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Scott Eblin
Through his work as an executive coach, leadership strategist, speaker and author, Scott Eblin has become known as a thought leader in identifying the behaviors that executives need to pick up and let go as they transition into new and larger roles. President of the leadership development and strategy firm The Eblin Group Inc., Scott is a former Fortune 500 executive, with a coaching client list that runs the gamut from Astra Zeneca to Walt Disney. He is the author of The Next Level: What Insiders Know About Executive Success which Business Book Review calls a “fascinating read” that “is full of potentially career-saving advice.” Scott is a graduate of Davidson College and holds a masters degree in public administration from Harvard University. He blogs regularly on leadership “news you can use” at the Next Level Blog.
By now, pretty much everyone has heard of the elevator speech. You know the drill, describe what you’re working on, why it matters and what the other person can do to help in 60 seconds or less. I’ve read lately that the Tweet is the new elevator speech. Can you describe what you’re working and why it’s important in 140 characters or less? It’s all about the idea behind the famous line from T.S. Eliot, “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.” It takes time and effort to boil down the essence of what you’re trying to do to a short and memorable idea.
In her weekly Wall Street Journal column, Peggy Noonan built on this point by telling the story of what 20th century renaissance woman Clare Booth Luce once said to John F. Kennedy, “a great man is one sentence.” As Noonan explains, “His leadership can be so well summed up in a single sentence that you don’t have to hear his name to know who’s being talked about.” The first two pictures in this post are captioned with Noonan’s examples to give you additional insight into her point.
For the fun of it and to add some gender diversity to the examples, I've added a third picture of another leader with my own one sentence caption. (What one sentence descriptions can you come up with for other well known leaders?)
Someone once said that strategy is as much about what you’re not going to do as what you’re going to do. Great leaders know how to focus and to keep the group’s attention focused on the most important things.
If you were to focus on crafting a short sentence that you hope would sum up the essence of your current work as a leader what would it be? While you’re thinking about it, take a look at the following 30 second clip from the well known cowboy philosopher Curly for some inspiration:
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