The Story of Hyundai: A Lesson in Public Speaking

Hyundai, rhymes with Sunday.

I loved this talk at MIT by John Krafcik, head of Hyundai’s American branch. It lasted an hour; I wished it was longer. It reminded me of Carl Willat‘s Trader Joe’s commercial: Full of emotion, in this case Krafcik’s pride in his company and what they’ve done. Toyota is the world’s number #1 car company; when a Toyota executive interviewed for a job at Hyundai, he told them that at Toyota, they are most afraid of Hyundai. So afraid that they bought five straight years of a certain Hyundai model, took them all apart, and studied how each system changed from year to year. (I used to compare New Yorker articles with their book versions, word by word, to see what the editors changed. John Updike compared two versions of Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir, Conclusive Evidence and Speak, Memory, word by word. More recently I noticed that Zadie Smith’s On Beauty had significant differences between the audio and printed versions.)

Krafcik repeated an old Jay Leno joke: “How do you double the value of a Hyundai? Half-fill the gas tank.” So he had a great story to tell, the return from ignominy, but curiously he barely told it. Probably this was because he was working at Ford at the time. I have no great interest in cars, I’m not particularly interested in why one company does better than another, yet I was entranced. I came away thinking that most of what I’d heard about public speaking was wrong — most of the stuff in Made to Stick, for example. Sure, the advice to tell a story — and most speakers don’t even understand that — is right. Krafcik did tell a story. But that’s the easy part. I think everyone understands what a story is. The harder part is convey emotion. Carl Willat has said to me that in movies, that’s all that matters. Absolutely, and I think what’s he saying applies to talks as well. Of course an academic talk must have content. But the practical lesson for me is that when planning a talk I should pick something I care a lot about and in the talk do my best to convey how I feel. That’s all. Don’t worry about telling a joke, don’t worry about slick visuals, don’t try to impress them.
I plan to show Krafcik’s talk to graduate students (in psychology) because it makes a point I doubt they’ve heard: It’s fine if it’s other people’s work that you feel strongly about. Krafcik isn’t the head of Hyundai. He had nothing to do with their long comeback. But he’s proud of his company — and he conveyed that in spades, and that was enough. Suppose you do research on X. You’re giving a talk about it — perhaps a job talk. Maybe your research is mediocre. But you think research on X is incredibly important. Fine — just make that clear. Everyone in the audience will like you for being able to appreciate the work of others, that’s so rare. When you point them to other work that is great, you’re helping them. Suppose you’re teaching a class. Find the parts of the subject that you feel strongly about. Do your best to convey how strongly you feel. Better positive than negative but negative works. (Ask Nassim Taleb.) Avoid the parts you don’t feel strongly about.

In a sense all speaking (and all writing) is public speaking (unless we’re talking to ourselves, which is rare). The audience might be one person or a hundred people, it doesn’t matter, the principle is the same: We use the emotion in what we hear to judge how much attention we should pay to it. Zero emotion = zero attention. I once visited Alaska. While I was there I took a day trip to a glacier. Near the glacier was a building with a little slide show about the glacier, with a taped narration. It was all very dry — the glacier grows in winter, shrinks in summer, there are these animals nearby — but you could tell the speaker cared a lot about the glacier. I was terribly struck by that. How rare it is to hear someone talk about something they really care about, I thought. I’ve told that story dozens of times. But I didn’t manage to translate it into advice about how to give a talk.