How to Wing a Winning Presentation
+ Hospitality News and Jingle Bell Kindness #3, 2024
It was day two of the Rezidor Hotel Group Annual Business Conference in March 2016. Corporate leaders, hotel managers, and property owners were gathered in Copenhagen.
Since we’d been impacted by a couple of terrorist attacks a few months prior, I had been given a slot on the list of main-stage presentations.
On day two of the conference, March 22, terrorists struck again. This time in Brussels, Belgium, where suicide bombers detonated at the airport and a metro station. Our company headquarters was a five-minute drive from the airport. We had four hotels in the city and several more in Belgium.
It was a rarity, but our corporate crisis team was all in the same city simultaneously. We set up a crisis centre in the venue hosting the business conference. The two first decisions that were made were 1) the conference would continue and 2) the regional security director for Belgium would return to Brussels to support corporate staff and hotels.
Long story short, I missed the rehearsals for my presentation on day three of the conference. I was part of a three-person slot. The two others, including my boss, had snazzy cue cards with the conference logo and scripted presentations loaded into a prompter.
I had been given a stack of snazzy cue cards, but they were still blank. The script I’d prepared in the weeks leading up to the conference was no longer valid. We didn’t load it into the prompter.
In between meetings with the crisis operations team, the corporate communications team, and catch-up calls with the regional security director in Brussels, I scribbled some notes on a few sheets of paper I swiped from the printer in the crisis centre.
On stage, we were seated on uncomfortable stools lit by glaring spotlights. I was to be the third of the three presentations in our slot. Of the three of us, I was easy to spot. My two clean-shaven colleagues had newly dry-cleaned designer suits, silky ties and smooth shirts. I hadn’t trimmed my beard and was wearing my off-the-Macy’s rack suit and an unironed shirt that looked like I’d slept in. Because I had.
Both of my colleagues delivered their presentations professionally. Rehearsals had paid off. It was like watching a well-structured, seamlessly edited TED-talk.
When my turn came, I shuffled toward the spotlight from the now-dark area of the stage. I apologised for not having anything on my snazzy cue cards or the prompter. I pulled the large, folded papers from my coat pocket and looked at the poorly structured scribble.
For a moment, I thought I was doomed.
A better thought replaced the one of pending embarassment.
Fuck it, just wing it.
None of my presentations have ever generated audience emotion or feedback to the same degree. There were tears. There was laughter. There was even applause at the end. Better yet, there was no snoring!
I’ve seen many people wing their presentations.
Almost everyone who has bombed badly.
So, how did I manage to wing such a winning presentation when “wingers” usually fail?
There’s no secret.
In all honesty, I didn’t wing it.
I had prepared the presentation for weeks before the conference.
Yes, the situation had changed because of the Brussels attack. The script I had written, rewritten and edited time and again was suddenly useless.
But all the thought that I had put into it wasn’t wasted.
It’s like Eisenhower said:
Plans are nothing. Planning is everything.
Life is never going to follow a script you write, but the work you put in will allow you to adapt your script to the life you live.
Hospitality News
Can hotels prepare for security incidents like the shooting of the UHC CEO?
The gun was still smoking after the CEO of United HealthCare was shot outside a Manhattan hotel. The talking heads were full of advice about training staff on situational awareness and how hotels can avoid liability. What didn’t they mention? Nothing I read suggested hotels should liaise with event organizers to do a risk assessment and collaborate on security preparedness. My motto is “communicate, collaborate, contribute”.
Taylor Swift - Hospitality Influencer
Bars and restaurants have long focused on sports fans; maybe it’s time to focus more on the Swiftie generation. If the Vancouver Canucks hockey team makes the playoffs, never a given, it adds a few million to bar and restaurant revenue. Taylor Swift brought eight times that amount to bars and restaurants during her three-day stop in Vancouver. That solved “champagne problems” and was quite an “epiphany” for some “fearless” restaurant owners looking at their results so far this year and wondering how they were going to “shake it off.”
Jingle Bell Kindness #3 - 2024
The Kindness Games were started by Lee Oughton and Tim Wenzel. It challenges you to give shoutouts of kindness and gratitude to people who have inspired you or played an important role in your life.
Every Always Care Community Newsletter in December will include a Jingle Bell Kindness shoutout to people who are important to me.
Don’t forget your shopping!
Spin the Bottle Service - Hospitality in the Age of AI is on sale for only US$ 9.99 until January 15, 2025! Click the pic to order on Amazon.
Thanks for being part of the Always Care Community.
I’m Paul. I was born, raised, and currently live in Canada. After high school, I embarked on a gap year in Europe. It lasted four decades. I went to university in Norway and started my hotel career in the basement of a five-star hotel in Oslo. The manager who hired me told me I was too old, too educated, and had too many opinions to be a security guard. He also told me that the only other person who applied for the job didn’t want it.
Thirty years later, I left that same company. It had grown from a small regional hotel chain in Scandinavia to become a large, global, multi-brand company. I moved from Norway to Denmark to Belgium. The company awarded me their highest individual honour for leadership, and security professional peers selected me as the world’s most influential corporate security executive.
I’m a hospitality professional. I’m a security professional. If you ask, I will tell you that security was my job, and hospitality was my business.
Today, I’m an educator and a consultant passionate about hotels, hospitality, and keeping people safe during their travels.
In addition to the Always Care Community, I also write for Risk Resiliency’s Keep Travel Safe. If safe, secure hospitality, hotels, and travel are important to you, please follow us there!
Written with the clarity of hindsight, the accuracy of a faded memory, and countless creative liberties, this is a newsletter of how life has made me an emigrant, an immigrant, and gifted me experiences I never dreamed possible.
Thanks for reading. Your support is my motivation and I’m genuinely grateful that you’re here. Please share, subscribe, and connect with me.
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This is the last newsletter for 2024. See you all in 2025!
What a sweet shout-out to your daughter! I also liked your story of how winging it wasn't really winging it. Have a lovely holiday and see you here in 2025!