Always the right words

Sounds simple or perhaps even like a joke, doesn’t it?

And I mean who hasn’t wished in hindsight that the comeback was better picked. Remember George Costanza and the Jerk Store joke? No, look it up.

George spends a lot of time and money, takes on a new job, relocates, all in hope of recreating the setting in which he could use the right line during a lunch meeting gone bad.

This happens all the time, to everyone.

I remember this one time, on stage, at an event with relatively big names. Not Fortune 50, but neither the chump change crowd. Premium SMEs we could label them, with an international footprint.

This guy comes on. Director of So and So industrial technology and Company XYZ (fake name, not an Elon Musk-associated brand).

Very enthusiastic and hip but also serious and credible.

He launched with a bang, a slide that looks like a mind map, but genetically modified to also be a Gartner innovation hype cycle timeline and a marketing brochure.

His talk was pretty much like that, too.

Again, great guy, with a relevant topic and a confident stage presence.

But everything he said could be (and was) forgotten 3 seconds later, without consequence.

Why?

Like I said, I'm not trying to peg down the guy. The reason it didn’t work is chiefly because he didn’t understand what his job was on that stage.

He thought he had to make the audience understand what So and So Industrial Technology is.

So he rolled out some buzzwords, a serving of hype, and macros for dessert. You know, the 27B CAGR in 2027 type things.

It’s not that he couldn’t figure out a better way, but it’s hard to do that when already on stage.

That would be like Max Verstappen trying to set up the car on the actual qualifying lap, instead of in the free practice session beforehand. So, no good; there just wouldn’t be enough time to drive the lap and figure out the setup simultaneously.

I guess the only result of this confident yet confusing presentation was that they spoke about So and So.

But not like they owned the topic, dominated the space, cherry-picked that deal.

Had he understood that was the goal, he would have found better words.

Ahead of time.

You can too.