#BePrepared

I am currently in Paris, France running a series of two-day executive communication skills workshops for one of our top clients. The participants came from all over EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa.) In today’s workshop, we had executives from France, UK, Morocco, Italy, Portugal and Egypt. It was an outstanding group, and a thoroughly enjoyable day. In […]

There will be no politics or political preferences in this post. But I will make a critical, although seemingly obvious, point. We advocate to our clients all the time the importance of not only strong preparation for your presentations, but we also advocate for time spent on practice. We separate those two concepts into two […]

According to some sources, more than 30 million business presentations are created each day. And you know what? Most of them are terrible. We’ve all sat through the proverbial terrible presentation with no purpose, nothing memorable, no clear action items, too many slides, the monotonous drone of the boring presenter. There is a reason business […]

Let me know if this sounds familiar… you have a presentation to give. You immediately begin thinking about your slide deck. You pull out the last presentation you gave on the topic, you dust it off and realize that some of the same slides will work. So you are on your way. Then you look […]

Last week, during a series of workshops with one of our best clients, a fascinating topic came up for discussion. As we were reviewing the themes of The Latimer Group’s Model for Persuasion, one of the participants commented that “this seems more art than science.” The conversation paused for a few moments, we all thought […]

One of the most frequent questions or objections we hear in our workshops, usually delivered right about the time we are teaching our Latimer Group Model for Persuasion, is this… “I don’t have the time to do the things you are telling me to do. I know I need to, but I just don’t have […]

(Note: This post was originally published in August of 2013. But it’s more important now than ever.) My family and I spent the weekend with some dear friends, and over the course of a weekend of laughter, swimming, ping pong and wine, the conversation turned (for a few minutes) to business. My good buddy, who […]

My colleagues and I preach the importance of “knowing your audience” all the time. We believe it is a critical component of persuasion. But knowing your audience requires knowledge on multiple levels, beyond just the individual. Here is what I mean… if you are pitching someone on your product or service, and trying to sell […]

(This post was originally published Dec 2014) I had an outstanding experience recently with a workshop participant from one of our major client companies. This young man had participated in one of our one-day presentation skills workshops about six weeks ago. And then he signed up for a different workshop this week, a two-day “executive […]

Think about how you communicate in the workplace. Not just the words you use, or doing what you say you’ll do, or meeting deadlines, or smiling and being easy to work with. Assuming those traits are all a given, what about your “brand” among your coworkers? Have you given thought to how you, personally, are […]