Sir John Sawers has given a significant speech at King’s College London on the Limits of Security. Here is the ‘official’ website version. And here is my piece for Daily Telegraph Comment mentioning it with (as you can see) my disclaimer mentioning that I worked with Sir John on his speech, his first after […]
My latest Ukraine/Russia piece for Telegraph Comment today must have been good – it has smoked out an unusually nasty set of Russian trolls. Here it is: Negotiation is often presented as a choice between carrot and stick: what can one side do to affect the positive or negative incentives […]
Back from watching the world from the fascinating vantage-point of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in The Hague. Imagine our surprise when we discovered that one of our Negotiation Skills specialist imaginary roleplays had been almost exactly what happened to OPCW inspectors at a tense suspected CW site in […]
+++ OMG! Stop the presses! +++ Michelle Obama did not wear a headscarf in Saudi Arabia! But wait? What does this mean? Some Saudis have Tweeted criticism, others praise. Elsewhere views similarly differ. Christine Odone in the Telegraph (paywalled these days): This gesture is being widely praised for sending a “bold […]
BBC integrity? How about this: my latest piece for DIPLOMAT on my encounters with the media down the ages: In Moscow in late 1993 I was in the Embassy watching the live BBC TV coverage of the attempted Red/Brown coup against President Yeltsin. We could hear sporadic gunfire. At the […]
I’ve been scrutinising public speaking disasters in preparing for a forthcoming online course that I am running for the UN on Drafting Talking-Points and Speechwriting. I found this handy list of horrors compiled a while back by Scott Berkun, with help from his readers. This one is good: Moscow, 1997. […]
A question about top-end public speaking technique. Say you’re President of France. You are visiting Bosnia a few months after the US President was there. He made a winning, moving keynote speech. You want to do the same. Or, ideally, do much better. How to set about this task? You […]
Very sad news this morning. Jozef Oleksy, one of Poland’s smartest politicians, has died. Oleksy (see a Wikipedia summary here) was one of those smart former communists (he was for a while a secret informer for Poland’s communist military intelligence) who smoothly made the transition to European social democracy after […]
That row in Poland about my speechwriting support for former foreign Minister Radek Sikorski rumbles on inconclusively. See eg here (where they impertinently add a year to my age) and here. Excellent that Hungarians are following this saga with keen interest. And Czech that! Here are some extended thoughts from me about […]
At last. My new ebook Speechwriting for Leaders is out. Hurrah. General blurb and a link for international readers here. UK folk can (and must) buy it through Amazon here. Meanwhile over in Poland – as if by magic – a vivid row has erupted over the fact that I […]
