To Improv or Not to To Improv
The Famous and Infamous Art of Public Speaking
It’s been a tough week for one leader who put 1000 foots or more in his mouth. He has been slammed and trolled. For a moment, let’s step away and imagine that he did have a fair intent in asking everyone to put in unyielding hard work, as the current times need it. And let’s just believe that if it were not for his urge to sound witty and improvise, all would have been well.
He isn’t the only leader who may have tried to improv and made a mess. And on the other hand, there are many leaders who used their improv skills to create great inspirational moments.
This week’s theme of #1MinuteStories is just this…on leaders who struggled on that big momentary question ‘To improv or not to improv’ and then made it memorable in their own way.
On the 23rd April, 1991, Gerald Ratner, CEO of the Ratners group, was invited to give a speech at the Royal Albert Hall at London to a 6000 strong prestigious audience of Institute of Directors and members from British Royalty. It was a speech to celebrate the success of the entrepreneur who made it big. Gerald Ratner, at that point, owned the largest jewellery group on the planet.
Just that, in 3 minutes of the speech he delivered, he destroyed his brand and business. And was on the road to become a pauper in 24 hours.
Yes, just that one speech.
Gerald Ratner was born in London in 1949 and was expelled from school at 13 and joined his family business of running 6 jewellery shops at 15. It was a tough time for jewellers as most consumers were spending on clothes - shopping malls were busy, jewellers were not. But young Gerald was aggressive salesman who believed ‘the people who shouted the loudest and appeared to give the best offers sold the most’. He steered his family business, making smart moves and became a millionaire at 35.
His shops shocked the former staid jewellery industry by displaying fluorescent orange posters, advertising cut-price bargains, and offering low price ranges. The Ratners Group consisted of Ratners, H. Samuel, Ernest Jones, Leslie Davis, Watches of Switzerland, including brands like Kay Jewellers. By 40, he owned 1500 stores in UK, 1000 in the US. He was the CEO of largest jewellery group on the planet.
Ratner started his speech nervously. He was a self made man, a school dropout who made it big on his own and now stood before royalty. He did not feel that he was a part of this high powered audience. He wanted to show his defiance. Three minutes after he started, he finds his own theme - mocking his own brand.
‘We got this imitation book that you lay on your coffee table..the pages don’t actually open..but there are beautiful corners with imitation antique dust..I know you might say that it is not in the best possible taste..but we sold a quarter million of them last year…’
The audience loved it. They were laughing and clapping. It made Ratner braver.
‘We also do cut-glass sherry decanters complete with six glasses on a silver-plated tray that your butler can serve you drinks on, all for £4.95. People say, "How can you sell this for such a low price?", I say, "because it's total crap.’
Making fun of his consumers and calling his own products ‘total crap’! He was on a unstoppable high even as he saw members in the audience egging him to tell more with their laughter. He was also silently killing his own business empire. There were newspaper reporters in the room who smelt a story. Ratner did not realise at that time that the speech that had gone very well with the audience in the hall, would be received very cold when it hit the newspapers the next morning. UK was in the middle of a recession at that time and ordinary people did not like the multi-millionaire standing in front of his fellow 1 percenters and mocking his own customers for their crappy taste.
Who would buy an engagement ring from a company whose own boss mocked his products?
Sales crashed the very next day. Stocks went downwards. By Christmas, Ratner was sacked from his own company. They changed the company name because Ratners had become a toxic brand.
To this day ‘Doing a Ratner’ means committing a humiliating gaffe.
But there is one truth about Gerald Ratner’s speech that I must tell you before ending this story. His speech was not fully extempore. Infact, Ratner prepared his speech meticulously. He even got his aides to review it. He had used the ‘total crap’ joke before and it seemed normal to them. Only his wife asked him to be careful.
Here’s the thing - most people thought that he would sound self deprecating. And it would sound awesome, just as it did in their small informal lunch parties when Gerald would go off. They were horribly wrong. What sounded like a harmless self deprecating humour by a CEO mocking his own products to the amusement of a live audience, sounded terrible in the newspapers.
In truth, Gerald wasn’t laughing at his customers. Infact, he was trying to identify with them. He was trying to establish a point that all you big business leaders never gave me a chance, but look at where I am. He was keen to prove that he gave customers what they wanted. He wanted to say ‘You laughed at us - but look, my customers are happy - so who’s laughing now..’
Gerald failed, not because of lack of preparation. He failed because of his utter lack of judgement. The search for a good joke destroyed his business and destroyed Ratner.
The big lesson? If everyone is watching, choose your words with care - don’t just wing it.
But not all improv speeches went that way.
It seemed that Rev Martin Luther King Jr was always preparing for giving that great speech on the steps of Lincoln memorial. At the age of 5 he was learning the bible passages by heart. Martin’s father was a preacher and the boy took to the art of speech making early.
Martin worked very hard on his speech preparations. He would research, quote from the works of Plato & Gandhi extensively - draft, redraft, memorise and finally deliver with passion. He woke up at half past 5, made coffee, shaved off his stubborn bristles into a neat moustache, worked on his doctorate for 3 hours and put enormous efforts on his Sunday sermons for which he began working from Tuesdays itself. He wrote his speech neatly on yellow lined paper, memorised, and then leave the papers at the pulpit and spoke from memory.
He spent 15 hours crafting every sermon. He was always prepared. He never liked to impovise on the go
But on that day of Aug 28th 1963, of what would be his greatest speech and the one that is counted amongst the 20th century’s greatest - Rev Martin Luther King did the unthinkable. To the stunning disbelief of his speech writers and his aides, he chose to improv on the moment.
A quarter million marched to Washington DC and were waiting to hear him. He would be live on every TV network. This speech demanded intense preparation. Dr King and his aides prepared a very tight script for the 7 minutes he was allocated.
Standing in front of the statue of Abraham Lincoln, King began his speech. It was a very serious script. Parts of it read like poetry and most parts were confusing legalese and uninspiring. Halfway into the speech, there were murmurs of discontent in the crowd. King was not having any impact. This was not what the people had come to hear from him. Suddenly towards the end, there came a biblical flourish from him - ‘We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty street’.
The first cheers came up.
King looked down at the next line on his script. It was very limp. He couldn’t get himself to say those words. And that is when he decided to step away and improvise. ‘Go back to Mississippi, Go back to Alabama…’ , his voice thundered. Behind him, his friends and aides knew he stepped away from his speech and this was the moment of highest danger. The pivotal moment.
He then he heard voice of the opera singer Mahalia Jackson ‘Tell them about the dream..Martin’ It was a reference to a dream that King was talking in the churches. A reference to the dream of equality and harmony between whites and blacks. Of a dream when one day he would see little black children play with little white kids.
And it was then, as he was looking into the television cameras and a million people looking at him for inspiration, Martin Luther King ditched his prepared script and went on to deliver the greatest ever speeches in history . ‘I have a dream..’
One great leader who improvised in the moment and became an inspirational icon forever. Another one who destroyed his career in a minute.
This is where you can see the Gerald Ratner speech and here is Martin Luther King’s greatest speech. And I was inspired to write this piece after listening to the great podcast Cautionary Tales by Tim Harford.