In today’s high-stakes professional world, the ability to communicate isn’t just a competency—it’s currency.
Are you leading a team? Strong communication skill is one of your most important tools.
Pitching a product? Ditto.
Navigating a job interview? Ditto.
In most every workplace situation, your presentation style can be the defining factor between influence and invisibility.
Bill McGowan understands this better than most. This Emmy Award-winning TV journalist and bestselling author is a top communications advisor to leading names in business, tech, entertainment, sports, and finance. He’s coached the founders of Amazon, Meta, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Spotify, Snapchat, and Airbnb … as well as Oscar, Emmy, and Grammy winners and World Series, Super Bowl, and Olympic champions.
McGowan’s latest book is Speak, Memorably: The Art of Captivating an Audience.
His experience in TV journalism underscored many of the lessons he now provides as a coach. For example, when McGowan worked on ABC’s popular “20/20” show, the executive producer would share the minute-to-minute ratings of a segment. Any time an on-camera personality told a story, viewers’ interest spiked. Stories, McGowan learned, are much more compelling than statistics.
You want to break out of the conformity zone? McGowan recommends avoiding “corporate speak” and communicating concisely with clarity and simplicity. And at every opportunity, use pertinent stories.
While it’s important that every part of a presentation be interesting and relevant, McGowan highlights what psychologists call the primary-recency effect: people tend to remember the first and last items in a sequence better than those in the middle. That’s a clue on where compelling stories, challenges, or facts should be in a presentation.
To underscore the importance and power of simplicity, McGowan tells of a CEO who was in a media interview about a struggle his company was experiencing. The interviewer asked the CEO, “Why do you think your IPO underperformed vis-à-vis the other companies in your competitive space?” McGowan says that instead of blaming the market or a poor valuation or even suggesting that they didn’t have the right financial institution leading the offering, the CEO simply said, “We underperformed because we failed to come up with a narrative that could fit on the back of a cocktail napkin.”
McGowan used that story to kick off a speech he made to a group of communication clients. Using a “through line,” the connective tissue that helps explain the relevance of a story, he spoke on the subject of simplicity.
Citing research studies, McGowan says factual information embedded within storytelling becomes 22 times more memorable “than if you just fire hose talking points and data points.”
McGowan coaches his clients to communicate the visual, the specific, and the anecdotal. When you speak abstractly and theoretically, it’s pictureless, he says. “We human beings have this movie reel spinning in our heads at all times. If a speaker doesn’t give us imagery to work with, that movie reel keeps spinning in our head—only now it’s spinning with the images we’ve created. That’s what daydreaming is.”
In what ways has the rise of remote work and virtual meetings affected the way people communicate?
In addition to what many people now call “Zoom fatigue,” McGowan talks about “Zoomnesia.” That occurs when people attend a seemingly endless string of remote meetings in which they’re sitting in the same room with the same potted plant on their desk and the same view out the window and with no contextual clues. That circumstance makes it even harder for people to retain information, and it underscores the value of well thought-out communication practices that engage people’s thinking.
McGowan frequently uses metaphors in his coaching. For example, he talks about what he calls the “pasta sauce principle.” You put a pot of tomato sauce on the stove and cook it down for about three hours. You then have something with about half the volume but a lot more flavor. “But it takes time and effort to get that reduction going,” McGowan says. “The same is true for speaking.”
It wouldn’t be accurate to say McGowan has written a cookbook. But Speak, Memorably certainly provides the ingredients for welcome servings of appetizing communication.
Whether you’re giving a TED talk, speaking at the local Rotary Club, or just trying not to lose people in your Monday morning staff meeting, McGowan offers insight that will boost your communication mojo.