Presentations in Action - Jerry Weissman [56]
In the culminating session of the program, I asked each participant to deliver a version of the slide show to an intended audience in his or her country. Their selections were quite diverse. One manager targeted a corporate enterprise, another a government agency, another a telecommunications carrier, and another a university. Yet as each participant stood to present, each was able to customize his or her story to a specific audience while using the same set of slides.
Multiple presenters were able to deliver one presentation to the multiple audiences because each presenter’s narrative added value beyond the content of the slides.
The presenter is the focus of the presentation.
77. The Art and Science of Oprah Winfrey: The Secrets of Oprah Winfrey’s Appeal
Oprah Winfrey shares a unique distinction with Lucille Ball, the 1950s television comedienne, and Mary Pickford, the 1920s movie actress: All three attained extraordinary popularity in front of the camera, and all three became powerhouses behind the camera as heads of their own production studios. But Ms. Winfrey differs from the other two women, in that her stardom is based on her own personality rather than on the assumed role of a character in a comedy or drama.
Ms. Ball played Lucy, a scatterbrained housewife, in her television series, and Ms. Pickford, known as “America’s Sweetheart,” portrayed ingenue leads in her films. Ms. Winfrey, on the other hand, from the very start of her career in television news and through every progressive step along her way to her own enormously successful The Oprah Winfrey Show, has always been herself—just Oprah. Her uncanny ability to be natural in all settings has enabled her to create, as her own web site states, “an unparalleled connection with people around the world.”
Very few people can attain Oprah’s level of success, but you can learn to make unparalleled connections with your own audiences by analyzing and adopting the elements of her style. Her talent to connect is both an art and a science; the science is the foundation, and the art is the expression.
The science is empathy, the universal human dynamic that has recently been gaining attention in the media and scientific communities. Empathy, evolved from the Greek word for emotion or affection, refers to shared or vicarious feelings, as distinct from sympathy, which is more about pity and implies separate feelings. In presentations, empathy is a sharing of feelings between presenters and audiences.
On Oprah’s show, the empathy that resonates between her and her guests—whether they are celebrities or men and women from ordinary walks of life—fairly jumps off the video screen. Oprah clearly understands the pain and pleasure—the entire gamut of her guests’ emotions—that she shares with her audiences. That sharing produces a cycle of emotions that generates further empathy in her audiences.
To see how she communicates the empathy, the art that leverages the science, let’s compare her style with that of other prominent talk show hosts. We’ll focus on seven key presentation factors. Although each of these hosts is quite successful in his own right, none has nearly the emotional impact on his audiences that Oprah does on hers.
Roles. Because of her grounding in news, Oprah conducts her interviews by immersing herself in her subjects’ stories. David Letterman, Jay Leno, and their contemporaries Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Craig Ferguson, and Bill Maher, as well as the illustrious predecessor