Now it’s time to actually evaluate the good natured bureaucrat (aka “NEP guy”) who presented at the Neighborhood Enhancement Program (NEP) meeting I recently attended. Unfortunately from the point of view of an evaluator, this fellow was both a very solid speaker and did not engage in the rhetorical excesses of the Grow Rich, Stay Rich guy. This is to be expected of course; it’s not like the bureaucrat was trying to sell us some shady real estate scheme.

My main good points for him were:

• He had good stage presence and eye contact.
  
• He was blunt without being rude. The premise of the NEP is that we have $275K of “mad money” to spend on various improvement projects and that we have to make a hard choice on which of them are most important.
• His handling of the A/V material (namely PowerPoint) was flawless. The slides were really good.
• The material was inherently dry, but he held my attention throughout without resorting to making smart ass comments (which is my crutch). The main way he did this was with lots of good slides and moving quickly through the thirteen projects. The only times I was bored was when some random audience member went into a monologue.
• He handled the really weird questions and comments pretty well. “Thank you - we’ll make a mental note of that, Ma’am.” “Yes, good point, thank you, Ma’am.” He did his best to answer and admitted he didn’t know things, without promising anything he couldn’t deliver.

Suggestions:

• Work on the opening! It wasn’t a disaster, but he made a few mistakes that are easy to fix that any of us can make. The rest of this post will explore the opening in more detail.
  

The main issue is he had someone from Sound Transit get up and say a few words about a light rail system that they are looking into taking into Bellevue. This Sound Transit fellow got to talk first so that he could leave right away.

Fair enough. But the main NEP presenter could have handled the opening moments better. He stood way off to the side of the stage and pointed to the Sound Transit guy to start talking. The Sound Transit guy said, “I’m only going to talk for an hour.” It wasn’t clear who was running the show, or that this was a joke until the NEP guy laughed. The Sound Transit guy did his spiel and then left. The NEP guy got up and immediately launched into his presentation about explaining the NEP after that, with very little intro beyond that.

Here’s how I would have done this if I were the good natured bureaucrat. (Obviously I’m not good natured to be picking on him this much!) First, I’m the star of the show. I’m going to be talking for an hour and a half, this other guy is there by special invitation. So I would call the audience to order and I would start speaking. Sound Transit guy can wait for a minute or two of my warming up of the audience, no matter how badly he wants to be home.

I’d thank the audience for coming - I think he did this but it didn’t leave a strong impression, so I would’ve spent a few more sentences talking about civic pride, but not more than a few sentences of that. I would then explain briefly that we were here to talk about how to improve the Sammamish/East Lake Hills community under NEP, which I would explain momentarily. But before that, I had my friend from Sound Transit to speak briefly on light rail. I’d explain that he was going first so that he could leave.

Once the Sound Transit guy left, I’d do a little opening once again. Maybe some more buttering up the audience, like “I count twenty three people here out of four thousand households. You’re the people who make this neighborhood tick and I thank you again for your attendance. I have good news - I’m here today with a lot of money to give you. We can make this neighborhood even better! Let’s begin!”

His conclusion needed more of a bang too - again just a few sentences to sum up and get the civic pride going, without overdoing it. At the end of the day, though, our good natured bureaucrat had good presence and excellent AV backup to hold my interest in otherwise dry material. But hey, I’m paying his salary so I’m entitled to pick on him a bit!