The Excellence Edge

Yesterday I had the chance to sit in on the live telecast speech by the three top leadership consultant gurus Ken Blanchard, Marcus Buckingham and Tom Peters. It was an event organized by Octara which took the initiative to host the satellite up-link at Sheraton Hotel in Karachi. The telecast started at 8:00pm sharp and lasted well past midnight ending at around 2:00am. and was being transmitted to over 60 countries across the globe with an estimated viewership of over a million people captivated for the 5 hours of the presentation.

Locally Octara had its own share of hiccups, as we were initially served with the Spanish translation for a good 20 odd minutes, it was rectified after a few frantic calls by the event manager to Luma Corp in the US. The attendees like myself had paid a hefty sum for attending this telecast, these kinks should have been ironed out by Octara well in advance serving top notch quality event management requires the agency to go the extra mile and not sit cross legged until the show has commenced. If that was any sign of things to come, it got repeatedly worse as Karachi Sheraton went through a series of three electrical blackouts which naturally knocked everything into the stone ages. I should not blame Octara for the KESC issues but it did cast a bad image into the mess. Each blackout took a good minute for the Sheraton’s generators to kick in and then another odd minute or so before the video signal was restored and projector lamps resume functioning.

Ken Blancard was first up discussing the steps needed into developing a true leader, I felt he was truly inspirational and had the entire audience revved up to conquer the world with his amazing stories and concepts to boot.

Ken was followed by Marcus Buckingham, who talked about developing the employees strength and allowing them to mature in their own realm of development. His casual style and periodic humor kept the audience captivated through out the 1 1/2 hour presentations.

Tom Peters, the guru of management consulting was up next and he talked about achieving excellence in management. Sadly Tom Peters did not live up to the hype to which he is understood to be as, I personally felt he lacked considerably on delivering a truly inspirational speech which was delivered by the previous two orators. His entire style was more like a disorganised grumbling narration of his concepts, he had a massive 120 slide presentation which he tried to squeeze into the allotted time. The slides were far from acceptable and lacked professionalism and creativity. Read my analysis of his presentation in the post titled Tom Peters and his Presentation Blunders.