Adam Bryant, author of the weekly “Corner Office” column in The New York Times, has compiled 70 interviews with CEOs and come up with five X-factors that contribute to great leadership.

You can find them all here, but I want to share one of them as it relates to this blog: A simple mind-set.

A Simple Mind-Set

There is a stubborn disconnect in many companies. Most senior executives want the same thing from people who present to them: be concise, get to the point, make it simple. Yet few people can deliver the simplicity that many bosses want. Instead, they mistakenly assume that the bosses will be impressed by a long PowerPoint presentation that shows how diligently they researched a topic, or that they will win over their superiors by talking more, not less.

Few things seem to get C.E.O’s riled up more than lengthy PowerPoint presentations. It’s not the software they dislike; that’s just a tool. What irks them is the unfocused thinking that leads to an overlong slide presentation. There is wide agreement it’s a problem: “death by PowerPoint” has become a cliche.

If so many executives in positions of authority are clear about what they want, why can’t they get the people who report to them to lose the “Power” part of their presentations and simply get to the “Point”?

There are a few likely explanations. A lot of people have trouble being concise. Next time you’re in a meeting, ask somebody to give you the 10-word summary of his or her idea. Some people can do a quick bit of mental jujitsu, and they’ll summarize an idea with a “Here’s what’s important…” or “The bottom line is… .” Others will have trouble identifying the core point.

Another possible explanation is that a lag exists in the business world. There was a time when simply having certain information was a competitive advantage. Now, in the Internet era, most people have easy access to the same information. That puts a greater premium on the ability to synthesize, to connect dots in new ways and to ask simple, smart questions that lead to untapped opportunities.

“I’d love to teach a course called ‘The Idea,’” said Dany Levy, the founder of DailyCandy.com. “Which is, basically, so you want to start a company, how’s it going to work? Let’s figure it out: just a very practical plan, but not a business plan, because I feel like business plans now feel weighty and outdated. It seems, back in the day, that the longer your business plan was, the more promising it was going to be. And now, the shorter your business plan is, the more succinct and to the point it is, the better. You want people to get why your business is going to work pretty quickly.”

Steven A. Ballmer, the C.E.O. of Microsoft, said he understood the impulse in presentations to share all the underlying research that led to a conclusion. But he changed the way he runs meetings to get to the conclusion first.

“The mode of Microsoft meetings used to be: You come with something we haven’t seen in a slide deck or presentation,” he said. “You deliver the presentation. You probably take what I will call ‘the long and winding road.’ You take the listener through your path of discovery and exploration, and you arrive at a conclusion.

“I decided that’s not what I want to do anymore. I don’t think it’s efficient. So most meetings nowadays, you send me the materials and I read them in advance. And I can come in and say: ‘I’ve got the following four questions. Please don’t present the deck.’ That lets us go, whether they’ve organized it that way or not, to their reccommendation. And if I have questions about the long and winding road and the data and the supporting evidence, I can ask them. But it gives us greater focus.”

Sims Wyeth & Co. provides public speaking courses, executive speech coaching, presentation skills training, voice and speech training, speech writing, and courses that address stage fright, body language, presentation strategy, and effective use of PowerPoint, all of which contribute to greater executive presence and personal impact.

I grabbed my Blackberry when I woke up this morning and saw that Bnet was promoting a webinar called How to Change Hearts, Minds, and Actions: Guy Kawasaki Speaks on Enchantment.

Guy Kawasaki, for those of you who don’t know, is a venture capitalist and an original thinker.  For instance, when people came to him with an idea for a business, he enforced the 10, 20, 30 rule:  No more than ten slides; no longer than twenty minutes; and no font smaller than 30.

Now he’s into enchantment, which is a game-changer.  Most of us are talking about persuasion, story, brain science, stickiness, and presence.  Suddenly we’re into the realm of the magical, the mystical, the enchanting!

It is a great word, one that has freshness and bite, so let’s run with it.  But it speaks of the oldest art of the public speaker, the rhetorician, the spellbinder, and rainmaker.  The ability to get an audience to believe, to see a new reality in the theater of their own minds, and to carry it with them into action.

You may be familiar with Bruno Bettelheim’s seminal work, The Uses of Enchantment, in which he writes about the power of folk and fairy tales.

Bettelheim suggested that traditional fairy tales, with the darkness of abandonment, death, witches, and injuries, allowed children to grapple with their fears in remote, symbolic terms.  If they could read and interpret these fairy tales in their own way, he believed, they would get a greater sense of meaning and purpose.  Bettelheim thought that by engaging with these socially-evolved stories, children would ge through emotional growth that would better prepare them for their own futures.

- Wikipedia, The Uses of Enchantment

We are enchanted by stories and by performances; by the artificial world of opera, sports, and theater.  Any story that doesn’t suspend our disbelief is a failure.  Good novels and movies are more vivid than real life.  They lodge in our minds forever.  And because they last, they have a chance to teach us how to behave, how to act.  The drama is so captivating, so enchanting, that we are penetrated by it – and instructed by it.

Combined with the wisdom of rhetoric, cognitive and social science, and the art of the theater, the spoken word can also be enchanting.  When we learn how to shape our arguments, structure language patterns to captivate the mind, be both conceptual and concrete, and perform like an actor, we can alter reality for our listeners.

Percy Bysshe Shelley said that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.  I think what he meant to say is that great speakers and storytellers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

They are, in fact, the acknowledged leaders of countries, companies, and institutions, because they are the people who are able to tell the stories that shape their followers vision of the future, and their interpretation of the past.

And maybe even more importantly, the personal story of the leader – his or her biography – very often embodies the values held up by the institution he or she leads.  Think, “Obama,” a new kind of President.  Think: “Lincoln,” “Mandela,” “Thatcher,” “Reagan.”  Their personal stories represented the aspirations of their cultures.  They enchanted the electorate, not only by what they said, but also by what their lives said.

The bar has been raised.  Kawasaki has done it again – jumped out ahead of the conversation and elevated the discourse to urge us to a higher level.

It’s no longer persuasion and influence.  It is no longer presence or power.  And it certainly is no longer “presentation skills,” that mechanical, pedestrian phrase that fails to lend any magic to the art of speech – that is so 1980s.  No, the new word is enchantment.  Can we enchant our audiences?

Can you see it now?  A whole generation of MBA’s studying the art of suspending disbelief.

Sims Wyeth & Co. provides public speaking courses, executive speech coaching, presentation skills training, voice and speech training, speech writing, and courses that address stage fright, body language, presentation strategy, and effective use of PowerPoint, all of which contribute to greater executive presence and personal impact.

I heard an Indian novelist interviewed recently.  Asked what struck her when she first came to America, she said, “I noticed that in America, the rich are thin and the poor are fat—the opposite of my country.”

Of course, she meant that, compared to the poor, a higher percentage of wealthy, educated people are thin and healthy.

I am tempted to say something similar about my experience as a consultant to speakers and presenters.  In America, the highly-educated people are tongue-tied, while the less educated people speak with more impact.

As soon as my fingers type these words, I can think of exceptions.  President Obama, Robert Reich, Bill Buckley—all are (were) highly educated and all are good speakers.  And of course, we can all conjure images of less educated people who could prove to be ineffective at the lectern.

Still, in my work with scientists, MDs, PhDs, MBAs, statisticians, actuaries, PharmDs, and engineers of all stripes, I encounter a large number of them who struggle terribly with the task of making compelling sense when they stand up to speak about their area of expertise.

And I also work with many people in the sales profession, and while they all possess native intelligence, and have gone to college, they do not have letters after their names.  And perhaps because of their experience, or their natures, they are, for the most part, pretty darn good on their feet.

Why might this be true—that the highly educated struggle more as public speakers than the less educated?  (By the way, I have no letters after my name.)

Let me speculate.  First, highly educated people see things in shades of gray, not in black and white.  They tend to pride themselves, and are rewarded for being careful with language, avoiding indefensible generalizations, and striving to make fine distinctions in logic and reasoning.  They follow the rules of evidence.  In a word, they’re boring. 

I heard someone say that in a political rumble, Republicans show up with knives and chains, while Democrats show up with library cards.  This is a hit on Obama’s professorial image, but it suggests that an over-educated approach to popular debate is ineffective.

Highly educated people like their speaking to show off their educations.  Regular people like to speak in order to get things off their chest, or to make other people do something.  Like sales people.  They like to get people to buy their stuff.  They don’t care if they sound smart. 

The other thing about highly educated people is that they know more and more about less and less.  They have had to specialize so early in life that they have not been able to read widely outside their area of expertise.  They have a highly specialized vocabulary, and struggle to speak the language of the market place.

Nor have they ever had to study rhetoric, or take a class in public speaking.  Some of them never even took any liberal arts courses.  And by the way, rhetoric is not the dirty word many people think it is.  It is the ancient art (and now science) of getting other people to understand and accept your ideas.   A good thing to know if you’re planning on having a career of any kind.

So America is a funny country.  The rich are skinny, the poor are fat and the highly educated are tongue-tied.

Happy New Year!

Sims Wyeth is an executive speech coach in Montclair, NJ specializing in presentation skills and public speaking training in order to give accomplished people the knowledge and skill they need to become accomplished speakers. Learn more public speaking tips at www.SimsWyeth.com.