Over the last few years, I have worked to help discovery scientists within the pharmaceutical and biotech industries make persuasive scientific presentations in order to sell their ideas for new drugs to decision makers.

The challenges were many.  Often, scientists had to report to their bosses in Europe via video conference.  The image projected in Switzerland was a wide-angle shot of six people sitting at a table in New Jersey.  It was difficult to know which person was talking.

English was being spoken in a variety of accents. America is blessed to have brilliant people from all over the globe come to work in our pharmaceutical and biotech industries, but understanding each person, on both sides of the Atlantic, through a wire thousands of miles long, was a continual challenge.

When English is spoken as a second language, it is often delivered in the pitch pattern and rhythm of the first language, which makes it hard for us Americans to grasp, and perhaps even harder for those who come from yet another country and whose first language is different from that of the speaker.

Sensitive cultural issues arose. In some European cultures, one does not tell a senior scientist overseeing a vast number of crucial experiments that his presentations are incomprehensible. One calls on a consultant to say such things, if in fact the scientist in question agrees to meet with the consultant.

And then there’s the problem of the traditional approach to scientific communication. The language, form, and conventions of published scientific papers- which spill over into scientific presentations- could almost have been devised to conceal information.

Even in conversation, scientists use words that are perfectly ordinary within science but are simply never heard at a bar, dinner party, or on the side of a soccer field. When speaking to marketers, scientists have to learn to stand back from their own work and see it as strangers might.

They need to ask themselves what is the most significant thing about their research? Is it that they can’t account for 70% of the efficacy since the mechanism of action is unknown? What is the detail, the issue, the problem that will make most people sit up and pay attention?

Many distinguished scientists- Richard Feynmann, J.B.S. Haldane, and Peter Medawar among them- knew how to hold a popular audience, and they weren’t afraid to address their peers with the same vividness and economy. In fact, their fame became inseparable from their gift for words.

Scientists can be great communicators. Carl Sagan, Primo Levi, E.O. Wilson were (are) great examples. They each had the engaging quality of enthusiasm, and enthusiasm is derived from a Greek term that means divinely intoxicated.

In order to be useful to their companies, and to society, scientists must be able to sell their ideas. Most scientists can think clearly. Many can write clearly. Fewer are spellbinding on the presentation platform, but thoughts that are clearly expressed, especially in live meetings, have greater potential value, and bring credit to the presenter.

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.

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.