Posts

With a single speech today, I can reach millions of people. An enormous potential for those who have something to say, who can present authentically and with a certain competence.

Chris Anderson, curator of the TED Talks, names the number of over 1 000 speakers who have already succeeded in doing so by 2016. The 25 most popular TED Talks alone generate a reach of 16 to 56 million clicks each. On YouTube, TED and TEDx Talks now have 30 million subscribers with 4.4 billion clicks.

 

Read more

Do you present your project in English for an international audience? Do you adapt your presentations to people with different cultural backgrounds? Are you ready to take the next step delivering even more professional speeches? Here are some highlights on how you will succeed with your presentation.

 

Connect with your audience

The German way of thinking is said to be very precise. In short, their highly functional language can be traced back to numerous wars and subsequent reconstruction efforts. UN interpreter and author Susanne Kilian attributes this to Germany’s central geographic location in Europe. In fact, many German presenters introduce technical concepts full of details while also including numerous technical terms.

Read more

A source of good and often inspiring lectures are certainly the TED Talks and their independent TEDx Talks. One of the speeches that has inspired me in recent years is the talk “How great leaders inspire action” by Simon Sinek. Of course, we can discuss whether his performance could be further optimized: There are only a few laughs in the audience, the eye contact between speaker and audience is not optimal and the speaker often takes his glasses (exactly 22 times) – to name just three examples.

Nevertheless, why is his 2009 TEDx talk the third most seen of about 3 000 TED talks worldwide? Why has his presentation, which he held live in front of just 50 listeners, been clicked more than 42 million times on ted.com and a good 15 million times on YouTube to date? So what did Simon Sinek do right?

Read more