12
Lectures
30
minutes/lecture
1.
Overcome Obstacles—Demosthenes of Athens
Here, Professor Hale outlines the goals of the course. Then, he introduces you to Demosthenes—the ancient Greek orator whose life and career illustrates how practice, hard work, memorization, the acceptance of early failures, and other skills are essential to overcoming obstacles from stage fright to speech impediments.
1.
Overcome Obstacles—Demosthenes of Athens
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7.
Build a Logical Case—Susan B. Anthony
Logic should always guide the sequence of your thoughts, whether you're giving a sermon, a corporate report, or a birthday toast. Discover how to avoid digressions, offensive statements, contrarian views, and other pitfalls that may disrupt the logic of your speech, with examples from Susan B. Anthony, John Stuart Mill, and Chief Joseph.
7.
Build a Logical Case—Susan B. Anthony
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2.
Practice Your Delivery—Patrick Henry
Key to effective speaking is using your voice and body to reinforce your meaning. Using examples from Patrick Henry, Oliver Cromwell, Winston Churchill, and others, learn how the power of a speech lies not so much in words as in vocal and physical elements like tone, pitch, facial expression, and posture.
2.
Practice Your Delivery—Patrick Henry
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8.
Paint Pictures in Words—Tecumseh on Unity
Narrow your focus to the individual words and phrases you use in your speech—each of which can make your topic unforgettable. With the help of Tecumseh, Homer, Aesop, and others, examine ways to create and use evocative images, avoid mixed metaphors and hyperbole, and more.
8.
Paint Pictures in Words—Tecumseh on Unity
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3.
Be Yourself—Elizabeth I to Her Army
In order to make the deepest possible connection with your audience, it's essential to talk about yourself. This lecture provides you with advice on opening up to people about yourself—your experiences, your emotions, even your weaknesses—with some lessons taken from speeches by Elizabeth I and Sojourner Truth.
3.
Be Yourself—Elizabeth I to Her Army
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9.
Focus on Your Audience—Gandhi on Trial
Now that you've learned how to overcome obstacles and prepare, it's time to learn the essential elements of actually giving a speech. Here, Professor Hale uses famous historical figures, including Gandhi and President Kennedy, as models for how to deliver your speech to—and connect with—specific audiences.
9.
Focus on Your Audience—Gandhi on Trial
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4.
Find Your Humorous Voice—Will Rogers
Learn how to use humorous techniques such as hyperbole, incongruity, and surprise—even when your speech is of the utmost seriousness. The secret of effective humor, as speeches by Will Rogers and others show, is to ensure that each laugh makes a point and focuses your audience's attention on the topic.
4.
Find Your Humorous Voice—Will Rogers
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10.
Share a Vision—Martin Luther King's Dream
Martin Luther King Jr.'s “I Have a Dream” speech is one of the most iconic speeches in modern history. More important: It's the perfect example of a speech with the power to inspire. In this lecture, discover ways to articulate and share your personal vision with an audience.
10.
Share a Vision—Martin Luther King's Dream
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5.
Make It a Story—Marie Curie on Discovery
Turn now to a series of lectures on composing effective speeches. Here, investigate the benefits of organizing information into a story to give your details weight and vividness. One powerful example of this concept at work: Marie Curie using storytelling to explain the complexities of radium—and to make them memorable.
5.
Make It a Story—Marie Curie on Discovery
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11.
Change Minds and Hearts—Mark Antony
Sometimes, you may find yourself speaking before an audience who needs to be persuaded about your point of view. Discover invaluable tips for swaying emotions and opinions by appealing to sentiments, repeating facts, and using props—just like Mark Antony does in his unforgettable speech from William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.
11.
Change Minds and Hearts—Mark Antony
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6.
Use the Power of Three—Paul to His People
What is the power of three? And why is it so important to writing a great speech? Find out as Professor Hale unpacks the 13th chapter from Paul's first letter to the Corinthians to demonstrate why a speech—and the examples and anecdotes it uses—should be planned in threes.
6.
Use the Power of Three—Paul to His People
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12.
Call for Positive Action—Lincoln at Gettysburg
Finish the course with a look at what Professor Hale considers the greatest speech ever written: Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Two powerful lessons you can take away from Lincoln's words: Include a clear call to action near the conclusion of your speech, and always craft a strong ending.
12.
Call for Positive Action—Lincoln at Gettysburg
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24
Lectures
30
minutes/lecture
1.
Making High-Stakes Decisions
Examine the myth that bad decisions are most often made by bad leaders. Professor Roberto uses the examples of the Challenger disaster, the Bay of Pigs invasion, and Daimler's acquisition of Chrysler to uncover why good leaders can make bad decisions if the decision-making process they use is flawed.
1.
Making High-Stakes Decisions
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13.
Creativity and Brainstorming
IDEO is one of the world's leading product design firms, expert in developing creative and innovative products for many industries. What makes their process so effective? To help you understand their formula at work, Professor Roberto describes an experiment in which IDEO staff worked to design a new product in just one week.
13.
Creativity and Brainstorming
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2.
Cognitive Biases
Using the story of the tragedies on Mount Everest in 1996, Professor Roberto introduces you to three cognitive biases that play a role in bad decision making: sunk-cost effect, overconfidence bias, and recency effect.
2.
Cognitive Biases
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14.
The Curious Inability to Decide
Often as individuals or in groups we become paralyzed by indecision—unable to commit to one path or another. This lecture examines three modes of indecision in groups: "the culture of yes, the culture of no, and the culture of maybe."
14.
The Curious Inability to Decide
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3.
Avoiding Decision-Making Traps
Explore more decision-making traps you can fall into if you're not aware of them, such as confirmatory bias, anchoring bias, attribution error, illusory correlation, hindsight bias, and egocentrism. Darwin avoided confirmatory bias by keeping a separate record of observations that contradicted his theory of evolution.
3.
Avoiding Decision-Making Traps
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15.
Procedural Justice
Using case studies about Daimler Chrysler and an aerospace and defense firm, Professor Roberto explains the challenge of building consensus among team members once a decision has been made so everyone will work together to implement it.
15.
Procedural Justice
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4.
Framing—Risk or Opportunity?
The way you or others frame a problem or decision can have a significant impact on the choices you make. Understand why framing a decision in terms of what you have to lose causes you to take more risks.
4.
Framing—Risk or Opportunity?
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16.
Achieving Closure through Small Wins
To move forward through the brainstorming and decision-making processes, groups must find intermediate moments of agreement that Karl Weick calls "small wins." This lecture looks at how teams achieve closure through small wins, using cases about D-Day, Social Security, and the CEO of Corning.
16.
Achieving Closure through Small Wins
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5.
Intuition—Recognizing Patterns
Discover how to use intuition as a powerful tool in decision making when combined with rational analysis and acknowledge the cognitive processes that are part of our intuition. Professor Roberto recounts case studies from firefighting, health care, and the video game industry to explain the potential and pitfalls of intuition.
5.
Intuition—Recognizing Patterns
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17.
Normal Accident Theory
Discover how organizational culture and structure affect decision making by individuals and groups. Learn about the Three Mile Island accident to understand what went wrong in that system, and understand how catastrophes more often stem from a domino chain of bad decisions rather than one wrong choice.
17.
Normal Accident Theory
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6.
Reasoning by Analogy
Learn how the Korean War differed from the threat of Adolf Hitler. Professor Roberto explains reasoning by analogy and how you can use analogies to make sense of a complex problem. At the same time, we must avoid the common tendency to overstate the similarities of one situation to another and overlook key differences.
6.
Reasoning by Analogy
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18.
Normalizing Deviance
The tragic explosion of the Challenger space shuttle was likely the result of a flawed culture at NASA. The repeated and increased tolerance of questionable data and decisions ultimately led to a large-scale failure. How can leaders reform such cultures?
18.
Normalizing Deviance
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7.
Making Sense of Ambiguous Situations
We might like to think that we carefully examine our choices before we make a decision. However, we often do the reverse—make a decision and then figure out why, and base future decisions on how we made sense of other decisions. This process, called sense-making by Karl Weick, constantly influences our behavior.
7.
Making Sense of Ambiguous Situations
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19.
Allison's Model—Three Lenses
Learn Graham Allison's approach to examine decision making through three lenses. Use Allison's model to explore the Cuban Missile Crisis from the individual and cognitive perspective, the group dynamics view, and the vantage point of organizational politics and bargaining.
19.
Allison's Model—Three Lenses
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8.
The Wisdom of Crowds?
This lecture includes examples from game shows such as Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and from the business world that demonstrate the usefulness of decision making by groups and the potential problems if group members are not fully engaged.
8.
The Wisdom of Crowds?
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20.
Practical Drift
Uncover why organizations make decisions that contradict their own rules and regulations. The concept of practical drift explains this phenomenon, as you see by studying a military friendly-fire case from 1994.
20.
Practical Drift
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9.
Groupthink—Thinking or Conforming?
Discover why even diverse groups can make bad decisions if members are not able to express divergent opinions. This lecture focuses on how groupthink led to the Bay of Pigs invasion.
9.
Groupthink—Thinking or Conforming?
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21.
Ambiguous Threats and the Recovery Window
When a threat is ambiguous, organizations are likely to minimize the possible risks. Look again at NASA but this time at the Columbia space shuttle accident, 17 years after the Challenger explosion, to understand how conditions changed or stayed the same in that culture.
21.
Ambiguous Threats and the Recovery Window
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10.
Deciding How to Decide
After the Bay of Pigs failure, President Kennedy and his advisors reflected on their mistakes and created a new process for group discussion and decision making to prevent future groupthink and promote diverse perspectives. Here, Professor Roberto introduces the concept of developing a decision-making process.
10.
Deciding How to Decide
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22.
Connecting the Dots
Often in large organizations, no one individual can see or understand all the elements at the same time. Great organizations integrate various pieces to see the big picture. Discover how failure to connect the dots led to an inability to recognize the extent of the threat of a terrorist attack on American soil and therefore a lack of appropriate action before September 11.
22.
Connecting the Dots
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11.
Stimulating Conflict and Debate
Learn how constructive conflict can lead to new insights and stronger decisions. Discover four methods to stimulate useful debate: role plays, mental simulation techniques, creating a point-counterpoint dynamic, and applying diverse conceptual models and frameworks.
11.
Stimulating Conflict and Debate
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23.
Seeking Out Problems
Explore how complex, high-risk organizations succeed by focusing on the possibility of failure. Leaders at these organizations proactively look for problems rather than ignore red flags. Also, learn how Toyota's application of these principles has contributed to its success.
23.
Seeking Out Problems
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12.
Keeping Conflict Constructive
Unfortunately, it's not uncommon for conflict to become unproductive. Understand how to look for and eliminate dysfunctional conflict to cultivate effective teams. This lecture includes cases on Sid Caesar's comedy writing team, health care, and the nonprofit sector.
12.
Keeping Conflict Constructive
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24.
Asking the Right Questions
Examine the trend of leaders moving from making decisions themselves to focusing on how decisions are made by everyone in their organizations. Smart leaders, as you discover, ask the right questions to glean the collective wisdom of their colleagues and staffs.
24.
Asking the Right Questions
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