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A Dream Come True… Thanks Barnes & Noble!

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Monday nights are writing nights for me. So, last night, after work I went to the Barnes & Noble on Route 17 in Paramus, NJ. It is one of my favorite spots to write while jacked-up on coffee and triple-chocolate-espresso brownies.

In a caffeine and sugar induced groove, I spent several hours editing my next book, a collaboration with Ryan Avery, the 2012 Toastmasters World Champion of Public Speaking.  Though the book won’t be released until early 2014, you can check it out at: Speaker, Leader, Champion: Succeed at Work Through the Power of Public Speaking.

As I was walking out, I stopped at the self-service kiosk to see if my recently released book, How to Deliver a TED Talk, had made it onto store shelves.  I figured the chances were somewhere between zero and “you must be kidding.” My excitement built as I saw the option to “locate in store.”  Strolling over to the business section, I erupted into an ear-to-ear grin with pride and gratitude. To save the moment, I snapped a few photos and headed home to show-off to my wife and kids. My 13-year-old put things back in proper perspective, “Dad, just 3 books?” You’ve got to love the honesty.

I started to feel like an author when I self-published my first book.  The feeling grew stronger when McGraw-Hill released an expanded version of my TED book.  In my wildest dreams, I never expected I’d have a book on store shelves.  Thank you to my brilliant editor Casey Ebro and the team and McGraw-Hill.  Thank you to my meticulous line editor PJ Dempsey. Thank you to my wonderful agent Jackie Meyer.  And especially, thank you to the buyer (or the person who designed the buying algorithm) at Barnes & Noble for making one of my dreams come true!

 

IMG_0289  IMG_0288  IMG_0287

 

Do Great Players Make Great Coaches?

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If you Google, “Do great players make great coaches?”, you will get a lot of opinions but few facts.  I’m sure there is an academic article out there somewhere with a definitive answer, but I could not find it.  Refusing to give in, I contacted a professor at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business who specializes in sports statistics; unfortunately, even he was not aware of a study that addresses this question.  Though I usually write about public speaking and have little interest in sports other than watching my son play soccer, I decided to turn to ‘armchair’ sports statistics to resolve whether great players make great coaches once and for all.

My fixation with this question started with an email that I recently received:

“I’m halfway through your How To Deliver a TED Talk book and I think it will greatly help my public speaking. However, I’m wondering, have you ever given a TED Talk?  I’ve studied hundreds of runners and I know what it takes to run a marathon in under 3 hours.  But, even though I have run 13 marathons, I have not run one in less than 3 hours.  So, I don’t feel authentic giving advice to other runners.”

The individual who emailed me was asking two questions.

The first question was, ‘Have you ever delivered a TED Talk?’  My answer is a little more complex than yes or no.  At the time I wrote the book, I had not given a TED talk despite having invested over ten years and 10,000 hours in public speaking and coaching speakers.  Since writing the book, I have delivered a TEDx Talk, organized 3 TEDx conferences, and coached many TED and TEDx speakers.

The second question, one with a more ominous subtext, was, “And, if you have never delivered a TED Talk, then can I trust the advice in your book?” Of course, this is just another form of ‘Do you have to have been a great player to be a great coach?”  To answer this question, I turned to a free database of coach and player information provided by Basketball-Reference.com.

 

Round 1: Do coaches who were players win more?

There are several ways to think about what it means to be a great player.  The first criteria we will look at whether coaches who were NBA players won more games than coaches who did not play in the NBA. After all, anybody who makes it into the NBA has to have been an exceptional college (or high school) player.  As shown in Table 1, owners prefer to hire coaches who were NBA players (57%) versus coaches who did not play (43%)

Similarly, there are at least two ways to think about what it means to be a great coach.  One way is based on career regular season winning percentage.  Another way is based on a coach’s ability to win championships.

When being a great coach is defined as having a high winning percentage, it does not matter if the coach played in the NBA or not. When being a great coach is defined as winning championships, former players have a slight edge.  Given these mixed results, it is too soon to conclude that great players make great coaches.

[table caption=”Table 1″ colalign=”left|center|center|center”]
Coach History,# Coaches,Win %,Championship %
Never played in NBA,100,44.5%,11.0%
Played in NBA,132,44.3%,14.4%
[/table]

 

Round 2: Do coaches who won championships as players win more?

In Round 1, I defined great players as those good enough to make it to the NBA.  But, that may be too loose a definition of what it means to be a great player.  Suppose that to be considered a great player, a coach would have needed to have won a championship during his playing days.  As Table 2 shows, exactly half of coaches who were former players won at least one championship as a player.

Coaches who won championships as players fared slightly better in average career winning percentage than coaches who did not win titles as players and than coaches who did not play.  However, coaches were more likely to win championships (19.7% chance) if they won when they were players than if they did not (9.1% chance). These results support the contention that great players are more likely to make great coaches, but we will explore a better test in Round 3.

[table caption=”Table 2″ colalign=”left|center|center|center”]

Coach History,# Coaches,Win %,Championship %
Never played in NBA,100,44.5%,11.0%

Never won title as player,66,42.9%,9.1%
Won title as player,66,45.6%,19.7%
[/table]

 

Round 3: Do coaches who were great individual players win more?

Round 2 imposed a more restrictive definition of what it means to be great player than Round 1 did.  However, a coach may have simply been lucky enough during his playing days to warm the bench on a team that took home the title.  That does not mean he was an exceptional player.  Fortunately, John Hollinger came up with the player efficiency rating (PER), a single composite score that factors in many basketball performance measures; it is used to make fair comparisons between all kinds of different players. Table 3 shows coaching achievement broken out by how well coaches performed when they were players.

The better a coach played when he was in the NBA, the higher his career winning percentage.  But, only coaches that were incredible players fared better than coaches who never played.  When great coaching is defined as winning championships, coaches who were the weakest players did just as well as coaches who were exceptional players.

[table caption=”Table 3″ colalign=”left|center|center|center”]
Coach History,# Coaches,Win %,Championship %
Never played in NBA,100,44.5%,11.0%

PER: unknown,11,40.8%,9.1%

PER: 7.0 to 11.6,30,41.7%,26.7%

PER: 11.7 to 13.7,28,41.6%,3.6%

PER: 13.8 to 16.3,33,44.5%,3.0%

PER: 16.5 to 27.0,30,50.4%,26.7%

[/table]

 

Bonus Round: Do point guards really make better coaches?

When you Google this topic, you find a lot of people expressing the conventional wisdom that point guards go on to make better coaches than coaches who played other positions in the NBA.  The reasoning is that point guards are usually the on-court leaders so they should make natural off-court leaders.  As Table 4 shows, the people who hire coaches indeed have a preference for point guards. However, they might do better by hiring former power forwards.

The bottom line is that the position that a coach formerly played has little impact on his ability to be a great coach.

[table caption=”Table 4″ colalign=”left|center|center|center”]
Coach History,# Coaches,Win %,Championship %

Never played in NBA,100,44.5%,11.0%

unknown,9,41.6%,11.1%

Point Guard,50,45.0%,18.0%

Shooting Guard,28,44.3%,10.7%

Small Forward,20,42.0%,5.0%

Power Forward,15,45.4%,26.7%

Center,10,45.9%,10.0%

[/table]

 

The Final Word

Finally, Table 5 shows what happens to great players when they become coaches.  Nearly half (46.7%) become great coaches.  The other half do not achieve greatness.  Though not shown, 30% of the worst players go on to be great coaches and 22% of those who never played went on to be great coaches.

[table caption=”Table 5″ colalign=”left|center|center|center”]
Coach History,# Coaches,Pct. of Total

Terrible Coach,2,6.7%

Below Avg. Coach,5,16.7%

Above Avg. Coach,9,30.0%

Great Coach,14,46.7%

[/table]

In the end, there are great coaches who were great players (ex: Lenny Wilkins, Doc Rivers, Rudy Tomjanovich).  There are great coaches who were terrible players (ex. Pat Riley, Rick Adelman, Larry Brown).  There are terrible coaches who were great players (ex: Kiki Vandeweghe, Red Kerr). And, there are terrible coaches who were terrible players (ex: Kenny Natt, Jack McCloskey).  I’m of course using ‘terrible’ only in a relative sense since we are talking about some of the most talented athletes and leaders on the planet.

As there are so few championships, I think the better measure of whether someone is a great coach is his regular season win percentage. Defined that way, only the most exceptional players make better coaches than people who never even played.

From all this data, I conclude that you don’t have to have been a great player to be a great coach.  Sure, your odds are a little better, but the difference may easily be explained away by other factors such as having a bigger budget to acquire better players to begin with. The proper way to do this is to use a multivariate statistical model but I will leave that to academics and team statisticians.

If you are looking for a coach in any field, rather than asking if he or she was a great player, you should ask:

(1) Does the coach’s advice resonate as intrinsically valuable to you?

(2) Does the coach have a track record of successfully developing great players?

 

Methodology Notes:

(1) Win percentages are for regular season games unless otherwise indicated
(2) Analysis includes coaches who coached at least 50 NBA games during their careers
(3) Championship percentages indicate the percentage of coaches in each category that coached a team to at least one NBA title
(4) All references to “NBA” are inclusive of the  ABA as well unless otherwise indicated

10 Most Popular TED Talks From TED2013

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It is pretty easy to determine the most popular TED Talks of all time.  To see the ranking on TED.com, click here.   You can also see a mostly overlapping list on YouTube by clicking here.  However, I was curious which were the most popular talks to emerge from TED2013.  That took a bit more work.  Without further commentary, here is the list as of March 23, 2013 ranked by number of views.

 

#1  Amanda Palmer – The Art of Asking

 

#2 Shane Koyczan – ‘To this day”… for the bullied and beautiful

 

#3 Allan Savory – How to Green the World’s Deserts and Reverse Climate Change

 

#4 Ron Finley – A Guerilla Gardner in South Central LA

 

#5 Edith Widder – How We Found the Giant Squid

 

#6 Sugata Mitra – Build a School in the Cloud

 

#7 Dan Pallotta – The Way We Think About Charity is Dead Wrong

 

#8 Bono – The Good News on Poverty (Yes, There’s Good News)

 

#9 Danny Hillis – The Internet Could Crash. We Need a Plan B.

 

#10  Elon Musk – The Mind Behind Tesla, SpaceX, and SolarCity

2012 Toastmasters World Championship Finalist Andrew Kneebone Shares His Insights

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I interviewed Andrew Kneebone on January 27, 2013 and asked him just one question: “What are your best pieces of advice on how to win the Toastmasters World Championship of Public Speaking?”

In his own words, here are the insights he captured along his journey.

 

Tip #1: Compete to make a friend of your public speaking fear

“I guess it all begins with the reasons why we all joined Toastmasters.  I joined Toastmasters because I realized that wherever I’m going in my career, I will need to speak in public.  Fear or no fear, I recognized that without training I most likely would do it badly.  During the biggest moments in my life, I am going to have people in front of me – my bosses or my peers.  Or, it could be my wedding.  Those are the times where you really don’t want to stuff it up.”

“After twelve months in Toastmasters, I wanted to take it to the next level.  I realized that the more that you confront the fears of public speaking in this nurturing environment, the more fear is no longer a stranger.  That feeling I get in my chest… he’s a friend now.  If you know how to harness that energy, then it’s going to do some pretty cool things to you.  That’s why I decided to complete.”

“I competed for a couple years and then work changed and I dropped Toastmasters.  I came back after a three year break to get my skills going again.  There’s nothing better than jumping into the deep end and just doing it.  I entered the club competition with my speech entitled “The Lights That Blink” and rode that all the way up to and including the win in the semi-finals.  On the surface, that speech is about setting the time on the VCR.  But, it is really about family and what happens when technology comes into a family unit.”

 

Tip #2: Develop your speech around a ‘seed idea’

‘I started developing the speech I gave in the Finals about three weeks before I left to come to Florida.  In speech writing, I use what’s called a ‘seed idea.’ It’s that little kernel of a speech, often one sentence that sort of embodies the whole damn thing.’  For that speech, it was ‘his blood is your blood.’  His blood is your blood.  If your father says words to you like that, you don’t really forget it. It’s pretty empowering.”

Before I developed “A Story of Two Kneebones”, I tried another speech out in my club and it just bombed.  It bombed, it bombed, it bombed.  I call it ‘airing.’  I was doing the speech for me and not ultimately for the audience.  If you want to do that, go stand in front of a mirror, because that’s who you’ll be pleasing.  .I then just scrapped it, and worked until I got the feeling that what I had was a heck of a lot better.  I practiced the new [Final round] speech twice – once at my club and once at another club.”

“When I arrived in Orlando, I came across one of my first troubles with the competition, because I don’t actually write my speeches down.  People were rifling through notes for their speeches and I just said ‘Wow!  You write them down?’  When they found out I didn’t write [my speeches] down they’d look at me and go, ‘Wow! You don’t write them down?’”  I go for walks.  I walk and I think.  I just mutter to myself.  I’m sure I’m known as the mad man of Melbourne.”

 

Tip #3:  Don’t practice the emotion out of your speech

“I hear of people giving speeches 20 and 30 and 40 times.  For me it’s kind of like the difference between listening to ‘Love Bites’ by Def Leppard versus ‘Hound Dog’ by Elvis Presley.  ‘Love Bites’ took six months to record.  But does it make it a better song?  No.”

“For me, a speech is going to be great or not.  I’ve always approached speaking akin to something similar to like a jazz performance where there’s a beat, but I get out there and throw a couple things in that I might not have rehearsed because I feel it at the time and go with it.”

“You’re pretty much going to know after the first couple times if a speech sucks, especially if people know that you are open to honest feedback.  At the other extreme, I find that if I’m delivering a speech 10 or 15 times then I’ll be bored with it.  It might be too polished and therefore sanitized and boring.  That’s just me.  Other people get better with practicing that way, but not me.”

 

Tip #4: Prepare for competitive speaking like a sporting event

“I treated the competition like any sporting event.  There was a lot of preparation that had very little to do with the speech itself.  For starters, I arrived a week early [from Australia] because I knew my body was going to get beaten around.  I’m went from 9 degrees [48 Fahrenheit] drizzling weather to 30 degrees [86 Fahrenheit] humidity.  I got sick the first two days.  When I recovered I then went down to the gym – just moving the body.”

“Your body’s got to work at all if it’s going to deliver this thing.  Don’t gorge on junk food, although I did try to taste the great American hamburger.  Good burger.  Once the physical was done, then I turned to the mental.  Don’t build yourself up to fail.  What I mean that is don’t go there with the expectation that you have to get a trophy in order to get a win.  I’m going to get some Florida sun.  That’s a win right there. I’m going to go to boot camp on how to actually prepare for a speech.  That is another win.”

“I also set myself a schedule.  Up until the Division contest, I practiced my speech three times per day.  That was it.  Stop.  Then, for the semi-final and the final, I rehearsed on my own seven times in the morning, seven times in the afternoon and then I’d rest.

 

Try it out!

The main thing that Andrew stressed during our discussion was the friendships that he developed throughout the competition.  He got support and constructive advice at every stage from other Toastmasters, former champions, and even from his fellow competitors.

He asked me to leave you with his one regret:

“They didn’t give me an opportunity to thank the other semi-finalists.  I really feel badly about that.  Every single one of the semi-finalists and finalists were amazing.  I really feel sorry for the judges.”

2007 Toastmasters World Champion of Public Speaking Vikas Ghingran Shares His Insights

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I interviewed Vikas Jhingran on January 25, 2013 and asked him just one question: “What are your best pieces of advice on how to win the Toastmasters’ World Championship of Public Speaking?”

Check out Vikas’s insights on leadership at http://www.vikasjhingran.com/blogs/.  In addition, stay tuned for the 2013 release of his first book: “Emote: Using Emotions to Make Your Message Memorable.”

 

Tip #1:  Planning trumps execution

“Anytime I give out advice on how to win the world championship, one of the first things I say is that in most cases the championship is won long before the actual event. Sometimes it’s difficult to understand that.”

“My background is in engineering and project management and we do these huge projects in the oil and gas sector. If you ever go to a project management training course, the first thing you will learn is that the best place to influence the outcome of a project is right at the beginning. When you carefully plan your path upfront, the value that you get out at the end is far better than if you rely on brute-force execution.”

“How that translates to speaking is that you have to spend a lot of time figuring out what you’re going to talk about.  Once you’re in the execution phase, you can only influence the end result so much.  In other words, you have to start with something that can win. If you start with something that doesn’t have that kind of potential, you might do a fantastic job in delivering that speech, but it’s not going to win the competition.”

“Topic selection is deeply introspective. You really have to sit down and figure out something that moves you… that matters to you. It’s not, ‘Hey, this topic will win, so let me speak on it.’ It’s more about where you really come from. What is something that stirs your strongest emotions?  Until you are in that place, you cannot connect with your audience.  With that level of depth, you can make a lot of mistakes in delivery and still win.  If a judge is crying at the end of your speech, then do you really think he’s going to mark you down for mispronouncing a word?”

“Speeches are about the transfer of emotions. If you’re not able to manage that, then the audience is not going to have a very good experience. The only time I think you’ve gone too far is when you are not in control of the emotions that you are feeling.

 

Tip #2: Deliver a moving message to the best of your ability

“I think it is a dangerous to go into the contest with the objective of winning because that is not in your hands. That just creates unnecessary pressure.  You don’t control that. What you do control is having a message that will move people in a very dramatic way and delivering it to the best of your ability.”

“I come from a very analytical background. I spent many years trying to figure out how do well on exams.  Though it took a long time, I ultimately figured out that the best approach is to not worry about the grade.  You are not there to get the ‘A.’ You are there to solve every problem that you can solve. If you prepared to the best of your ability and there are 15 problems out 50 that you have no clue how to answer, then you should be absolutely fine with that.  If you get nervous along the way, then you will do even worse.  It is the same with speaking… how you manage your mindset is critically important to the overall outcome.”

 

Tip #3: Practice idea delivery not word delivery

“Though I do write my speeches out, I can never recite a speech word for word.  I just don’t have that kind of memory.  I’ve delivered my world championship speech probably a hundred times now and I still cannot give it word for word. I just have to be there in the moment and let the emotions roll. The words are close, but they’re never exactly the same.”

“The words really are not that important. The words are a tool to convey emotion.  When you start thinking about words, you are hampering the flow of emotions; you are thinking about what comes next.  That prevents you from being present in the moment which is the point of speaking.”

 

Tip 4: The rule is that there are no rules

“People give all kinds of advice like the ‘10 things you have to do if you want to win the world championship.’ I really stay away from that. I think there is nothing that you have to do to win a speech contest. Just be original. Figure out what works for you and then run with that.”

“If you are uncomfortable doing something onstage, the audience will know it instantly and that takes away from the connection you are building.”

 

Try it out!

Like his fellow world champions, Vikas encourages competition as means of improving your speaking skill in a way that regular Toastmasters speeches do not.  Again, in his words:

“I found that competing is a very good way of improving your speaking skills because it’s one of the few times in Toastmasters that you get a chance to work on one speech for a long period of time. If you do that, it shows you how good you really can be.  Even if you don’t win, just experiencing that preparation process makes a huge difference in your development as a speaker.”