Keynote Addresses -- Uplifting and Thought Provoking
The keynote above was given by Gary Gagliardi at the recent sales meeting
of one of our corporate customers. The theme of the event was war and Gary
was costumed as a ninja. The presentation was made in the round on a map of
SE Asia.
A
great keynote address sets the tone for the entire industry event or business conference.
Keynotes on Sun Tzu's Art of War are great because they hit home for any size
and type of audience, making the stakes clear. Gary Gagliardi's keynote
presentations run from 60 to 90 minutes. These short presentations are
inspirational, but they are also packed with ideas people can use.
Our keynotes are designed to be
informative, inspirational, and a bonding experience. These presentations are
usually designed for audiences that combine an organization's employees -- most often its sales and
marketing force -- with its customers. Our keynote speeches have
two goals:
The first is to excite our listeners about the strength of
their organization's current
strategic position.
The second is to give people a new perspective that will
allow them to see the challenges they face as opportunities.
Above is a snippet from a recent keynote speech for a large corporation.
It is unusual since it was given in the round and all speakers were in
military costume, in my case as a ninja.
All our keynotes draw all their strategic concepts from Sun Tzu's The Art of War,
and we use quotes from the book to illustrate the points we are making. We offer
our
keynote addresses with a slide show, but the point of our slides is to provide an
emotional backdrop for our presentations. The slide show mixes pictures
illustrating ideas with text offering thought-provoking questions.
Before preparing our keynote presentation, we discuss your strategic situation
with a number of people from your organization. Typically we talk with the
executive who is responsible for the business event and to a few different types
of attendees. The goal of these discussions is to identify the most critical
elements of your organization's current strategic situation so that we can
emphasize them in our discussion. We normally ask a series of questions regarding:
Your organization's core philosophy
The changing conditions in your business environment
The nature of the economics in your marketplace
The decisions that attendees must typically make
The techniques that make your organization unique
In the end, the session should:
Excite
the audience about your organization's strategic opportunities
Introduce the audience to the power of thinking more strategically
Provide
attendees a new perspective on your organization's position
Instill
in attendees the desire to improve their understanding of strategy