when you give in. The great comics are all about story-telling. Think back to the seventies when every mum’s favourite, Max Bygaves, started every performance with his catch phrase ” I wanna tell you a story”. Think now, Billy Connelly or Ricky Gervais.

Away from comedy, think Barack Obama. His acceptance speech was mesmerising, its impact undeniable. And yet, how much of what he actually said do we now remember? I tested a few friends. Their limited responses included ‘yes we can,’ ‘change’, these united states of america’ and ‘a puppy dog for the children’.

However, what they all recalled, with ease, was his story.

“This election had many firsts and many stories that will be told for generations. But the one that’s on my mind tonight is about a woman who cast her ballot in Alabama. Ann Nixon Cooper is 106 years old. She was born just a generation past slavery: a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky….”

Storytelling is the most neglected area of pitch stagecraft yet good stories, or personal anecdotes, will stick in the mind long after the charts. They provoke thought whilst engaging and entertaining the audience.

“Please tell us a story, please…..”

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