This interview with George Stalk of The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) shows how BCG began working with a theatre-based training organization to improve the quality of its consultants’ presentations at conferences and benefited in more ways than they expected. George Stalk is the author of Hardball: Are You Playing to Play or Playing to Win (with Rob Lachenauer and John Butman, Harvard Business School Press, 2004), Competing Against Time: How Time-Based Competition is Reshaping Global Markets (with Thomas Hout, Free Press, 1990, 2003), and several Harvard Business Review articles. Throughout his career, Stalk has been known for being innovative and being willing to take chances. The Actors Institute and TAI Resources of New York has been offering classes for actors, businesspeople, and students for 27 years.

Buswick: George, were you involved in the process by which BCG first started to work with The Actors Institute (TAI) ten years ago?

Stalk: I was the first person through. Paul Basile, who was the head of corporate communications, had us on a program of improving our conferences and making them more effective with the audience. He brought into question a large number of assumptions we had about what a good conference was, ranging from things that one might regard as trivial like food, location, seats, ambiance in the room, length of presentations, audience behavior, and then took the BCG audience behavior all the way to how speakers communicated with the audience, how effective they were. Paul convinced me that some of the simplest things he was onto would make a huge difference to the conference programs. He told me he also thought The Actors Institute would make a big difference if we could get our presenters to work with them and wanted me to go through their process. This wasn’t because he thought I needed a great deal of improvement, although as we’ll get into this you’ll see there was a great deal of improvement possible, but because he felt that if somebody like myself who was giving 70 speeches a year and getting great reviews went to The Actor’s Institute, it would be harder for other people to say, ‘‘It’s not for me.’’ So I said, ‘‘That’s a pretty good reason. I’ll give it a try.’’

Buswick: Do you know why he chose The Actors Institute? There are so many groups out there with a theatrical base doing things that at least on the surface look similar.

Stalk: He claimed that they were the most suited for a corporate setting. I tried to do a brief background check, and it’s difficult to evaluate from the outside in corporate settings. They did have a great client list, people like CitiGroup, or CitiCorp, whatever they were called back then, for example. Pfizer was there. Johnson & Johnson. At the time, I didn’t realize what the time commitment was. So I said, ‘‘What the heck. I’ll give it a try.’’

Buswick: Did you have any specific expectations before you started?

Stalk: Well, I figured it was going to be about how to address the projector, moving around in front of the audience, vocal intonations, a lot of technical and mechanical things about speaking. I would say I didn’t have low expectations. I didn’t have high expectations. I just was doing it to get Basile off my back. I knew other parts of Basile’s program were working. I could see the differences in the ratings and reactions, and I figured this might make a difference as well.

Buswick: And what did they do?

Stalk: Well, the first thing they did is ask for either six or eight sessions at two hours a session. My assistant gave me this message, and I said, ‘‘Call them back. Tell them I want this scheduled over a long weekend. I’ll come down to New York and get it over with. I don’t have a lot of time to play around here.’’ They called back and said, ‘‘You don’t understand. This is two hours at most in one day.’’ And so, I said, ‘‘Okay. There’s really no good time to do this.’’ So to make it work, I took my wife, daughter, or one of my other kids with me every now and then for a long weekend in New York. After the very first session I realized that two hours is probably too long for the first session because it was so emotionally draining, physically draining.

Buswick: Why? What did they do?

Stalk: It’s just very stressful. It wasn’t about addressing the projector. It was about treating the audience as a customer and as a guest and as somebody that I as a speaker wanted to have a relationship with. So there were exercises that tested one’s self-confidence and self-awareness. For me it was real interesting because I had been giving speeches on time-based competition for a couple of years by then and got it down to a great patter and could almost have background thoughts in my mind while I was giving it. But after the second session at TAI, it became clear to me that at best I was the equivalent of a VCR player. Might as well just push the button and sit back. There could be an audience there of one person or ten thousand. As far as the delivery went, I didn’t care. And what I became convinced of after the second meeting was, yeah, those may be good speeches that I was doing, and yeah, they may be better than everybody because the ratings reflected them being the first or second best speeches that people were hearing at the conferences, either BCG or non-BCG, but there was a huge opportunity being missed by not being able to connect with the audience at an emotional, personal level.

Buswick: I don’t really see why it was so draining. Can you give an example of the types of exercises?

Buswick: These are sessions just with you. You’re the only one involved here.

Buswick: Why did they have so many sessions?

Buswick: What other types of things do we have?

Stalk: We’ve got relationship management and body language, and large account sales. This is good stuff, but I saw the data for a long time and TAI’s training was always the highest rated. The flipside is it’s always the most expensive per impression, too. We’re talking thousands of dollars per impression, not hundreds of dollars. But also, I don’t recall ever seeing a negative review by a BCG officer who went. And one of the things that we were careful of was making sure that the first group had a high probability of feeling it was a worthwhile effort. So Carl Stern, the CEO at the time, and I were very careful about picking the people to go the first time.

Buswick: Do you see what they do as more skills training, or is it a form of developmental coaching?

Stalk: I think it’s developmental coaching.

Buswick: But from what you said so far, it’s not clear why it’s developmental more than skills because if you’re really improving your ability to give a speech, that could at least be considered a skill.

Stalk: I call it developmental because it widens people’s repertoire. One might say, ‘‘It’s actor’s training for presentations,’’ but a lot of us actually got more out of it for dealing in client situations, how to work a meeting, how to give a presentation to a Board. Most people don’t regard that as the equivalent of a conference speech, it actually has higher stakes than a conference speech. To be able to develop an empathy with the audience to me is more than a skill. Skills are addressing the projector, body language, the voice projection. Those are actually all relevant, and indeed at times they go to the top of the list of what good sessions are about. I used to do the introductions to the subsequent group sessions that we did, and I just told people it’s going to change the way they interact with their clients, and change the way they interact with large group meetings. And it’s even going to affect their personal rapport.

Buswick: I heard somebody say that it gets at your inner creativity, really getting you to express what’s best and most creative about you. Does that fit?

Stalk: Well, I think it does because what people try to do in making the connection to the audience is to say the audience needs to hear from the speaker those things that the speaker believes are the most important messages, and transitions are all built around making sure the messages don’t get lost in the shift from one topic to another. And so the creativity aspect says, ‘‘Well, what am I saying here that’s really so damn important? And how do I make sure that when I’m talking to this group about it, they really know when it’s important and don’t get lost?’’ It’s very easy for me to get lost in my own knowledge and not know how the audience needs to be exposed to the topic. I have to keep in mind the fact that they probably can’t carry more than two or three ideas out of the meeting, just like I probably can’t if I sit in a meeting about genomics. Since I’m not an expert on genomics, I’ll be lucky to get three things out of it. I think the creativity is around managing the message. Now when people walk out of the room, are they likely to discover the new way to compete because of TAI? I don’t think so. That’s not what they’re asked to do. But I think they’re likely to have a stronger understanding of the dynamics of any meeting or conference they go into.

Buswick: In your recent writings about your hardball manifesto, you discuss the need for organizations and individual leaders to maintain laser-like focus on the heart of the matter and flexibility in adapting to ever-changing business landscapes. Does this type of coaching help leaders enhance those capabilities?

Stalk: Well, I would say, yes, but not in the absence of other things. I think if a leader has an agenda, it generally reflects the heart of the matter, issues that a corporation needs to deal with for its long-term success and viability and health. Then the mission becomes convincing the organization to have the same level of commitment to the heart of the matter that their leader does. So this is about the communications that create that kind of commitment. And I remember talking to Chuck Miller, who was the CEO of Avery-Dennison, makes labels and stuff, a very successful company, a company that actually exploited time in its strategy quite well. He and I did a speech together in New York on time-based competition, and we were chatting over lunch. In response to a question about his strongest lessons from becoming a time-based competitor he said, ‘‘Just when I got sick of talking about time, I found I was only halfway through.’’ The tail that’s associated with communication is a very long tail; it’s not sitting you down and telling you the same thing seven times. If I want you to change the way you’re doing things, I’m going to have to tell you probably six or seven times, six or seven different ways, and I’m going to have to interpret his six or seven different responses to get you to change. And I think that’s where the two connect. I’m sure they sometimes bring in guys in that just can’t connect. One of our key speakers has never gone. His review of this whole thing was, ‘‘George, you go. You come back and tell me the few things that count. I can take it from there. Thank you very much.’’ I sat in a speech by him last week, and he hasn’t changed in ten years. Compared to most speakers, he does a good job. But he misses this huge opportunity.

Buswick: Okay, the company goes alternatively by The Actors Institute or by TAI. When you’re working with them, do you sense the theatrical roots in what they’re doing? They do acting training as well.

Stalk: Well, as you recall, early on I said they had an understanding of the needs of corporations. That was my assumption based on their client list. My interest in them wasn’t as a drama setting. It was people that could help a corporation like BCG deal with an issue they want to deal with. The fact that they have theatrical roots, I frankly don’t even know what the theatrical – I know their theatrical backgrounds as individuals. I don’t know to what extent the mix of business is non-corporate. I didn’t worry about it for very long because they quickly started to satisfy our particular needs. They’ve learned how to both be honest with and work with your audience through their skills with live theatre. My intuition says I should be much more comfortable knowing they’re continuing to get their skills reinforced by doing real professional acting development, not simply corporate development. If they became 100% corporate, I’d worry about them a bit. I recall Allen Schoer’s introductory speech. He’s TAI’s CEO. He talked about Shakespearean acting being much more what they were trying to develop. I don’t know if I have this right. In Shakespearian days, the audience didn’t pay close attention to the actors. They ate and talked on their cell phones, and they threw food at the actors if they were unhappy. The actors performed on a stage that was surrounded by the audience on all sides. They had minimal props, and it was all about getting the attention, keeping the attention of the audience. And that’s where this skill of connecting with the audience became so critical, because if you didn’t they talked to their neighbors and when they finally paid attention, they threw their tomatoes at you. I think acting itself has evolved to the point where we have guys who perform on a TV screen and have no relationship with me sitting there. I could be sitting in my underwear. It’s the same performance. So I think having acting roots counts.

Buswick: Is there any particular type or level of business person who’d benefit most from this type of developmental coaching?

Stalk: I think if senior people have the time, they could benefit because what we’re talking about is how much power by the hour can people provide and communicate. Given that senior people tend to be the most expensive, not in terms of dollars but in terms of time available to work with their colleagues and subordinates, they need to have the maximum impact in the time they have available. And this is good for them. So, I don’t think we should be sending 20-year-old new hires to this thing. Although having said that, it’s probably easier to change the behavioral patterns of a 28- or a 32-year-old than it is a 42-year-old or a 52-year-old.

Buswick: You mentioned before we began the interview that one of BCG’s other most prolific speakers, Philip Evans, benefited from this type of coaching. Can you say how he changed?

Stalk: It’s the relationship. I felt that he was connecting with me in the audience. Before, he was a great thing to watch, but he could have been a hologram for all I knew. Given the nature of the things I managed at that time, I saw him many, many times. So I’d say, ‘‘Here it comes. He’s gonna do that. And they’re going to giggle on this one.’’ But it was my job to sit there and look interested and enthused. Afterwards, it was much different. I mean, he knew how to bring the audience in, and he was slower. He was more careful of his choice and his management of transitions. It was a much more relaxing, engaging experience.

Buswick: Is there any anecdote about your sessions at TAI that would make a good conclusion?

Stalk: I remember the end of the first conference we worked on. I was one of the speakers. I can still picture us reading our survey scores and looking like schoolkids who had just gotten their best grades ever. We were smirking, laughing, and waving our papers in the air. When I saw Allen Schoer smiling at us from across the room, I crooked my finger at him, telling him to come over. I don’t know what he expected me to say, but my first words were, ‘‘You never told us the whole truth!’’ All done very dramatically while trying to keep a straight face. ‘‘Oh really?’’ he replied. I went on. ‘‘You said this would help us with conferences, but you didn’t tell us it would be the best professional development training we’ve ever had.’’