Living Dangerously - Issue 40

There's a lot to be said for vision and values, but what about the voice of leadership? It's not a widely discussed subject, but the masters-level players -- and you know who you are -- recognize speech as the "A" skill of leadership. Jean-Louis Gassée, head of Apple's products division in the 1980s, once explained what made Steve Jobs so mesmerizing: "Steve could charm the panties off a person." The very French Gassée wasn't talking sexual harassment; he was referring to Jobs's ability to convey such passion and conviction that the listener and speaker became one, united in a single goal or vision. Jobs understands that if you can't win people's attention, you can't win their approval.

Leaders are judged even more by the music of their words than by whether they live up to them. We can't hear the music in Al Gore, so we condemn him for not speaking from the soul. George W. Bush works hard to convey a tone of seriousness, and we listen for that even more than we do for his platform. It's all music. Leaders who connect enter our imaginative space. It's a huge space, one in which there is very little competition -- which should make it prime real estate for any leader. Enter singing, and you are like Tide before Cheer, Fab, and Yes were invented. As the poet Malcolm de Chazal once said, "The ear has no eyelids." If this is prime and empty mind space, then why don't leaders understand how to colonize it?

One reason is that ours is a visual culture: We focus most of our efforts on seeing and on what is seen. Leaders and marketers rely on visuals to carry meaning. But words are so robust and physical that to use words like a singer is to nail home deep conviction in another person. Have you ever listened to how a really great vocalist turns a word, makes it move? Listen for how certain songs run right past your reasoning brain. The next stop is your primitive consciousness -- smack into the space where the capacity to fall in love resides.

The ears are prime emotional real estate; the eyes are pure judgment. Marshall McLuhan, the great interpreter of visual culture, must not have appreciated this enough. Folklore maintains that McLuhan's wife suffered a bizarre form of deafness: She was supposedly deaf only to the sound of her husband's voice.

U2's lead singer, Bono, understands this terrain. He calls King David the "Elvis of ancient times." That's a tremendous insight. King David transformed a ragtag group of nomads into a world power in a single generation. The equivalent today would be if Bill Gates had convinced people to buy Microsoft and to start speaking in Microsoft code. Yes, King David was your standard bloody street fighter and arch competitor. But Bono acknowledged that, in large measure, this king's success came from being a poet, a singer, and a songwriter. Remember Psalm 23? It's one of 150 psalms that King David is said to have written and sung to his own accompaniment. Like the King, King David knew how to strum a person like an instrument. He communicated at an emotional level beyond words. Get the music right, and you capture the crowd. When you listen to Nelson Mandela, you lean forward into his words. Something moves you. You are not just informed or entertained. You are won.

Let's start with the average guy who morphs into artistry -- who gets people to listen deeply, beyond their defense systems. His speech touches some primitive chord in people. How does it work?

Max Atkinson, once a professor at Oxford, was one of the earliest leadership-music analysts. Imagine listening to people as if they were performing unplugged -- unaccompanied by anything but their audience's heartbeat. That's how bold Atkinson was. How much boredom he had to endure to find the Holy Grail of sound! He'd show up at speeches and analyze the words against the rate of applause. Applause produced the spikes on the speakers' EKGs.

He came up with a formula that links leaders and rock stars. Discovering and following a few simple rules, Atkinson purportedly prepared a talk for an aspiring British political leader. Her speech was to run for 15 minutes in a forum that included several other candidates. Using Atkinson's formula, she got through only 5 minutes of her prepared text. What happened? She was interrupted by applause so frequently that she couldn't finish speaking. This is the realm of rock stars. This is the stuff of transcendence: when the music takes over -- and musician, audience, and music become one.

How did Atkinson do it? He discovered that there are about a half-dozen verbal devices that will incite a rock-star reaction in people. The more of those devices that you can use together, the stronger your connection to your listeners will be.