This began as an interview with a business school student who asked what the activity of a conference speaker consists of. I noticed he chose the word activity rather than profession, and he was right to.
Not being an academic, I think turning this activity into a profession can be professionally dangerous unless you are a professor. What follows is an honest account of how the work actually operates, including the parts nobody puts on a speaker page.
Then the harder question, which is what happens to this trade next. Disrupting the speaking business is a phrase that usually introduces something about being more engaging, and that is not the argument.
A speaker has historically sold two things: access to knowledge that was hard to obtain, and a room full of people paying attention at the same time. Both of those have collapsed in value, and neither collapse was caused by anything happening on stage.
What remains sellable is the part that cannot be recorded, which changes the economics of the whole trade and explains why I spend a week building thirty minutes.
| What the trade looks like | What has actually collapsed | What survives |
|---|---|---|
| Three activities, one visibleDisrupting the speaking business starts with knowing what the work is. Building a talk, finding engagements, and delivering. Only the third is visible, and it is the shortest of the three by a considerable margin. | Scarce knowledge and a shared roomA speaker used to sell access to information that was hard to obtain, and the fact of an audience present together. Information is now free, searchable and synthesised on demand, and attendance has become optional and contested. | Everything that cannot be recordedWhat remains sellable is the response to an unplanned question, the willingness to name what the organisation avoids, and material built for one specific audience. The recording becomes marketing and the unrecordable part becomes the product. |
What the work actually consists of
The activity breaks into three distinct parts, and the proportions surprise everybody who asks. The part audiences see accounts for a small fraction of the time involved.
Creation, the longest and most painful part
I build talks on paper first, and the reason is defensive. Start in presentation software and you get what I call slide thinking, where your reasoning disappears into a tunnel of slides and takes whatever shape the tool suggests.
The other failure is the image-led talk, where the argument bends to accommodate photographs you have found rather than the photographs being chosen to serve the argument. Both are visible from the third row and neither is recoverable once it has happened.
Only once the argument and the transitions between its parts are worked out on paper do I move to slides. To give you a sense of the ratio, I spend roughly a week of work for thirty minutes of stage time.
The work does not stop at the first delivery either. I replace about twenty per cent of the slides in my most popular talks every year, which is a maintenance cost nobody buying a talk ever thinks about.
Marketing, or why more talks produce more talks
The comparison I like here is with music. A talk is like an album, in that there is the recording and there is the stage, and the two do different commercial work.
To find engagements easily you have to do a lot of stage time, because word of mouth is the mechanism that actually books this work. Which produces a summary that sounds circular and is simply true: the more talks you do, the more talks you do.
That circularity is the hardest thing about starting, and it is also why agents matter. Mine handle the bookings, which is a specialist activity I would be worse at and which frees the week that goes into building the next talk.
Delivery, and the independent label approach
The obviously visible and gratifying part, and the part that used to astonish me most about this activity. You are alone while building the talk, choosing the photographs and selecting the examples, and then with no transition whatever you are standing in front of an audience.
That is no longer how I work. I now take what I think of as an independent label approach, where a talk sits between construction and client delivery long enough to be tested on my associates and partners first.
Since I customise every talk for its audience, that testing step is where the customisation gets checked by somebody who is not me. An argument that works in my head and fails in a room is expensive to discover on the day.
It also changes the failure mode. Alone, a speaker discovers a weak passage in front of the client. Tested first, the weak passage is found by somebody with no reason to be polite about it.
The numbers behind the trade
People ask how many talks I give in a year, and the honest answer is that it depends on the year, on what is happening in the world, on whether a book has come out, on which subjects are of interest, and on how the calendar falls.
How many, and how the year moves
On average I would say between eighty and a hundred and twenty engagements a year, with a personal record of five talks in a single day.
The distribution matters more than the total. This work arrives in dense clusters around particular periods and disappears for weeks either side, which makes the annual figure a poor guide to what any given month looks like.
Which has a consequence for anybody buying. The periods when a speaker is easiest to book are the periods when everybody else is not booking, and the dates every organisation wants are the dates every organisation wants.
What a talk costs to make
Put the two figures together and the economics become visible. A week of construction for thirty minutes, plus a fifth of the slides rebuilt annually, plus the customisation for each audience, plus the testing round.
None of that is visible in a fee, which is why fees look startling to people who have only seen the delivery. What is being priced is a stock of built material, maintained continuously, and adapted for each room.
It also explains something about the market. A speaker with one talk and no maintenance can charge less and does, and the difference between the two is invisible until about twenty minutes into the session.
What separates one speaker from another
Some years ago my answer to this would have been simple, and it is no longer available to me, which is a useful thing to be honest about.
The advantage that disappeared
I was among the first to turn conference presentations into sessions that balanced substance and form, with video and with heavily worked slides carrying very few words and sometimes none at all.
Since Garr Reynolds published Presentation Zen and independently organised talks became widespread, I have largely lost that advantage. Which is good news for everybody who attends conferences, and I would rather say so than pretend otherwise.
Bullet point presentations have almost disappeared, and the people still using them tend to be either near the end of long careers or sitting on a board. That is a real improvement in the general standard and it removed a differentiator I had relied on for years.
What survives, and it is unglamorous
I keep a small lead on holding the attention of an audience that finds it increasingly easy to look down at a phone and finish a level of whatever game is currently installed.
The difference is staging rather than content: how the slides follow one another, which photographs are used, the number of hours of rehearsal, and how I dress in relation to the subject I am presenting.
There is also a capacity for not taking myself seriously, which sounds like a personality note and is a working tool. A speaker who cannot be lightly wrong on stage will avoid the sentence that makes a room sit up, because that sentence carries a risk of not landing.
None of that appears in a showreel, and all of it is the reason a session works or does not.
Checking the stories everybody repeats
The last difference is that I dig into the stories I tell, past the version everybody has absorbed second hand. Two examples I use often, and both contradict the standard telling.
The success of the repositionable note did not rest on an engineer’s mistake, which is how the story is nearly always told. It rested on the commercial work that followed, done by people who had to find a use, a market and a distribution route for an adhesive nobody had asked for.
Alexander Fleming is a poor illustration of serendipity, for a related reason. The observation required years of accumulated expertise to be meaningful, and turning it into a usable medicine took a separate team and a decade of work that the anecdote leaves out entirely.
And I do not invent the quotations I use, which is a lower bar than it should be. I also name the people whose thinking I am drawing on, which appears to be going out of fashion, and I have written elsewhere about how to check whether a speaker’s examples are current and true.
Vertical and horizontal speakers
There is a structural choice in this trade that nobody makes consciously and everybody makes. It determines what you can talk about in five years and whether you will still want to.
The vertical approach and what it costs
Most speakers become known for one precise subject, or for a single idea, or for one exceptional personal experience. That recognition is commercially valuable and it arrives quickly.
The consequence is a vertical approach, digging into the same subject year after year, and it can leave somebody permanently fixed in their field in the way certain actors become permanently fixed in one role.
The visible symptom is a speaker delivering the same talk they were delivering several years ago, which is now available to anybody in the audience on a video platform before the session starts. That is a difficult position and I would not be smug about it, since the market rewarded the specialisation before it punished it.
The same pattern appears among academics, who are required to specialise, and at the other end of the quality range among people who assemble an expert position out of whatever the internet says about a subject that week.
The horizontal approach and what it demands
I try to work horizontally instead. That means paying attention to the societal changes actually under way and then identifying their effects inside organisations.
Which is why, although my subject is innovation, I also work on the human side of it through creativity, curiosity and empathy, on the managerial side through wellbeing, collaboration and engagement, on the societal side through transformation and generational change, and on the economic side through attention and recommendation.
The point of working that way is to avoid stopping at the easy observation. Saying that the education system kills creativity, or that organisations have lost their sense of purpose, is a conclusion rather than a contribution, and both are available free.
What I am after is identifying what is changing, finding the connection to what happens inside a business, and proposing something concrete and scaled to the organisations actually in the room. The demand this places on you is continuous reading in fields that are not your own, which is expensive in time and invisible in the price.
The examples change with the audience too. What speaks to an executive in one country will not speak to a fifty-year-old middle manager in a regional town or to a factory worker in another, so I start from situations I have actually been in, having managed more than a thousand people over the years and worked with around eight hundred clients across a lot of countries.
And I do not present myself as a guru. I present as a witness, and occasionally as somebody who took the damage before everybody else did, which is a more useful position and a considerably less profitable one.
Field note
Five talks in one day
My personal record is five sessions inside a single day, and I am not proud of it in the way the number suggests. It is the clearest lesson I have had about what this work actually sells.
The first was good. The second was better, because the first had warmed up the material and I had adjusted two things that had not landed. By the third I was competent and running on craft rather than attention, which an audience does not detect and I could feel precisely. The fourth and fifth were technically fine. Every slide in place, every transition working, every question answered accurately. What was missing was the part no booking form describes: noticing that one table had gone quiet, abandoning a planned section because the room had already understood it, taking the risk on a sentence that might not land. All of that needs attention I no longer had, and none of it shows in a recording.
What I took from that day is the argument this whole article rests on. The reproducible part of a talk survives fatigue perfectly well, which is exactly why it is the part with no defensible value. What cannot be reproduced is the reading of a specific room in real time, and that is finite, it does not scale, and it is the only thing left that a recording cannot deliver instead of me.
Two audiences and four formats
There is no usual audience. I have spoken to military personnel, government ministers, elected representatives, school students, managers, executives, surgeons, nurses, engineers, athletes, union officials and even a few priests, to rooms of five people and rooms of five thousand.
Closed and open rooms
On reflection those all sort into two types, and the distinction matters more than the size of the room or the seniority of the people in it.
Closed sessions gather people from the same organisation. Their jobs may differ and they share at least a company culture, or a common responsibility such as managing people. This is the easier audience for a speaker, because everybody in the room has the same objective.
Open sessions gather heterogeneous profiles with widely varied expectations and interests. This audience is more complex, since it shares no common culture, does not necessarily face the same problems, and has no shared level of maturity on the subject.
Which means one room can contain somebody encountering the topic for the first time, somebody attending their second session on it, somebody there to network and somebody hoping for a precise answer to a problem that concerns nobody else present. Serving all four at once is the actual skill in an open room.
Four formats and when each one applies
I work in four formats depending on what the client is asking for, the shape of the event and the time available. Choosing the wrong one is the most common reason a competent session disappoints.
| Format | What it does | When it fits | What it needs from you |
|---|---|---|---|
| Update | Very concrete examples adapted to the audience’s daily work | The room already knows the subject and needs current material | Access to several attendees beforehand, to gather questions and gauge maturity |
| Animating a weak moment | A performance built around lesser known stories of innovators, or my own | The session precedes an evening, a product launch or the annual figures | Honesty that this is not the high point of the day, which helps rather than offends |
| Inspiration | My own path, the obstacles hit and what they taught | The room needs permission to attempt something rather than a method | A brief that says what the organisation is about to ask of people |
| Understanding | Storytelling combined with concrete tools and company examples | The subject is entirely new to the audience | Time, since this is the format that suffers most from a short slot |
Inside the first format I have been running something for a couple of years that I think of as the ninety per cent question format. A short opening exists only to trigger the first questions, and the rest of the session is answering them.
It terrifies organisers and it is the most useful thing I do, which is not a coincidence. It also happens to be the format most resistant to everything described in the next section.
What is actually being disrupted
Now the harder question. The usual version of this argument says speakers will need to be more engaging, which is a prediction that has been made continuously for twenty years and asks nothing of anybody.
The two things a speaker used to sell
Historically this trade sold two things and neither was performance. The first was access to knowledge that was difficult to obtain, held by somebody who had spent years acquiring it and would spend an hour transferring some of it.
The second was a room. Getting several hundred people to pay attention to the same thing at the same time was expensive and rare, and a speaker was the mechanism that justified assembling them.
Both have collapsed and neither collapse had anything to do with what happens on stage. Information became free, searchable, and then synthesised on demand into exactly the summary an individual wanted. Assembling a room became optional, then expensive to justify, then contested.
Which is the actual disruption, and it is unusually clean as these things go. The two goods a trade was built to sell both lost their scarcity, at speed, for reasons entirely outside the trade’s control.
What remains sellable
What survives is everything that cannot be recorded, and the list is shorter and more specific than the inspirational version of this argument suggests.
- The answer to a question nobody planned for, given in front of the people who need to hear it.
- The decision to abandon a prepared section because the room has already understood it.
- Naming the thing the organisation has been avoiding, which somebody external can do and nobody internal can.
- Material built for one specific audience, which only exists because somebody spent the week.
Notice what that list does to the economics. The recorded talk stops being the product and becomes the marketing, and the unrecordable part becomes the thing being bought, which inverts how most speakers price and promote themselves.
It also explains the week per thirty minutes and the annual rebuild. Neither of those is craftsmanship for its own sake. They are the cost of having something specific enough that a general summary cannot substitute for it.
The honest counterpoint is that this argument suits me, since I am a craftsman claiming craft survives. So here is the part that does not suit me: a great deal of what speakers currently sell is replaceable, the single inspiring personal story most of all, and the people most exposed are the ones with one talk and a vertical position they cannot leave.
Want to see what a week of work looks like?
Curious what actually gets built and what it covers? See the sessions I run and the format each one uses, and ask which parts of any of them I would rewrite for your room.
How to work with me on this
Everything above has a practical consequence for anybody booking a session, and most of it concerns what happens before the day rather than on it.
Briefing and preparation
Give me access to several people who will be in the room. Not a survey, a conversation, so I can hear the questions in their own words and gauge how much of the subject the audience already holds.
Tell me which of the four formats you actually want, and if you are not sure, tell me what should be different in your organisation a week after the session. That sentence chooses the format better than any brief.
And tell me what you would rather I did not mention, so we can negotiate which of those things the organisation is ready to hear named out loud. That conversation is the preparation, and everything on the slides follows from it.
Choosing between speakers, including me
If you are comparing several people for a session, the criteria are worth applying properly rather than from a showreel, and I have set out eight questions a weak candidate can fail, including two that I fail myself.
The prior question is whether somebody has a record at all, which is a different assessment from whether they suit your slot, and I have written about why that title cannot be claimed and only conferred.
If you would rather test this than read about it, a conversation beats a proposal. You can tell me what should be different a week after the session and we will know within ten minutes which format you need.
Conclusion: the recording is the marketing now
The work is three activities and only one is visible. Building a talk takes about a week for thirty minutes, finding engagements runs on the circular logic that more stage time produces more stage time, and delivery is the short part everybody thinks they are buying.
Disrupting the speaking business turns out to have very little to do with being more engaging. The two goods this trade was built on, scarce knowledge and an assembled room, both lost their value for reasons nobody on a stage caused or could prevent.
What is left is the unrecordable part. The unplanned answer, the abandoned section, the sentence the organisation cannot say to itself, and material built for one room by somebody who spent the week on it.
Which reverses the old arrangement completely. The talk used to be the product and the recording a souvenir. Now the recording is the marketing, and the product is whatever happens that could not have been recorded in advance.
Frequently asked questions about the speaking business
How long does it take to build a keynote?
About a week of work for thirty minutes of stage time, built on paper before any slide is made. Add roughly a fifth of the slides rebuilt every year in the talks that get booked most, plus customisation for each audience and a testing round before the client sees it.
What is actually disrupting the speaking business?
Not performance standards. A speaker historically sold scarce knowledge and an assembled room, and both lost their value. Information became free and then synthesised on demand, and gathering people became optional. What survives is the part that cannot be recorded.
What is the difference between a closed and an open audience?
A closed session gathers one organisation, so the room shares a culture or a common responsibility and has the same objective, which makes it the easier audience. An open session gathers mixed profiles with no shared culture, different problems and different levels of maturity on the subject.
How do I choose the right format for my event?
Write one sentence describing what should be different in your organisation a week later. If it concerns how people felt, you want inspiration or a session that lifts a weak moment. If it concerns what people did, you want an update or an understanding format with tools attached.
Why do some speakers give the same talk for years?
Because the market rewards being known for one subject, which produces a vertical position that becomes difficult to leave. The risk is that the talk ends up available on a video platform before the session starts, which is now visible to any audience with a phone.
