Steve Jobs;His Communication Legacy
October 15th, 2011Steve Jobs’ death has certainly caused the world to reflect on his brilliant career as a technology innovator but we should also remember that he was a brilliant communicator.
What lessons can we take from Jobs that can help you as a communicator and speaker?
Jobs had developed his own, very distinctive style that appeared cool, and laid back but at the same time highly polished. He knew how to create impact by keeping it simple. He had an amazing ability to speak with passion and make his ideas understandable and memorable through telling stories and demonstrations.
His Stanford commencement speech in 2005 was a classic and now very poignant example of how he did this.
He was quite understated and his speech was simply based on three stories, personal stories from his life, with which he imparted some very powerful messages to the young people he was addressing and indeed to the wider world audience.
He kept it simple with his message and his graphics. He only focused on one idea at a time and did not muddle what he was saying by having busy PowerPoint slides behind him. His slides were simple and elegant .Jobs hardly ever used words on his slides; he let the image paint the picture and reinforced it with stories.
Jobs never let the fact that he was a techie and generally speaking to a tech audience turn his speeches stale with an overload of jargon and unnecessary complexity. In an age of information overload he knew how to create a clear signal that cut straight through all the noise. He knew that he needed to connect on a human level and speak about what a normal person really wanted out of a product rather than just reciting lists of impressive specs and stats.
His stagecraft was also simple. He usually worked with quite a bare, empty stage, not a fancy corporate set. That way he ensured audience focus was fixed on him and his message. The way Jobs walked around the stage freely, comfortably and relaxed is a lesson that everyone should learn and follow. You never saw him stationary, or with a death grip on a lectern like so many other corporate presenters!
Finally, and this is a lesson everyone should follow, Jobs rehearsed his speeches. You may think looking and sounding relaxed may have come naturally for him but he put in days and hours into rehearsing for every major speech and product launch. Simplicity and clarity are a function of hard work, or as Mark Twain put it, “I would have written you a short letter but I didn’t have time”.
So while much of what history will write about Steve Jobs will focus on his technology innovation and business skills let’s not forget that a large part of his legacy is that of a great communicator from whom we can all learn.
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At a conference last week a speaker shared with us the recently researched fact that the information we are exposed to in a day is the equivalent to a lifetime of information for the average Elizabethan ! Apparently the amount of information we are exposed to in a year is the equivalent to a pile of books stacked 7 feet high, and enough piles to cover the whole of the USA (including Alaska and Hawaii !)
