The Elements of Persuasion

JOHN E. CLOSES STRONG

There is less than a week until the Iowa Caucuses. The three Dem front-runners are making their closing arguments. With the clock ticking down each has two story goals:

1) To explain the core Passion that drives their candidacy so that people care enough to actually go out on a cold, dark night to the caucuses and vote.

2) Offer them a chance to be a hero in their own story knowing their vote really matters.

John Edwards has two new ads that do an excellent job on both counts. Check them out.

The first, “A Time to Tell the Truth” has him rallying the troops with a real barn burner of a speech. The core of John E’s candidacy is unabashed economic populism. The Middle Class is being squeezed and someone has to be strong enough to stand up and fight. As he makes his case people in the audience nod their agreement. It is easy to see how he won all those big-ticket lawsuits against deep pocket corporations. I counted seven shots that featured an American flag. The ad ends with thunderous applause. I defy anyone to watch it and not get a little fired up.

In the second, “The Choice” Edwards faces the camera and makes a one-on-one personal appeal. You can almost feel him leaning over the jury box, turning on the charm. And he does a very nice job of pigeonholing his opponents without naming names (saying “the status quo and good intentions aren’t enough’ – gee I wonder which is Hillary and which Obama?)

Both ads end saying something big is starting “right here in Iowa” that will sweep the nation. He makes it clear that what he is doing (running) and what the people of Iowa are doing (voting) are equally important. Equality is the essence of a democratic hero.

It is very, very nicely done indeed.

FAUX HEROES

Ever since 2004 the Iowa Caucuses have made me very nervous. That was the year that John Kerry won in Iowa then coasted to the Dem nomination on his record as a war hero. Kerry pushed that image as far as it would go – even stepping to the convention podium for his acceptance speech and smartly saluting that he was “reporting for duty”. He was begging to be swift-boated. The Repubs could hardly wait to do their part.

Voters that year knew that Iraq was being mismanaged – John McCain among others was saying as much (at least under his breath). People wanted a hero with military experience – someone who really knew the lay of the land – to come in and fix things. Ironically the Dems had a candidate that year that filled the bill – Gen. Wesley Clark. He had foreign policy experience, having served as the head of NATO forces – the same forces now fighting in Afghanistan. He had successfully waged war to protect Muslims from Serbian ethnic cleansing, winning that war with no American casualties (that’s right, none) so his credentials both in the military and in the Middle East were particularly shining. And as a southern centrist Dem he was probably electable – history shows that ex-generals are far more likely to win than sitting Senators.

But Clark sat out Iowa. By the time the dust settled Kerry had claimed the role of War Hero and Clark’s candidacy was history. Unfortunately for Dems Kerry’s military experience wasn’t broad enough to maintain his heroic stature during the general election. When the inevitable attacks came and the ground underneath his feet began to crumble Kerry had nowhere else to stand.

When Bill Clinton talks about he difference between style and substance this is what he is talking about. I hope the good folks in Iowa are listening.

CHRISTMAS GIVING

If like us you have spent hours searching the malls for the perfect gifts, you will be happy to know that you are going to get all that time back! At least that is the statistical result of recent studies that show generous giving is a positive survival trait in humans. One reason may be the neurotransmitter Oxytocin.

Oxytocin is stimulated by such things as touching and being trusted and is shown to facilitate the bonding of mother and child. If you are building a brand, this is the stuff you need your customers producing when they hear your name. And it is clearly connected to giving. A report published by the journal, ONE, shows that giving test subjects Oxytocin made them much more generous. It seems to be a two-way street, so the act of generous giving gives you a shot of this hormone as well. And Oxytocin is a gift that keeps on giving – to you! The hormone is known to reduce heart rate and blood pressure, promote wound healing, and reduce the effects of stress.

The best gifts to give are the most personal. Giving of your own time trumps all the rest. A review of over thirty studies on the subject done by the Corporation for National and Community Service found that people who volunteer time to help others have lower mortality rates, function at a higher physical and cognitive level, and are less likely to be depressed than others. You get more benefit if you are older, and if you give more than 100 hours a year. We’ve said before that one of the smartest career moves you can make is to find and support an important social cause at work. Now it turns out it might just save your life. 

Merry Christmas!

DEAD HEAT

It is conventional to complain about the “horse race” aspects of political reporting. Personally I wish the MSM would see this more as a horse race instead of something akin to boxing. The latest CNN poll makes it clear this isn’t Obama vs. Hillary slugging it out in center ring. Iowa is Obama, Hillary and Edwards locked in a statistical tie as they round the last turn and head for the wire.

So in story terms what does each bring to the party? 

Obama is all Passion and vitality. He doesn’t really have any positions he hasn’t borrowed from the other two, and his talking points come prepackaged from Repub pundits, but boy does he know how to smile. Bill Clinton is right in saying to Charlie Rose that there has never been a Presidential candidate with so little experience at a national level, but to younger voters that in itself is exciting.

Hillary is a Heroine; like many heroes her strength is also her Achilles heel. She may not be likable, but that glint in her eyes lets you know she is ruthless – Clint Eastwood from “A Fist Full of Dollars” without the cheroot. Given the current world situation that might be just what we need.

Edwards’ story element is Antagonist. He is a scrapper from the wrong side of the tracks - the only one to clearly define the problems in economic terms. Walter Shapiro at Salon has a nice piece on how economic populism fuels the Huckabee surge, but somehow it hasn’t yet clicked that way with the Dems. The recent FEC decision denying Edwards matching funds – you can’t swing punches without making powerful enemies – makes Iowa must-win for him. But that is exactly when scrapers dig deep and come through.

It’s a great race. What’s wrong with that?

MAKING IT MEANINGFUL

One of the great things about corporate consulting is that you get to work with some very smart people – in our case people smart enough to realize the power of using the five-element story model in corporate strategy. David Berry, Director of Coaching and Leadership Development at TaylorMade-adidas Golf, is that smart and then some.

Every year TaylorMade, which makes the finest performance golf equipment in the world, has its leaders prepare an individual Leadership Plan that reflects back on their past year and express how they plan to carry what they learned forward into the next. It has been a very successful process. But TaylorMade is by nature innovative so David called FirstVoice and asked if we could come up with a program to make those leadership plans more Meaningful, Relevant, Challenging and Actionable.

The minute we saw the criteria we knew this was a match made in heaven. Why? David’s criteria directly relate to the first four elements in our story model!

MEANINGFUL: This directly relates to a story’s Passion. What makes a fact meaningful? First you have to capture our attention. Story does that. Cold facts do very little. Effective leaders use facts wrapped in emotions – our definition of story - to get people fired up and passionately engaged. The best idea in the world, without passionate commitment, will fizzle out and have no meaningful result.

RELEVANT: Relevant to whom? It is all a matter of point of view and POV relates to the story element Hero. Leaders are corporate heroes because they know where their work fits into the larger whole of corporate strategy. They understand the corporate “lay of the land.” They move an idea towards fruition by helping other leaders see how it connects to their areas of responsibility and so that they become equally committed to seeing it happen.

CHALLENGING: This goes with Antagonist. There are always obstacles to be overcome. That is the nature of business. Defining those obstacles in a way that makes them clearly opportunities is one of the key advantages of the story model. That little hit of adrenaline that a well told story releases can make all the difference. What might seem drudgery suddenly becomes exciting and we accept the challenge.

ACTIONABLE: This is Awareness. If we know what to do next, we can do it. As we say in The Elements of Persuasion awareness is a bit like lightning. It is a flash of illumination. It should be quick, clean and just a little startling. Awareness is like a great punch line, it automatically produces an action. A punch line makes us laugh, in leadership stories awareness makes us take action and get right to work. 

TRANSFORMATION, our fifth element, is the natural result of bringing the first four elements into alignment. Managing change is what TaylorMade-adidas’s leadership plans are all about.

Though the idea of storytelling in business is broadly catching on the specific application of the five-element story model is still very cutting edge. It offers a decisive competitive advantage. It is no coincidence that TaylorMade-adidas, at the absolute cutting edge of the highly competitive world of performance golf, would be smart enough to understand that.

PASIONATE DEBATE

It’s rare to hear a politician – particularly a Dem politician - really laying out their gut feelings in the sort of take-no-prisoners language this country used to thrive on. This is especially true during campaign season when candidates are so afraid of a “Howard Dean moment” that they end up looking particularly plastic. That is why Chris Dodd taking the floor in the Senate Debate on the FISA bill is such must see TV. Check it out by clicking here.

When we originally did our round up of the Dems we said Dodd was an old-school breath of fresh air. With this speech, and his refusal to yield to Harry Reid’s wrong-headed desire to play it safe and avoid a filibuster, Dodd shows us the value of passion in action. His style of presentation – leaning slightly forward, his head moving to look right, then left like a boxer closing in on his prey trapped in the corner - makes it crystal clear that what Dodd is saying is vitally, viscerally important to him. Though his verbal pacing is measured and his words carefully chosen there is nothing cool about his demeanor. His blood is up, he is fighting mad and doesn’t care who knows it.

He is talking about an “irreducible core value” of the Republic – the freedom from illegal search and seizure. And "irreducible core" is one way to define a story's passion This is the sort of issue that used to bring out massive crowds for torch lit parades.

Dodd’s passion carried the day. Reid withdrew the bill from consideration. Obama’s cool style may play well on the stump, but it was Dodd’s verbal broadsides that actually got things done. Smart Dems should take note.

LATE NIGHT HEROES

On Friday the LA Times reported that the WGA is planning to shift strategy and negotiate with TV and Film production companies one-on-one rather than through the AMPTP in hopes of ending the strike. 

On Saturday the NYT reported that David Letterman is seeking an interim deal to bring his writers back to work. You would think that CBS would welcome the chance to get a leg up on arch rival Leno in the cash-cow late night arena, but according to Nikki Fine at the LA Weekly, who has done some of the best reporting on the strike, that isn’t the case. If I were a stockholder in Viacom I would want to know why.

What does this have to do with the five-element story model? On a story level this strike is a struggle between the big six media conglomerates who are using the mainstream media (which they own) to deliver a basically conventional message (it doesn’t help that their story “we want all the money because we want it, so there!!” doesn’t make a lot of sense, but you can’t have everything), and the WGA which is using asymmetric storytelling, largely on the picket lines and across the internet, to get their words out. So whose approach is working best?

Cracks are clearly showing up in the AMPTP united front. And the writers? This video by Letterman’s scribes done on the picket line in a cold wet snow makes it clear they are passionately committed to their cause and will stand their ground for as long as it takes – which is what Heroes do.

WGA writers are claiming new territory on the internet as well. In the video the Late Nite writers mention their blogsite. Click here to check it out. It is fresh, to the point and laugh out loud funny. Enjoy.

THOSE SHIFTY ANTAGONISTS

We often say that the relationship between the hero and the antagonist has to remain fluid if the story is to truly engage us emotionally. This is particularly true with crime stories. So it seems perfect that the location for The Scene of the Crime Rally has shifted from Warner Brothers in Burbank to that Citadel of Bad Behavior- the offices of the AMPTP itself in Encino. There is a coordinated rally in New York City as well.

Here is the latest on times and locations:

Los Angeles: December 18^th, 10 am to 12 pm PST, AMPTP HQ, 15503 Ventura Blvd., Encino, a few blocks west of the 405 at the corner of Firmament.

New York: December 18^th, 12 pm to 2 pm EST, Foley Square, Downtown NYC

But stay tuned and check the WGA calander of events by clicking here before you come.

THE SCENE OF THE CRIME

In The Elements of Persuasion we discuss Jerome Bruner’s observation that story is linked to surprise. It is a fact that creating narratives is one of our first responses to the unexpected. That may be one of the reasons why mystery stories are such a constant presence on film, TV and airport book racks everywhere.

It is certainly true that the best stories often arrive with a sense of surprise. No one can tell you where you will find a really great crime story. They just seem to pop up. But I can tell you where to find the world's highest concentration of really great crime storytellers.

On Tuesday, December 18 between 10:00 AM and NOON they will be rallying in front of Warner Brothers  as part of the WGA ongoing strike. The rally has been named “The Scene of the Crime” and there is a coordinated event in NYC for those on the East Coast. It is being hosted by Rene Balcer, show-runner of Law & Order and co-creator of Law & Order: Criminal Intent. To find out more about this and other  WGA strike events click here.

Want to know why the New York City judges are such constant dunderheads on Law & Order? Want to meet others who share your guilty pleasure of hopeless addiction to Women’s Murder Club or Dexter? Still waiting to find out if Hawaii Five-0 will ever come back? Then this is the place to be. Grab a sign and join the line.

THE LEADING INDICATOR

We generally suggest that you avoid telling fish stories. Those are stories where you brag on past accomplishments which seem to get more impressive every time you tell the tale. They aren’t that interesting to listen to. The problem is they can be almost irresistible to tell. We are in the grip of just such a “resistance is futile” moment. Mike Huckabee has moved from marginal to the top of the pack and this blog was one of the first to consider him a major Repub contender.

Don’t believe us? We understand. Everyone is making that claim now. But were they saying back then? You can check our record out with just a few clicks..

Back on September 15 – not that long ago, but many percentage points back - we said that Repub brand disintegration might give Huckabee traction.

Four days later on the 19^th we talked about Huckabee’s Value Voters as being crucial.

On October 3 on the basis of his performance at the New Hampshire Primary – and a no nonsense comment he made about Pakistan – we said he was “the one to watch.”

On October 21 we called what we still believe was the key moment when things shifted.

And our post November 25 about Huckabee’s ad with Chuck Norris – where he clearly shows a profound understanding of the role of the political hero – was just icing on the story cake. 

Our point isn’t that we have been right. It is why we have been right. We don’t track ideology, demographics, or fund raising. What we look at is the quality of the story the candidates tell.

Stories are the primary connection between politicians and voters. Understanding a candidate’s story is the most effective leading indicator of their eventual success. Knowing The Elements of Persuasion helps you do just that.