If I were an incoming Division Governor meeting my Area Governors for the first time at the District Officer Training, my little pep talk would go something like below. Unlike my post on how to be a Division Governor which I had no business making, I was a (in my opinion) good Area Governor. I actually know what I’m talking about here. I’m writing from point of view of Division Governor just for style.

 

You’ll note that I’m not spending any time schmoozing here. That’s because I’ve spent considerable effort already winning my team over if I were the Division Governor. This little pep talk would be delivered late in the day of the District Officer Training and I need to have won my team over by now.

 

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First, thanks again gang for volunteering to be Area Governors.

 

You may have seen the Toastmaster organizational chart, where the member is on the top - not the TM International President. The TM International President is at the bottom, since it’s his job to support us, not our job to serve him. I’m below you on the chart because it’s my job to support you. You are below your clubs and members because it’s your job to support them. This is a really cool model for running an organization and why I love Toastmasters so much.

 

What does supporting your members mean? You could join every club in your Area, attend every meeting and event, and setup a twenty four hour life-coaching hotline that is free of charge for anyone in your Area. I did all that when I was Area Governor, and I mowed the lawn of everyone in my Area and drove all of their kids to school. But I understand if you aren’t as dedicated as I was.

 

Seriously, if you try and do even a fraction of what you possibly could, you’ll roll over and die from exhaustion. There are Area Governors who join every club in their Area - I don’t know about the lawn mowing - but that’s rare. You can still have a really big impact and have a life outside Toastmasters at the same time. You just have to make sure you have the right priorities.

 

As I see it, there are three big things that need to be done for your Area. Support your president, visit the clubs, and run the contests.

 

First, support your club president. The president is a unique officer role and can be overwhelming for a lot of people. Even if they’re well able to handle what’s coming at them they may not feel like they are.

 

When I was Area Governor, I had a club president watch her club shrink from seventeen members to three due to no fault of her own. It was a company that was getting re-organized. In three months, she single handedly (literally, she was the only club officer) saved her club. By the end of my term, they were at fifteen members.

 

So what did I do? I listened. We had coffee a few times and I offered her advice, but by and large she knew what she needed to do already and obviously she did it. Since she couldn’t really complain about what was happening to people in her club, I was the place where she could let out her difficulties. She would have done fine without me I’m sure, but I hope I helped out some.

 

Other presidents you may have to do more for - you may have to do leadership 101 even, especially in clubs without good officers to play this job. But since the president has such a large job to play in the success of the club, giving them tons of support helps you and is one of the best bangs for the buck for your effort.

 

Be very careful in giving your presidents feedback and never do it in front of others. If the club is floundering, if the president cares they’re frustrated enough and likely feeling the burden already. Ideally you’re the shoulder to cry on when things go bad; keep the feedback on how to accomplish specific objectives (like how to get more members in a member drive) and not on their leadership style unless they’re really making a mess of things.

 

Obviously you should support any and all club members as best you can. But since you probably won’t be mowing laws or running a life coach hotline like I did, the president comes first when setting your priorities of who to give the love to.

 

Secondly, do your club visits. You get Area Governor points for doing the visits, but this isn’t the reason to do it. Your visit first of all is to see if anything is seriously wrong in the club. If only three people are showing up that’s a red flag. Or if someone is being verbally abusive and the officers are paralyzed and not asking for help. It’s not your job to save a failing club. It’s your job to let me know a club is failing and then we can get a team together to help rescue. You don’t have to be on that team, but you need to be the catalyst for its creation.

 

Next, you need to let the club know about the stuff outside their walls. Toastmaster Officer Trainings and contests and the District Conference. When people get involved outside their club, they’re far more effective inside their club and more likely to be life-long Toastmasters.

 

One of my clubs when I was Area Governor wasn’t into any District stuff at all; they got occasional emails about it (maybe) but they ignored them. I did a sales pitch to the officers and I got them excited. So excited that both the spring Area Contest Toastmaster and my assistant contest chairman were from that club. Beyond being a good experience for them, it made my life easier.

 

Your club visit is also about the future. I was lucky to have a number of strong presidents in my Area who I pushed into becoming future Area Governors. Especially in springtime, let the incoming District Governor know who the all-stars are and begin the sales job on the Joy of Area Governor. Hopefully you don’t hate the job by then!

 

Contests - I don’t have to say a lot about the contests because they’re much more in our face than supporting the president and the visit. It’s your responsibility to make sure they get done for your Area. We’ll talk more as the time comes.

 

The hard thing in contests are finding a venue and getting judges, because the judges have to be outside your Area so they won’t be biased. The sooner you get going on these things, the better. Getting judges for you is my job since I have the connections across the District to twist people’s arms that you may not yet. You need to schedule the Area Contest two weeks at least prior to the Division Contest. I don’t know when that will be yet but I’m working on it. You’ll know the details as soon as I do.

 

Another trick with the contests is to find someone who wants to do their High Performance Leadership project and get them to be the chairman for you. You’re still responsible for it at the end of the day, but the chairman (if they’re good - recruit good people!) can handle all the nitty-gritty for you

 

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Unfortunately we spend most of our time on the contests, less on an individual club visit, and even less working on a personal connection with the club president. To my mind this is backwards. A good president who feels supported can be the difference between a thriving and dying club, whereas the area contest only determines who’s the biggest smartass on any given day at Table Topics.

 

I’ve said “you need to do this and that” all up above. It’s more accurate to say, “This and that need to be done by someone and you’re responsible for making it happen.” That someone often times will be you, but it doesn’t have to be. We talked about delegating the club contest for someone’s HPL. You can even delegate the club visit! I’d prefer it if you could find your own lackeys (I, uhm, mean valued assistants), but if you can’t please let me know.

 

I don’t want anyone to get burned out and feeling like they can’t come to me for help. Recall the super-president I described earlier who saved her club. She was slated to be my replacement Area Governor but she had to drop out due to serious health problems. We’re talking to the point of having blackouts where she couldn’t drive a car. I don’t blame this entirely on her TM experience, but the stress I’m sure made things worse for her. Don’t overdo it.

 

Remember the Toastmasters org chart. You have made a commitment to support your clubs and members as best you can. It’s my job to support you. Please don’t be an Area Governor that drops off the grid or who burns out. Let me know the good and the bad. I trust you all to do your very best in your new assignments. I’ll try real hard for you guys, too. We’re going to have a great year! Let’s make it happen!

 

I’ve never been a Division Governor. It won’t stop me from giving my advice on being one, though. I was an Area Gov., so I had a Div Gov for a boss, and I’ve been involved around the District level stuff for years. And I think about this stuff too much.

 

For non-TM geeks, an Area contains about 4-6 clubs, and a District contains 4-6 Areas. So a Division Governor may have 25-35 clubs he’s responsible for helping and 300-500 members, which is a big responsibility. A District Governor is the next step up from that, having multiple Divisions and thousands of TM’s.

 

I’m going to focus below on handling your Division and especially the Area Governors. I’m not competent to tell you how to handle the relationship between you and your Division Governor and other big-wigs in the District. The mail between District and Division Governors is a mix of boring administrivia and really nasty personnel issues, neither one of which gets aired in public for curious bloggers.

 

Recruit All Stars

Too late for this coming TM year, but if you know in advance you’ll be a Division Governor then you should actively try to recruit an all-star team of Area Governors. You’re not at the mercy of the District Governor to fill in your subordinates. If you know and like people you think would be good Area Governors and especially if they like you and are enthused by you, do a sales job and recruit them.

 

An Area Governor does not have to be a member of any club in the Area he is helping. If you know two superstars from the same club and they’re both eager to start the road of being a Toastmaster big-shot, you can work it out where you can have both of them on your team.

 

Love Your Area Gov’s

You may know your Area Gov’s already or you maybe meeting them for the first time at District Officer Training. You need to begin your charm offensive on them ASAP; as soon as you know they’ll be on the team with you.

 

As Div Gov you’re at so high a level - 300-500 Toastmasters - that everything has the tendency to turn into numbers. The Area Governors are going to be your first line in handling the giant mess you’re stepping into. Keep the motivated! Make it clear you’re here to help them, not the other way around. If your Area Govs hate you, you’ll have a long year.

 

You’re probably a Bigger Toastmaster Geek than Your Area Gov’s

I’ve seen more than one Division Governor come up with some really interesting, out of the box idea that would require hours and hours of work from their Area Governors. You, the Div Gov, assume that the Area Gov is into Toastmasters and will automatically be game for taking on more responsibilities.

 

Wrong.

 

You need to be extremely sensitive to your Area Gov’s time commitment and stress level. There’s a few things Area Gov’s must do, which will be a future post. Focus them on that.

 

Between this and loving your Area Gov’s, your initial meeting with those you don’t know should be %100 schmooze fest. Make them like you, show they can trust you, and skip the “My uber-vision for the Division to be the best ever in TM history” stuff.

 

Know Your Area Gov’s Personalities

There are three types of Area Gov’s. I’ve heard this from a former Div Gov and it’s been spot on in my experience.

 

Type #1 - Gets things done, wants to do it alone.

 

This is the Area Governor that wants the District and especially his boss to leave him the hell alone. The only times he looks outside the Area are when he has to; judges for Area Contests and training. The Division Governor calling him up with TM Geek activities where he and the various Area Gov’s get together is not likely to be greeted favorably. This was the type of Area Gov I was.

 

Type #2 - Gets things done, needs help or just wants to feel connected to their boss.

 

Some Area Governors need hand holding. The Area Governor is more of remote leadership and is different than being a club president. Obviously respond quickly to their mails and boost their confidence as needed. But at the same time you should be proactively reaching out to ones like this, too. They may be able to handle all the Area stuff just fine, but want to feel plugged into the bigger picture District stuff, too.

 

Type #3 - Doesn’t get things done, doesn’t care.

 

Ugh. Dealing with the underperformer who doesn’t care is way outside the scope of this blog. Just realize you’re effectively the Area Governor for that Area until you can get help.

 

It’s OK for your Gov’s to be Type 1 or 2. You need to handle them differently. Don’t bother #1 with anything unless it really matters and make it clear to them why it’s important. They’re getting things done and making your life easier. Don’t take it personally if they’re not interested in random stuff you throw out. It’s not you; they’re so focused on their clubs and members, which they should be, and don’t care about the TM fluff.

 

It took my Division Governor a while to figure out that I was solidly in the #1 camp. He’s more a big-vision, let’s come together guy. But once he figured out my personality and that I was getting things done, he left me alone.

 

For a #2, do the opposite. Invent reasons to shoot them little “How are things” or “I heard this club in your Area was doing really great” type of mails. Even if you haven’t heard anything from the overwhelmed Area Governor, it doesn’t mean that all is well. Little motivational boost stuff like this goes a long way.

 

Don’t Burn Out

Another subject way too big for little old me, but you have to say No to stupid stuff or you’ll go crazy.

 

Never Too Important

In a class at Microsoft I went to for engineering excellence and how to become a senior engineering leader, one of the key tenants was that you’re never too good to do anything. Some engineers as they get promoted get kind of snotty; they refuse work if they think it’s beneath them. The promotions for people like this end. Even with 500+ TM’s to take care of, even if mostly you’re staring at Excel sheets, you’re never too important to pitch in.

 

Fortunately I’ve never once seen a Division Governor who needed to be told this from me or anyone else.

Since I’ve recently bashed auto-scheduling, I guess I should propose an alternative.

 

TurboBase.com

 

TurboBase is a website where your club can setup schedules for the future. It’s totally manual, no auto-scheduling! TurboBase has no ads and has an intuitive interface - think Google level simplicity. My club has used it for almost four years with great success. It’s never been down, no bugs, no glitches. A great lesson to any aspiring engineers about KISS - keep it simple, stupid. Do one thing and do it really well.

 

The hardest thing with TurboBase is etiquette when you’re first starting out your club on it. My club had a few snafu’s, but since it’s so convenient it was worth the learning curve.

 

• No changing roles without notification - Your club meeting is Saturday morning and on Wednesday night you decide to remove yourself as Speaker #2 since you’re not feeling well. Fine. But the club has to have a rule where you let the meeting’s Toastmaster and possibly the VPE know about it. The Toastmaster isn’t going to be checking Turbobase in real time, so they may not realize they’re a role short until Friday night. It’s not fair to pull the carpet out from under someone like that.
  
• Turbobase isn’t end-all / be-all scheduler - Not everyone is techno savvy, so it’s not fair to force them to use Turbobase if they don’t want to. The VPE or week’s Toastmaster should still be available to enter in anyone’s name who doesn’t have access to Turbobase.
• Walk-through - Again for those non tech folks, if your club transitions to using TurboBase you should have a simple walk through for them of the step-by-step. Ideally you can do this via wifi and in real time, but failing that hand-outs or overhead projections work, too. As a Microsoft employee I took this one for granted, but fortunately enough people complained that we did a walk-through. After the walk-through, even tentative technology users felt comfortable on TurboBase.
• Give Everyone Full Control - I initially had worries about making everyone an Administrator on Turbobase. I worried that anyone could delete a future meeting or a member by mistake, so I considered locking down write access. I write networking software for a living so I’m totally paranoid. My fears were unfounded on TurboBase. You’d have to really go out of your way to screw things up too royally. TurboBase is so easy to use it’d almost have to be malicious to be deleting stuff like this.
• It won’t fill in the schedule for you - Just telling your club members, “Go to TurboBase and sign up” won’t work in any club with fewer than sixty or so people. You still need a mechanism to get people to agree to jobs in the first place. Turbobase just records who’s doing what, it doesn’t force them to sign up in the first place.

I recently caught part of the Libertarian Presidential nomination on CSPAN. The candidate for their nomination I saw the most of was Wayne Allyn Root.

 

I imagine Mr. Root is a nice fellow. And in general he was a polished speaker. But he did not leave a very strong impression on me. I’m trying to sugar coat this, but despite that I’m very harsh below. Look - Root went for the ring of power and is fair game.

 

Speech Asking For the Nomination

Unfortunately no one has bothered posting Root’s performance to YouTube. As I said he was polished. But — he got off on very bad footing within the first thirty seconds, and the center piece of his speech was a wreck.

 

Make It Clear You’re Joking

First, Root started off by announcing that his daughter (I think that’s who it was at least) would be president in 2028, after he’d been President for 8 year and some other member of the Root family had been President 8 years. I started laughing out loud - at him, not with him. Maybe Root was saying this tongue and cheek, but the joke was lost on me. I really think he was serious. When I think of Libertarians, they don’t exactly seem like the type to get behind a family dynasty running the country. So not only did he not make the joke clear, he forgot his audience.

 

Avoid Clichés (Like the Plague)

After that, he said this wasn’t a typical political stump speech. Something to the effect that it was coming from the heart. It was different. Ugh.

 

Don’t Make Your Sap Story the Centerpiece

The body of Root’s speech was about how he was in Vegas while his mother was dying in New York in the 90’s. He received a call that she was about to go, so he jumped on an airplane and hoped he’d make it to get to say goodbye. He was sure his mom would hold out for him, since she was a Root, she was a fighter. He got to the hospital room, she was still alive, he held her hand for thirty seconds, then she died.

 

It sounds poignant the way I wrote it and I guess it was the way it played out in real life. But Root totally overpowered the story and it took a few minutes to get through it, wasting valuable time. It was manipulative even by manipulative Toastmaster speech contest standards. Maybe I’m being too cynical, but it came off as ghoulish to me.

 

Then came the whammy. He started shouting something to the effect of, “I’m Mother Root’s son and I’m strong too and I should be President because of it.” That seemed to be his main argument for the nomination.

 

It’s a complete non sequitur that because your mother faced death bravely, you are instantly eligible for the White House. It wouldn’t get you a job as an engineer at Microsoft. In fact, making it your main argument for a job would get you the boot if I was interviewing you. How does it make you the President?

 

People are tuned to the radio station WIIFM - what’s in it for me? The ghoulish story like this doesn’t come close to working.

 

Concession Speech

The way the balloting worked for the Libertarians is like American Idol - each time the contestant (uhm, candidate) with the lowest vote tally is eliminated. The losing candidate is given the chance to make a concession speech, the same way an AI speaker gets to (has to) sing the song they’d just lost on.

 

Keep Your Dirty Backroom Deals in the Backroom, Not Front and Center

Root began his speech with, “Boom!” He had a lot of energy for someone who had just lost the chance to lose the presidency in November. We found out why quickly. He immediately endorsed Bob Barr. Then he said that he wanted to be the Vice President under Barr, so that he could learn from the political master. Root was so excited about it that it sounded like he already had won it. Which he effectively did, because…

 

The overall effect of this was to make it seem that Barr and Root struck a deal about the endorsement for the VP candidate in return. Fine. That stuff happens. What doesn’t happen is that you parade it so nakedly. (One of my new found Libertarian buddies confirmed it was almost certain there was a deal.)

 

The way it should’ve worked: Root gets up and pledges his support to Barr. He doesn’t say a word about being VP. When Barr wins the nomination, he repays the favor by saying he wants Root to be his man. Root pretends to be pleasantly surprised. “Oh boy,” I would say. “I wonder if they cut a deal.” As it actually happened, I’m saying, “Oh boy. I’m sure they cut a deal.” I know you guys are politicos, but don’t rub it in my nose.

 
 

Chatting With Barr

During the break as the final vote between Barr and Mary Ruwart was conducted, the CSPAN cameras caught up with Root and Barr standing together.

 

Don’t Over Do It

Root was hanging off Barr like a puppy dog. He went on and on about how Barr was the political master, how he was going to serve as the VP for eight years and suck all of the wisdom from Barr, how he needed it. Then in 2016 Root would be elected President in his own right because he would have learned how to do the job.

 

Let’s think about this. Let’s say Barr wins the presidency in 2008. Indulge me. On January 25th, 2009, while Vice President Root is still learning from the master, Barr has a heart attack and is forced to retire to private life. The same day Israel starts bombing the hell out of Iran. Isn’t the fact that Root hasn’t got to suck the basics of politics from the master going to be a problem?

 

Barr was noncommittal when Root was gushing all over him. It made Root’s overdoing all the worse.

 

Unfortunately I did not see Barr and Root after Root won the VP nomination, so Barr may have warmed up and Root may have calmed down. Maybe.

 

Final Thoughts

If there’s one thread that runs through this, it seems that Root was just trying way, way hard. No amount of polish will save you from yourself.

In the Libertarian Presidential Nomination contest I recently watched, two candidates who presented a very strong contrast were Mary Ruwart, a PhD and Libertarian activist, and Mike Gravel, a former US Senator.

 

Between ballots, the CSPAN cameras went around the convention hall following various candidates. At one point there was a couple who had some issues with Mary’s policy issues or something she had said. Her response was along the lines of, “Well, it seems to me that…” Or, “I felt that…” Very calm, non-confrontational. Like I said, she’s an activist (and a good natured one it seems) and not a politico. Her body language was almost defensive.

 

I contrast this with Mike. I had heard of Mike only because of the “rock” video. In it he stands motionless for over a minute, then throws a rock into a pond, and walks off. I figured he was mentally ill, but he didn’t come off that poorly at the convention. After he had lost, he fielded questions from people on the floor during one of the breaks. Again and again he said, “I’m retired from politics now, I’m done with the party. I’ve written four books and I’m going on a book tour for them, and I have more books in me.”

 

And when I say again and again, I do mean again and again and again and again. When I’m his age and senile and being recorded throwing rocks into a pond, even though my mind will be gone I’ll remember one thing: Mike Gravel wrote four books and is going to go on a tour and has more books in him.

 

Mike stayed on message, which is now apparently promoting his writing career. Mary didn’t. I actually found Mary to be quite endearing. But if there’s something you need to bang into someone’s head, nothing succeeds like repetition. Mary needed to stand toe to toe with the people criticizing her and get back to whatever it was she was trying to say.

 

Did I mention that Mike has written four books, that he’s going on a tour, and has more books in him?

I saw Bob Barr speak twice at the Libertarian Party convention. I saw his acceptance speech for the nomination first. During a break, CSPAN replayed the speech he gave when he was trying to win the nomination.

 

His speech asking for the nomination he had the right objective and I thought he did a decent job. His speech accepting the nomination he had an objective, which he fulfilled, but it was the wrong objective in my opinion and he got into trouble.

 

Asking For the Nomination Speech

Barr’s initial speech where he was competing for the nomination wasn’t that bad.

 

His goal is simple - to win enough votes from the delegates to get the nomination. Barr is a household name, which could help him and the Libertarian Party get their message out in a general election. Complicating life is the fact that Barr was a conservative Republican congressman who took a pretty hard-right stand on a lot of (or rather all) social issues. A few years ago Barr became a Libertarian, but has never been fully accepted by the party. Barr’s needs to convince the audience that he respects them and that he is a real Libertarian.

 

I don’t think he won over the people that hate him (nor could he have with any speech), but he did make a good go at it.

 

 
 

GOOD

• The speech was short, about six minutes. We can probably thank the Libertarian Party, not Barr, for having the time limit. I’m not complaining either way.
  
• He praised the Libertarian ideals a number of times and general intellectualism. I liked his line about there being more substantive debate in the last three days at the convention than in thirty years of being a Republican.
• Praised the other Libertarian candidates. Barr frankly strikes me as a pretty cutthroat politician, but at least in public his praise of the other Libertarian candidates seemed sincere.
• Nice background about how he lived in Bagdad and Tehran when younger, so he appreciated the value of freedom.
• Talked about how he caught a lot of hell over the weekend, presumably for his past history as a Republican, from opinionated Libertarians. But again he welcomed it.
• Said he would vote to repeal the “Defensive of Marriage Act,” which he had voted for and wouldn’t be popular with audience. He qualified this carefully, he said he didn’t like how it was being implemented as opposed to the philosophy behind it. So kudos to nice hair splitting on his part.

 

SUGGESTIONS

• Vocal variety was so-so. He punched certain words up with extra emphasis, it kind of worked at end but it felt like he was trying too hard sometimes, too.
  
• He spoke way too fast at the end. All of the candidates that I saw raced towards their end, I’m sure because some timing light was flashing at them. If Barr had got three minutes of standing ovation in the middle of his speech I can appreciate that his timing would be thrown off. But he got tepid applause at best, so there was no excuse. He needed to have made painful cuts to avoid losing it at the end. It’s possible he was trying to build to a powerful end with lots of energy, but he had too many subordinate clauses for that. It felt rushed.
• All of these type speeches from all the parties feel kind of trite, this one was no exception. Not bad necessarily, just a little trite. I think he could have made it really special if he could have spoken more about his experiences in Tehran and Bagdad. How many American politicians can say they graduated high school in Tehran? Given time limits and given most of speech had to reassure Libertarians he was one of them, there’s no way he could have done this given these constraints.
• He tended to grab onto the lectern and rock around a lot, especially early.

 

On Accepting the Nomination

He blew this speech in my opinion. Not on YouTube or CSPAN, sorry.

 

It was a hotly contested contest for the presidential nomination. Barr’s main rival was Doctor Mary Ruwart, who is the more typical Libertarian. She has a PhD in biophysics and is more activist than politician. I really liked her (admittedly based only on her personality, not policy) and was upset when Barr won.

 

They had to go multiple ballots before Barr won the nomination, only beating Mary by 54-46 percent. The %46 of Mary supporters were visibly not happy at Barr’s victory. Barr was given five minutes to address the crowd after his victory.

 

Barr made the number one mistake in public speaking, which is not knowing what your objective should be.

 

Barr’s objective was to thank all the politicos who had helped him on his campaign. So he invited what seemed to be a cast of thousands up onto the stage with him and called them out by name, saying a few words about them. I’d guess most of these guys were Barr’s former supporters when he was a Republican who also jumped ship with him, reminding the audience further he’s not a complete Libertarian.

 

Barr introduced his wife as the next first lady of the United States with a straight face. Right.

 

Barr’s objective should have been uniting the party. His closest advisors will follow him to the gates of hell. They don’t need to be up on stage to get public praise, however grateful Barr is to them. The %46 are who he needs to worry about. Had I been Barr, I would have acknowledged the tough contest and thanked the candidates for the spirit which it was fought for the first thirty seconds of my speech. Then I would spend the next few minutes absolutely tearing John McCain apart. (I’m a McCain supporter personally so I hate to say that. But McCain is a better target than Obama for Barr, since Barr distances himself from Republicans further.)

 

This would get the audience going. In the last minute of the acceptance speech I’d go straight out Cicero. I’d walk out into the audience, wave my arms around, swing for the fences as I described exactly what the Libertarian party meant in the cosmic sense - never mind Barr versus McCain.

 

I know this sounds like Spaith is a dirty politico too, but the fact of the matter is Barr needed to get the focus off of him. By having the Barr Bunch up there, he kept the anger in the room directed at the wrong place. Barr will never win all %46 of Mary’s folks over, but I don’t think he won any of them over with the performance he gave.

 

It’s funny how the same man can give a pretty good and a really awful speech in the same day on almost the same subject. He had the right objectives in one speech and the wrong ones the second go around.

Last week I watched parts of the Libertarian Party Convention on CSPAN. I was reminded of a Simpson’s Episode back in 1996 where aliens impersonated Bill Clinton and Bob Dole with the intention of enslaving humanity. Homer revealed the plot on the eve of the election and said Americans didn’t have to vote for either of them. The aliens laughed and said something to the effect of, “If you vote for a third party, you’ll throw your vote away.” Ross Perot was in the crowd and punched a hole in his hat.

 

I don’t think the Libertarians would be worse than alien enslavement. Still, the few hours of their convention I saw were a mess. I’m going to be brutal as I evaluate them, much more than typical. These guys are trying to elect one of their own to be the most powerful man on Earth.

 

Even if you’re not planning on hosting the 2012 Libertarian Party Convention, I saw some things they messed up that any of us can mess up.

 

Libertarian Mistake #1 - Aesthetics!

I flipped onto the Convention by chance. The first thing I saw was an Excel spreadsheet with all the states in columns and numbers listed beneath them. It was so bad I started laughing before I knew what it was. It turns out were doing balloting for their presidential nominee and they were listing how each state had voted for verification purposes.

 

The Excel sheet they used to list out which state voted for who looked horrible. You could see the minimize/maximize/close bar, all the Excel shortcut keys, etc. There was no need for this.

 

It’s not hard in Excel to make it display something that looks really snazzy. In fact they could have disguised the fact they were using Excel completely. Given the number of techno-geeks who are Libertarians AND the fact this was on national TV, they should’ve had one person take a few hours to make the Excel look “major party quality.”

 

Technology is a great equalizer, but only if you use it right.

 

Libertarian Mistake #2 - Know the Rules

After they elected Bob Barr to be the Presidential Nominee, it came time to elect the Vice President. There became a debate as to whether one of the other candidates for President who lost could get onto the VP ticket at the very last moment, or something to that effect. The MC of the event didn’t know. They didn’t have a parliamentarian either. So there was a very, very long delay as they tried to sort this out. My VCR tape ran out before they got it settled. Even the CSPAN producers found this dull (which is saying a lot), so they cut to their studio and to previous clips of the day.

 

However much I make fun of parliamentary Toastmasters (or is it paramilitary Toastmasters?) who are up on the Robert’s Rule of Order stuff, you can’t have rules debates on the floor like this. Since they only do this once every four years I understand some rough patches. But since it’s once only four years, it’s also not much of a burden to make one person become the Rules God who would know the book backwards and forward.

 

Whenever you have adversarial relationships like people running for President or Toastmasters pushing through contested policy changes, people on both sides are going to try to take advantage of rules to get what they want. You need an impartial rules master to settle things quickly.

 

Perhaps Libertarians distrust government and regulation so much since they themselves are so bad at it?

 

Libertarian Mistake #3 - No Commentary, Forgetting TV Audience

The Republican and Democratic conventions will have long stretches of dull procedural stuff, of course. When this happens, the news networks cut out to their commentators who talk about other things.

 

No such luck in CSPAN. During the initial balloting at the Libertarian Convention, they had a few cameras on the floor following the candidates around - looking at how they interacted with the partisans, and so on during the time allotted for voting. That was really, really cool. There was literally a buzz in the room and we got to see the candidates up close and raw in a way we won’t with McCain and Obama.

 

What wasn’t so cool was during the long stretch of rules debate and also during the recess after Barr delivered his acceptance speech, there wasn’t the chance to send the cameras around. So they went back to the CSPAN studios, but all they could do there was show highlights from during the day. I kept wishing we had Chris Matthews to make all the smartass remarks that needed to be made.

 

Or it would’ve been nice to have had a personable Libertarian who was back in the CSPAN studios who could talk with the host and provide analysis. They would have to be able to bury whatever bias they had for any candidate and help the viewers understand what was happening. I don’t know if CSPAN would’ve allowed it, but the Libertarians seem disorganized enough that they never would’ve thought of it or else never would have agreed on someone to play the role.

 

It felt throughout that they forgot that this wasn’t just a closed door party conference, but an event brought to the homes of hundreds of millions and that they needed to keep the TV audience’s needs in mind, too.

 

Maybe I should become a Libertarian or at least a Libertarian analyst so I can be that guy back in the studio in 2012. CSPAN, here I come!

I’m wondering if Grow Rich, Stay Rich (GRSR - the get-rich quick seminar I went to last year) has went out of business with the real estate bust, since the number of queries I get for it has plummeted. Fortunately “unpopular baby names” has taken up the slack of non-Toastmasters queries that generates traffic.

 

I was thinking about GRSR guy recently and one thing I’d meant to blog at the time was his use of PowerPoint. He had some really awesome slides, animations, great pictures - the whole nine yards. But he did something much smarter, which was to not use slides for much of his talk. Even better, he turned his overhead projector off when he didn’t need the slides. This got us looking at him, not staring at the same slide on his deck for ten minutes.

 

There’s good news if you don’t have a fancy overhead projector/remote and all that setup. You can make PowerPoint do the same thing for you. With PowerPoint running, just hit the ‘b’ key and it will make the screen go blank. For once Microsoft has made life simple!

 

GRSR guy generally would have a few minutes of slides, then he’d turn off the projector and have a few minutes of direct appeals to us. That length of time - a few minutes slides, a few minutes without - seemed to work the best for me. The slides were only for facts and figures, the stories (with the exception of a picture of his really cute 9 year old daughter running her own business) were narrated and the projector was off.

 

One thing to watch out for is that your overhead projection equipment may end up auto-shutting itself off if the screen is left blank too long. So you need to practice any speech you care about the results for on the actual hardware you’ll be using.

 

While I’m on the subject of PowerPoint shortcuts, F5 is reasonably well known (at least inside Microsoft :)) as a key that will take you to the beginning of your presentation and blow it up in full screen. In order to make PowerPoint go full screen on the current slide you’re hovering over, it’s shift-F5. A lot of our presentations at Microsoft have demonstrations of software in the middle, which requires temporarily minimizing PowerPoint and then coming back to it. Whenever I see some poor schmuck fumbling around to get to the initial slide, I just scream out shift-F5.

In the last few weeks I’ve read some people doing some nasty griping about Toastmasters because they go to a meeting and realize it won’t make them a professional speaker. The gist of it is that most speakers at TM clubs aren’t all that good and that the evaluations aren’t very good, either.

 

First - let’s define a professional as someone who can support themselves off their speaking.

 

I agree strongly with the statement then that Toastmasters by itself is not going to make you a pro. Even my Toastmasters club, which is very strong, only has a bunch of really, really good amateurs. None of us can I see waking up one morning, making a call, and voila, making a living off of this. It’s not clear to me how someone can be a professional just by hanging out with a bunch of really, really good amateurs. And this is just on the speaking side. Consider the business element of speaking (remember how being a pro means it pays the rent), which Toastmasters doesn’t really have any formal training on.

 

That said - when did Toastmasters ever promise to make you a professional? I took piano lessons in high school, had a lot of fun, and am OK at it still. But I’m not Oscar Peterson. If that was my bar for whether the lessons were worthwhile, then I’d be disappointed. I went into Toastmasters with the same expectations. I’m way, way better at speaking and leadership then when I first joined five years ago and that’s what I was after. If I did ever want to turn pro, the learning curve would be much shorter because of what I’ve learned in TM.

 

With regards to complaints about the other speakers not being very good - that’s the point, isn’t it? The fact that Toastmasters lets any schmuck join - even me - means that its point is to help everyone become better, not to be a place where awesome people come in to show off.

 

As far as lousy evaluations, there’s no excuse for a club with any level of experience to be pulling that. I have a lot more to say later, but of the it can’t make you a pro/not great speakers/not great evaluators, this is the only legitimate complaint.

 

One thing to any Toastmaster trying to hype up Toastmasters as the place where you can become a pro - please don’t. Or qualify it at least, so that when the guest sees a & miss speech #2 they don’t think that we’re pushing that speaker as the next Zig Ziglar.

First I’ll assume you agree with me that auto-scheduling is not something you want in your club.

 

Your best bet is that if someone wants to introduce it to your club and you don’t have it already, push back. Just because an excited member touts some new project doesn’t mean you have to sit silently and accept it.

 

Suppose your club auto-schedules already and you don’t like it. The most direct path, though a lot of work, is to become the Vice President of Education (VPE). The VPE is responsible for scheduling. This happened to me. The former VPE had setup auto-scheduling a few months earlier, I hated it, and when I became the VPE the next term the first thing I did was make an executive decision that auto-scheduling was finished. It’s never come back.

 

I was lucky because we’d only had auto-scheduling for a few months anyway and it wasn’t popular. The fact I can be hyper-aggressive when needed helped, too.

 

If you’re in a club where it’s entrenched, it’s trickier but not impossible to make auto-scheduling go away as VPE. Here’s how I’d do it - I would float out as an “experiment” that you want to try having people manually schedule themselves. You may end up deciding that I’m full of crap and that auto-scheduling is the way to go, in which case you can come back to this site and lay into me. But if you decide I’m right after a few months, don’t bring up auto-scheduling again. Just let the “experiment” become the de facto policy. If anyone ever wants it back, see second paragraph above.

 

If you can’t be VPE to push this through, try to convince whoever is the VPE that you/I are right and then let them run with the “experiment.” As I discovered when I saw a club where someone tried to throw a bean into a jar at every uhm or ah, there were a lot of people not happy with the decision but not a lot of people standing up against it until the first person (me again) complained.

 

You too can be the hyper-aggressive obstructionist in your club!

 

If someone argues with you and wants auto-scheduling back, things can get really touchy. Toastmasters are process geeks and there are people that love auto-scheduling as much as I hate it.

 

Assuming it’s not clear cut which side has the majority, I would think that the only fair way to do this would be to put it to a vote of the membership. You can actually turn this into an interesting experience by having a meeting where both sides are debated and then voting after. My smart ass argument against auto-scheduling is if you relied on the auto-scheduler alone to try and schedule the debate, you could be waiting for years until it happened to put you and your debating opponent on the schedule on the same day. Then I’d just walk through the steps I laid out initially.