I was at a business dinner last evening — and it was a nightmare.  There were about 50 sales people in the audience who had just sat through two grueling days of training classes.  The original intention of the evening was for there to be relaxed fun — a multi-course dinner paired with wine.  The ‘entertainment’ was a wine expert who was to tell us about each wine and why it was paired with the food.  Sounds great, right?

Wrong!

The wine-expert-speaker was so totally not in touch with her audience that she alienated everyone in the room.  She talked on and on — blah, blah, blah — and it was pretty clear that no one cared.  All we wanted to do was let off a bit of steam and talk among ourselves.  But she was bound and determined to say everything she had intended to say — and then some.  She loudly asked us to be quiet, chided us for not paying attention, demanded that we sit down and listen — and even whistled at us at one point to attempt to shut us up.

You could argue that we were rude — but we started out trying to behave and pay attention.  When her commentary about a small glass of wine ended up being 20 minutes long, we got restless.

The lesson in here for every one of us is to pay attention to the audience.  Be flexible.  Change your game plan if it isn’t working.  The point of a dinner speaker is not to die trying, but rather to keep the group engaged with light information that will foster conversation when the speaker finishes.

When you’re the entertainment, be sure you’re entertaining — not torturing — your audience.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 at 7:58 am and is filed under Whatever. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.