I am on the island of Serifos in the blue, blue Aegean.  My wife Sharon is engrossed in her month-long seminar, and I am left to my own devices.  I have slowed down considerably – reading, swimming, and sleeping is all I do.  Eating too.

But now comes the national strike, a two-day gesture of defiance and outrage over the Greek financial crisis.  In both the public and private sectors, nothing will get done today or tomorrow, except shouting outside Parliament.  No ships will arrive or depart from the harbor.  No planes will fly overhead.  No trains will move between Athens and Piraeus on the mainland.  The Greek-speaking world will come to a halt.  Silence will take over from the noise of scooters and trucks.  Stillness will settle over us.

There is no peace in the silence and the stillness.  Anger and anxiety abound.  But I like to think my own effort to come to rest is radiating from me.  That my micro stillness has become the macro.  That the world around me is taking a breath, and that out of that experience will come new strength.  For the Greeks, it will be the strength to fight through the difficulties ahead, and mine will be the strength to go back to work.

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.

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.

It is widely held that man is the only creature with language.  But that may not be true.

African vervet monkeys are always looking around for danger, and when they perceive a threat, they give an alarm that is specific to the threat.

If it’s an eagle, they give an eagle alarm, and all the vervets take up the cry, and take cover under the trees.

If it’s a snake alarm, the vervets do the opposite.  They climb up into the tree repeating the call — Snake!  Snake!  Snake!

If the sentry monkey spots a leopard, it makes the leopard cry, and the vervets likewise leap into the tree, only this time they go out onto the narrowest, most lightweight branches — the perfect place to be when being pursued by a 200  pound cat.

Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney of the University of Pennsylvania have even stimulated these responses in vervets using alarm call recordings.

I think it’s pretty clear that African vervets have a language.  Their vocabulary may be limited, but their cries perform the same task that our presentations are meant to perform: They get their listeners to pay attention, solve a problem, and DO something specific.

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.