Interesting post from Scott Adams today.  Yes, The Dilbert Guy, and in my opinion one of the funniest people on the planet (and not because of Dilbert):

Keith answered and was receptive to hearing my feedback. I was in his studio delivering my bad review within an hour. Within two hours, he had offered me a job helping with his game. That was sixteen years ago. I’ve been happily working as a game designer ever since.

The post is well worth reading.

Thought provoking post from Seth today:

Perhaps one criticism in a hundred is actually a useful and generous contribution in your quest to reorganize things for the better.

Elevate your evaluations to really give the recipient the ammunition they need to make a difference.

I wonder whether an iPad could be a useful tool for evaluating speeches. As I wonder this, I also am considering what my fellow competitors would feel about the use of an iPad in the evaluation contest. There’s no rules against it.

Maybe time to start thinking about creating that app???

The recent series of evaluation and speech contests have got me thinking of what is most important, style? or substance?

An evaluation that delivers much needed feedback to a speaker delivered in a poor style will not likely win a contest, and most likely will alienate the speaker. The advice will be ignored.

On the other hand a vacuous evaluation delivered with poise and panache will give you a fantastic chance of winning a contest, but will be of little benefit to the speaker.

Clearly, style AND substance would be preferred. It is quite a challenge to deliver an effective evaluation with style, but it is possible. This should win any contest, but sometimes does not. Why?

I believe that you need to have style and substance that are congruent with each other. Your presentation style needs to match the content. If you suggest having bigger gestures, your gestures should be bigger, but not uncomfortably so. In other words, if you wouldn’t take your own advice, why are you giving it?

Now, there’s an argument for needing to give advice to internalize it ourselves. I have done this and it is a great mechanism for personal improvement. Just don’t expect to win higher level contests if you don’t talk the talk yourself.