If you've ever sat through a tedious, rambling speech and wished you could wave a magic wand and turn the speaker into a charismatic, engaging one, Martin Shovel's article will strike a chord. 
 

In extreme cases – I'm thinking of Gerald Ratner's infamous 'total crap' speech – it has been known for a chief executive to open his mouth and bring his company crashing to its knees. Fortunately, catastrophes on this scale are rare. Far more common, however, is the plethora of boring presentations and tedious speeches that drain an organisation of its lifeblood – good communication.

For instance, I recently attended a high profile product launch at a swanky London venue. As the managing director rose to his feet to say a few words before introducing a well-known guest speaker, I noticed that the people in the audience who worked for him visibly winced. He got off to a bad start by telling us all the things he wasn't going to do in his speech... and then going on to do each and every one of them. Predictably, this included speaking – or 'going on' as one of his team later described it – for much longer than he intended. What he ended up saying was shapeless, meandering and dull because he hadn't given much thought to the purpose of his presentation or the needs of his audience, let alone to his choice of words.

The performance of the guest speaker – a media celebrity and wordsmith – couldn't have been more different. He talked to us, not at us, and skillfully used words to paint pictures and tell stories that gripped our imagination, and really helped us 'see' with our mind's eye what he meant.

Trays of canapés and bubbly appeared and I found myself talking with some marketing department people about the two speeches we'd just listened to. They were wondering whether the magic of the guest speaker's presentation could be explained and, if so, whether someone like their MD could learn to become a more charismatic speaker, given the right kind of help.

My answer to both questions has to be yes. For one thing, studies of effective leaders and charismatic communicators show that they use more picture words and imagery in their language than other people – they are visual thinkers. Good speakers don't just tell you what to think or feel; instead, they use words to paint pictures in your mind's eye that will make you think or feel it for yourself.

If Churchill had talked abstractly about the misery of the post-war division of Europe, would it have been as memorable and palpable as his picture of an iron curtain descending across the continent? Or would Denis Healey's amusing and demeaning description of Sir Geoffrey Howe still echo in our ears if he'd relied on abstract adjectives like 'ineffectual', 'weak' and 'impotent'? By comparing an attack by Sir Geoffrey to "being savaged by a dead sheep", Healey made us witness and feel just what such an experience would be like.

Picture words work their magic on many different levels. As we've seen, they often work metaphorically because they show us what something is like. Whether it's the image of Margaret Thatcher as an 'iron' lady, or Muhammad Ali's image of his style of boxing as "floating like a butterfly and stinging like a bee", as the image appears in our head we can't help but respond to it as if it were something actually happening to us – as if we were there.

Mental images conjured up by words also tell stories because they invite us to ponder what happened before, and what will come after, as well as wondering why the whole thing happened in the first place. And stories make information more digestible and more memorable because they weave apparently unrelated elements into a meaningful pattern.

Let's return to our MD's lacklustre performance, and to his chances of being able to develop a more charismatic speaking style. The fact that we can analyse and understand the process of a charismatic communicator is very good news for him because it means that the skills of a good speaker can be distilled into a set of techniques that can be explained, learned and practised.