Some clubs use software to automatically schedule members for various meeting roles - speaking, running the timer, and so on - weeks or even months in advance. Maybe it’s because I’m in Redmond, a pretty high tech (read high geek) area that I see this.

You can probably cobble Microsoft Excel to generate a schedule for you, but there is dedicated software here that does this and has a lot more bells and whistles. Not that I’m encouraging anyone to use it!

Let’s kill auto-scheduling! It looks good on paper but having seen it in operation in multiple clubs, I don’t like it. Auto-scheduling doesn’t provide the vast time savings it’s supposed to, it establishes bad habits in members, it doesn’t give members the freedom to set their own pace of development, and it robs the VPE of a really great growth opportunity.

NOT A TIME SAVER AND ESTABLISHES BAD HABITS

• If a computer signs me up to be speak two weeks from now, I haven’t truly made a commitment. If I don’t feel much like speaking two days before the meeting, I won’t feel bad backing out. If on the other hand I raised my hand and said, “I’ll speak two weeks from now” then me backing out at the last minute is lame.

   

  I have some anecdotal evidence for this. My club does not auto-schedule and we have people miss obviously, but the rate isn’t too bad. In a club I I know that auto-schedules (and I’m on the email list for so I can spy), every week there’s a flurry of, “I can’t make it” mails.

   

  This gets people accustomed to backing out on Toastmaster assignments. Far better to have a nearly %100 rate of actually showing up when the schedule says you will.

   

• On a related note, I’ve seen cases where people show up for meetings not knowing they have roles. This is a disaster. It makes the poor person look bad and is a big demotivator and makes the Toastmaster’s life harder.

   

• The way to workaround the “I didn’t realize I was on the program…” is that you make people respond to the email confirming they will show up. But people invariably reply-all to these emails, which means more spam for everyone else. If I volunteer and say, “I’ll show up next Saturday and be timer” that’s all the confirmation that’s needed.

   

  The auto-scheduling club sometimes has +10 emails around scheduling a week. My club that does not has only 1-2.

   

TAKES FREEDOM AND INITIATIVE FROM MEMBERS

• Some speakers are hot-to-trot to speak more frequently because they have aggressive timelines for themselves. Others may be either missing meetings or too busy to do anything that requires preparation. It’s possible to manually tweak the auto-scheduling program to handle this, but it’s a huge amount of work. Far better to just let people fill out the agendas themselves.

   

• It’s critically important for new members to be signed up in jobs ASAP. I started as a timer, then grammarian, then did my ice breaker once in the weeks immediately after joining the club. I wanted to hit the ground running while I had a lot of excitement around TM. If I join a club where people are scheduled two months out in advance, I’m being told I have to wait around forever before I can really make my deep dive into the TM program. Just showing up and watching someone else’s speech and doing table topics if there’s time is not the same as knocking out my ice breaker.

   

• The new member should be speaking more in general and should be encouraged to do so even if they’re not wanting to take over the speaking world. There’s far more value in a new member going from their first speech to their second than there is in my going from my fortieth speech to my forty-first . I love to talk, but as an experienced TM I will only put myself on the program if there are openings because I want the new guy to have first dibs.

   

• A lot of people (myself included) hate the idea of anyone other than themselves dictating the pace they move through Toastmasters. It’s philosophical I know, but a lot of people feel very strongly about it.

   

TAKES A CHANCE FOR DEVELOPMENT AWAY FROM VPE

• The officer in charge of scheduling (Vice President of Education, aka VPE) is probably the most challenging in the club. Unless your club is bulging with active members, the challenge comes in begging and threatening people to do what you want them to do. I learned more in my first two months twisting arms as VPE than I did in any other two month period in Toastmasters.

   

  The VPE in the auto-scheduling club doesn’t get this. They punch buttons into a computer and end up working around the inherent flaws I’ve laid out above. In my no-auto schedule club, there was none of this for me. I knew I had to fill out the program without Mr. Computer and our membership was quite low at that point, so I learned about backing people into a corner and practically forcing a pen into their hands to make them do what I wanted.

   

• The main counter-argument I get here is, “Well John, there’s folks in our club who wouldn’t sign up otherwise.” Well - if someone does something because a computer tells them to do it, they should do it because a person tells them too, right? When I was VPE I made a list of veterans that never spoke and a few months into my term I arm-twisted them into speaking. This though is the type of thing the VPE should be tracking anyway.

In How to Win Friends & Influence People, one of the earliest chapters was about how important it is to smile. I was reminded of that yesterday by a weird situation I got myself into.

The Senior VP responsible for finance in my group (he pulls down one to two million dollars a year) has an uncommon last name that is the same as a girl I went to high school with. And he looks like he could be her father or uncle. One day we happened to be in the elevator and I gathered up the courage to ask him if they were related. No, he’d never heard of the girl, as would be expected, and then it was quiet. I can’t imagine what it was like for the guy to have some weirdo asking a question like that out of the blue, but I guess it was very-Seinfeld.

I’ve always worried a little about what would happen if I ever ran into the million dollar man again. Should I make eye contact? Would he remember a little peon (or is it minion?) like John? Would he want to?

Yesterday we were headed toward each other down a very long hallway. He saw me and gave me the biggest smile and waved without pausing. I know it sounds very cheesy, but getting a smile from the big shot I weirded out really made my day.

Are you upset that you seem to get white wash evaluations? When people fill out the comment slips, do they just write “Great Job” and then leave it at that? Does it bother you that you know you had flubs that no one called you on and worse, there are goof ups you didn’t catch that you’ll do again in your ignorance?

There’s an easy way to fix this. Ask for hard evaluations. I’m going to go so far as to tell my fellow club members to tear me apart for all my future speeches. I’m tempted to tell them I want to become a professional speaker and need their help - in the form of no holds barred feedback - to get to that level. I don’t want to be a professional speaker (not yet at least), but I’d like to have the rhetorical polish to be one someday if I wanted to. (Having something to say to justify being a pro is a much bigger problem for me!)

Whenever I tell people to go after me, they do. I’ve been told that if you give a speech and don’t get an evaluation, you might as well have given it to your car for all the good it’ll do you. I would change “an evaluation” to “a good evaluation,” since a bunch of “Great jobs” isn’t that helpful.

I don’t tell the audience at the beginning of my speech to throw hardballs at me, since that in some sense steps on the magic of the opening. I want my first words to hook the audience for the speech itself, not for the evaluation. So I ask the Toastmaster tell the club to give me a hard evaluation when I’m being introduced.

Incidentally if your club only gives white wash evaluations, it’s a good idea to push them in general to be more constructive.

Just be aware that if you have a delicate ego, you better get over it quickly if you want to know what people really think and improve. Toastmasters that just do the “Great Job” routine are not intellectual eunuchs, they’re being too nice.

A month ago I was visiting my club’s sister club and the next meeting they announced they were opening up last year’s time capsule and starting one for next year. They flipped the time capsule idea on its head, though. Rather than stuffing it with Hannah Montana ticket stubs or other 2008 kitsch memorabilia, during the meeting they will write down their goals for the next year and put that into the capsule. I guess they bring in note cards and crayons to write on to keep it informal. A year later they open the capsule and see how well they achieved it.

I may actually try this with my club one day, too, especially that we have a permanent home again. I couldn’t part with my Hannah Montana ticket stubs anyway.

[5/20 Addendum] I just saw one of those alarmist pieces on the news about people’s myspace pages of them intoxicated or worse getting them in trouble. In case some future employer or date comes snooping around here and it’s not obvious, the Hannah Montana thing was a joke. Really!

This Saturday in my club’s meeting, a guy gave one of the “how to sell a product” speeches from the manual. These tend to be dry, but this member had a cute deal where he was selling premium paper clips - the paper clip experience as it were. Only for the first few minutes he didn’t get that many laughs.

What went wrong? It was kind of my fault.

I was on the program right before him, doing an interpretive reading of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural. It’s a very powerful speech, even by Abe’s standards. He speculates that the Civil War was God was punishing North and South for the sin of slavery (imagine an American President saying God was punishing us today). It’s where the “With malice toward none, with charity for all” line comes from. I got choked up reading it, which has never happened in my TM career and took the club members by surprise since I’m usually the smartass. Wise Lincoln was assassinated a few weeks after giving this healing speech and was replaced by a petty, vindictive racist who did basically everything the opposite of what Lincoln would have for black people.

Are you kind of depressed now? The audience was and the minute break wasn’t long enough to get ready for the premium paper clip.

What I learned:

• I knew my speech was depressing, even if my getting choked up took me by surprise as much as anyone else. But if I could do it again I would have been the last speaker on the program, so that I wouldn’t leave the audience bummed out for anyone coming after me.
  
• If in the future I give a smartass speech, I’ll make sure that I go first so someone can’t pull this on me. This gets back to my obsession with controlling your environment as much as possible.
• The Toastmaster could have made it a two minute break, not a one, to try and give a bit more time for the “John getting choked up” effect to wear off.

A lot of clubs have someone throw a bean into a jar whenever someone says “um” or “ah.” Or they’ll click on a little clicker or do something else obnoxious in order to remind someone that they’ve goofed the very moment it happened.

I don’t like this one bit.

My biggest objection to this is that this will freak out and intimidate new speakers. It certainly would’ve demotivated me when I was starting out worrying about it, and I really have never had uhm or ah problems. This is when proponents of the bean tossing say, “Oh no, John, we only do this to someone after they’ve given at least X speeches.” The problem is that the person throwing the bean into the jar, at least every time I’ve seen a club do this, has to apologize to the person who has given < X speeches that they threw beans for because they didn’t realize where the person was.

The next objection is that this can freak out and intimidate experienced speakers. When I’ve had this done to me, not only does the initial bean throw off my thoughts but I have a secondary distraction when the audience smiles or winces or whatever when they hear the bean going around. I can deal with people entering and leaving and even straight out not paying attention, but the bean is pushing it.

Next, why do we interrupt only on uhms & ahs? Why not if someone has lousy eye contact? Maybe the grammarian should make a big production of covering his eyes the second that happens. Or how about if they mess up on grammar, we should start stomping on the floor?

Finally, the bean toss doesn’t simulate reality. No one in your speech to your boss is going to be throwing things if you “uhm” or “ah” unless you’re in front of a very hard audience.

A club I helped found a few years ago of course did not do the bean jar at first. An experienced member from another club where they do this introduced it to the club, and then suggested a clicker. I let the other members know that there was no rule for doing the bean counter/clicker and they got to decide whether the club used it or not. It was voted down overwhelmingly.

I’m not against someone asking for immediate feedback on messing up on uhms and ahs, bad eye contact, or whatever and having a club member make a noise to let them know. In fact, it’s a very powerful training technique that the speaking coaches I’ve worked with used on me on areas that I needed work. But it needs to be voluntary and on the area that I need work on. 

I was looking through my blog statistics and saw some hits on “tacky speech.” I decided to Google it and low and behold, this site comes up first.

Googling “good speech” doesn’t even put me in the top 200.

I hope this is just a blip and not an indictment of yours truly.

A few weeks ago I visited a club where the speaker was doing a folk tale from Hawaii. It was introduced as such by the Toastmaster but without much more background. The speaker began with, “The days in Hawaii are mostly the same length the whole year.” Because it’s close to the equator, I thought. Next sentence the guy said, “This is because Maui (a Polynesian hero) battled the sun to make it so.”

I loved it! He didn’t start with, “This is some Hawaiian folk tale, from 1000 AD, it shows their rich cultural heritage, blah blah.” He threw us in the middle, no details required, no science. He did the entire speech straight, as if it were real.

On the opposite side would be George Lucas in The Phantom Menace. The Force and the original Star Wars in general was a cool, anti-Star Trek type thing because they never delved into the technical details. Until we learn from Obi Wan that the Force is some sort of mitochondria field and that you can scan someone with some Tricorder type thing to see if they have it or not.

Ugh. It doesn’t take much to blow the magic.

One of my favorite shows back in the 90’s was Mystery Science Theater 3000. The premise was this guy and two robots were locked on a space station and forced to watch awful movies, which they made fun of.

The guys doing it were really good film critics and I was thinking of general stuff around speaking you can pickup from a bad movie. On one of them (I can’t remember the title for the life of me) they had this completely over the top super villain. They were trying way too hard to make him evil at basically every moment. After about an hour of this, the character did something else that was random and evil and one of the wise cracking robots said something like, “That’s it. I don’t like this character anymore.”

A simple moral from a sarcastic robot that I still screw up. Don’t overdo it!

When I was doing my taxes a few weeks back, I had to look up the IRS rules to figure out how to deduct some donations I had made. The information is available at http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p526.pdf

I got my answer. On the way through this overly long document, I learned far more about Government policy to dead, stuffed animals than I cared to. I learned that:

If you donate taxidermy property to a qualified organization, your deduction is limited to your basis in the property or its fair market value, whichever is less. This applies if you prepared,stuffed, or mounted the property or paid or in-curred the cost of preparing, stuffing, or mount-ing the property.

Desrcibing determining basis:

It also does not include direct or indirect costs for hunting or killing an animal, such as equipment costs and the costs of preparing an animal carcass for taxidermy.

And I also learned that:

Taxidermy property means any work of art that:

• Is the reproduction or preservation of an animal, in whole or in part,
• Is prepared, stuffed, or mounted to re-create one or more characteristics of the animal, and
• Contains a part of the body of the dead animal.

No wonder CPA’s make 6 figures if even taxidermy donations are this complicated! This is the type of thing that could drive me to become a Libertarian.