WHY YOU MUST EXPLAIN!  With the London Olympics looming, there's been a smorgasbord of appalling and excellent communications skills on public display. The early gold medal winner in the appalling category is Nick Buckles - a man who has lived up to what his name promises. Mr Buckles is the chief executive (for now) of the security contractor G4S which has had to admit that its contractual obligation to provide 10,000 Olympic security guards won't be met. When called before a parliamentary committee to answer some obvious and predictable questions, Mr Buckles acknowledged that his company's provision of only 4,200 of these staff was a "humiliating shambles". As discussed in the last ezine, telling the truth and showing humility are to be commended in such circumstances. But when admitting to something damaging or saying something controversial you need to couple it with a more positive message. This could be to say what you're doing to fix the problem - or putting it in a wider context. Mr Buckles totally failed to do this when asked a killer question by the committee about whether his company would still be claiming its management fee of £57-million on the project which it clearly hasn't properly managed. Controversially Mr Buckles said it would all be claimed - not something which went down well with committee members or taxpayers.  Mr Buckles had no justifying message or apology to accompany this answer - which is why he comes out of the exchange so badly.  Whether you are going to appear before a parliamentary committee - or you have to face challenging questions from prospects, customers, staff or financiers - there are techniques to ensure you come out better than Nick Buckles. The next open session of "Give Great Answers To Tough Questions" is scheduled for Friday 7 September in Central London. And the next open session of "Perfecting Your Elevator Pitch" runs later the same day. Details of the soon-to-expire early bird offer are at: http://www.michaeldoddmedia.com/presentation_training.php

KEEPING IT IN PERSPECTIVE    Meanwhile one man who has been around the running track and the media track more than a few times is doing a better job at putting the London Olympics in perspective. Gold medal runner and now Olympic organising supremo Sebastian Coe has made a couple of excellent fightbacks at a time when sections of the media are hunting just a bit too hard to find things going wrong.  Sebastian Coe winning gold in the Olympic 1500 metres in Moscow I was alerted to this when London's LBC Radio Station interviewed me to get my take on "news" that some Australian and American athletes had a delayed and circuitous coach journey from Heathrow Airport to the Olympic village. This was being portrayed in some quarters as a massive scandal rather than an unfortunate minor mishap. I predicted on air that the athletes (at least the rugged Australian ones) would get over it pretty quickly. And I advocated that - given the rare privilege of being in a city which is hosting the Olympics for the third time - we folk in London should guard against seeking out the teeniest things going wrong and blowing them out of proportion. Sebastian Coe did a much better job than me of making this same point the next day. "Out of 100 journeys, one coach driver missed a turning" was the way he successfully took on the "tall poppy syndrome" which seeks to unfairly drag down successful people and institutions. He went on to highlight the scale of the task facing Olympic organisers, saying "This is the ability to stage in 19 days in this city 26 simultaneous world championships." Lord Coe has sewn a bit of confusion by imprecise answers about whether the sponsorship rules will allow people to wear Pepsi shirts to an event backed by Coca-Cola, so he hasn't won communication gold yet. But he is showing some early medal-winning form in the Olympic media stakes. TURNING AROUND PERCEPTIONS OF YOUR SCHOOL Schools can get a rough time in the local media. Often this can be quite unfair, if one of the laws of bad journalism takes hold. The law states the first duty of the media is "to reinforce existing prejudices". The consequence of this is that where schools make a heroic and successful effort to turn around poor standards and results, it can go unrecognised. I've had the privilege in recent years of working with over a hundred head teachers and other education leaders to show them what they can do to more effectively convey positive impressions through the media - and to put things in perspective when something goes wrong. One school in particular has stuck in my mind for achieving a massive and rapid reputational turnaround. It's the Freeston Academy, located in the former mining area of Normanton in Yorkshire. When I visited the school last year it had just learned that plans for a large and much-needed building programme had been scrapped as part of government cutbacks. But despite this, there remained an overwhelmingly positive spirit in the school, demonstrated by the impressive work in all subjects spectacularly displayed on the classroom and corridor walls. However the achievements and spirit within the school weren't being reflected in the newspaper coverage outside. This reinforced a view of some parents in the potential catchment zone that the school hadn't improved since their time at the place, and that they therefore wouldn't want their own children to go there. So the school feared a drop in enrolments which would lead to unaffordable cuts in funding. I spent a day at the school working with the inspirational head teacher, Dr Gill Metcalfe, her senior staff and governors. We practised how to deal with conversations with sceptical parents and pupils, and how to convey positive points in media interviews. Freeston team members threw themselves into the task of coming up with positive messages they wanted to convey - and building a "Treasure Chest" of stories which they could use to illustrate their points in conversations and interviews. They came up with the idea of making "message cards" with punchy slogans such as "The right attitude brings the right results". These were backed up with examples on the reverse of the card with specifics about former pupils such as: "Louise Whiteley has started a course in Biological Science at Girton College, University of Cambridge, after achieving A-star in her A levels. She recently completed a 12-day trek in the Himalayas as part of her world challenge community project." Dr Metcalfe is pictured here with some of her students holding up the cards which were distributed throughout the Normanton community.    Freeston Academy now has an expanding collection of dozens of positive articles which have been run after learning how to write effective press releases and produce attention-grabbing photos. "Basically it's a mindset change," says Dr Metcalfe. "No longer do I think of media contact as an inconvenience, but as something I feel more confident to tackle and try to make it into a positive for our Academy. "The impact of our campaign is being seen in an increase of twenty students, plus a public perception that the school is definitely on an upward trend." So Gill Metcalfe's advice to other schools: "I would suggest having your Treasure Chest of good news stories always and hand, and be ready with a positive attitude to seize the moment." BOOSTING YOUR CHANCES IN JOB AND UNIVERSITY INTERVIEWS There's one more thing schools can do to boost the prospects of their pupils. And that's to equip them with skills to shine out in interviews for their first job or that university place. Having sat on selection panels for university places, it can be quite disturbing to watch how some pupils shoot themselves in both feet - while others can make a lot of themselves notwithstanding less-than-impressive results. My colleague in the training world - Jane-Emma Peerless (pictured below) - reports much the same story in the business scene after conducting countless job interviews.    Together we can help schools maximise their pupils' prospects by showing how to prepare their CVs and covering letters - and how to showcase themselves at their best in those challenging early interviews. Just as with media interviews, presenting yourself at your best is a learnable skill which can boost prospects hugely. And practice interviews - and real ones - become far more comfortable when you know what you're doing.  PRESENTING BETTER THAN GEORGE Showing yourself at your best is also something we do in sessions of "Presenting with Confidence, Impact and Pizzazz". The next open session this month is now full - but places are available in the following one on Thursday 4 October. Details are towards the foot of the page at: http://www.michaeldoddmedia.com/presentation_training.php But however bad your presentation skills might be, you can at least be encouraged that there's always someone who makes more gaffes than the rest of us do. Here's a compilation of the presentational "mis-speaks" of former president George W. Bush - including some you probably haven't seen before.  Don't you miss him! Everyone on the presentation master classes is guaranteed to come away better than George. Keep smiling, Michael

WHENEVER POSSIBLE, ANSWER THE QUESTION. British TV watchers have just witnessed one of the most excruciating examples of a "car crash" interview. The victim was Treasury Minister, Chloe Smith, who floundered throughout an eight-minute cross-examination with one of the world's greatest interviewers, BBC rottweiler Jeremy Paxman. Some might say Jeremy's a bit soft by Australian standards, but he's ruthless nonetheless and has a well-practised line in disbelieving looks in order to put his interviewees under extra pressure - as you can see.   Ms Smith by contrast is a telegenic thirty-year-old Conservative politician who was enjoying political success at a remarkably early age. And to her credit she by-and-large maintained her physical composure throughout her Paxmanisation - though a couple of little coughing bursts signalled some internal stress. But the actual content of Ms Smith's answers - relating to a deferral of a petrol tax rise - were universally regarded as completely hopeless and unconvincing. You can watch here - if you're tough enough to withstand something which really should have a health warning. The vital learning point is that the crash was entirely avoidable...especially as the minister was effectively being interviewed about what was good news for British motorists (albeit arguably not so good for the fume-choked environment). Lesson One is that Ms Smith was the wrong person for the government to put forward to be interviewed. As became gruesomely clear, Ms Smith was too junior to be seriously involved in making the decision, so she was sent out as something of a lamb to face the beast. The real decision-makers - the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Prime Minister - were far better placed to answer the obvious questions... had they been courageous enough to have faced the Paxman experience themselves. Lesson Two is that Ms Smith could have made life a lot better for herself if she had obeyed one devastatingly simple lesson: Just tell the truth. The first of the questions she was unwilling to give a straight answer to was remarkably easy. When was she told of the decision? Sure, it may have been a touch embarrassing to have to admit that she was so low in the hierarchy that she was only told on the day of the announcement. But still, far better for her to get this out of the way in one go and take the sting out of it, rather than come up with a pack of pathetic obfuscations. Best practice media advice is to answer the question - or give a powerful reason why you can't. Once you've done this you then effectively have a license - under the normal rules of conversation - to go on and make a positive point related to the question. It will be fascinating to see whether Ms Smith takes this advice next time - if her political masters ever let her near Mr Paxman again.

GIVING GREAT ANSWERS TO TOUGH QUESTIONS     If you'd like to discover how you can best answer your nightmare questions - from Jeremy Paxman, your clients, your prospects or your staff - then there is a solution. I'm running an open session in Central London on Friday 7 September. You, your colleagues and Ms Smith are entitled to book and come along. And on the same day you can also have the option to take part in a session on "Perfecting Your Elevator Pitch" A bad elevator pitch might be something like "I'm Chloe and I get chopped up on TV when my bosses aren't brave enough to appear themselves". A really good elevator pitch can help you stand out from the crowd and win new clients by highlighting what you can do for people better than anyone else. A well-crafted, well-delivered pitch helps you come across impressively during those sometimes nerve-wracking introductions at networking events. It also helps you shine in less formal situations. After one of these sessions, business leader Gary Jeffries emailed to say "I've already putyesterday's learning on pitching over the telephone to good use, by making successful calls to two key prospects and securing the meetings I wanted to." Details of both open sessions are at: http://www.michaeldoddmedia.com/presentation_training.php HOW NOT TO DO IT - THE AUSTRALIAN WAY If you're one of those people who thinks any publicity is good publicity, then here's reason to think again. This is the latest news on Australian Trade Minister, Craig Emerson, who I knew when I was working as a political correspondent in Canberra in the 1980s. At that stage Craig was an environmental activist who went on to become an economic advisor to Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke. But it's only now that he's really made his indelible mark on the world. In what looked at the start like a bog-standard political interview, Craig Emerson suddenly started to dance and then to sing. The song was Craig's response to a claim by Opposition Leader Tony Abbott that the government's new carbon tax would wipe Whyalla - a South Australian steel-making town - off the map. His song was a parody version of the 1970s hit "Horror Movie" by the Skyhooks.   (OK you can be forgiven if you don't remember Skyhooks.) Now you might think that Craig Emerson's karaoke-style performance was merely a moment of madness. But if it was, it was a planned moment of madness. Craig had got his staff to set up a beatbox to provide the backing music - and had even gone to the trouble of seeking permission from one of the old Skyhooks members to utilise the song. And he'd written some fresh lyrics with the line "No Whyalla wipe-out there on my TV." The result is a glimpse of political theatre like you've never seen before. The video has now gone viral...but Craig Emerson has received no shortage of political flak. The most severe has come from the Shadow Treasurer, Joe Hockey, who says he's appalled by the behaviour. "This guy is meant to be our representative on the international scene," Mr Hockey declared. "And he is treating as a joke the concerns of everyday Australians about something he has done. I can't believe he is still on the front bench." In fairness I should point out this is the same Joe Hockey who when serving as the government's Workplace Relations Minister a few years ago went on TV dressed as a wand-waving Shrek and dancing with a pink tutu to Abba's Dancing Queen.   At the time, Joe Hockey explained that one away by saying "People will suggest if you're going to be taken seriously you shouldn't be doing these things. But that is the nature of life, really. I am who I am." It all makes my years in Canberra - where the high point was Bob Hawke bursting into tears at a press conference - seem rather lacking in colour. PRESENTING WITH PIZZAZZ Meanwhile there's no excuse for a lack of colour in your future presentations - despite the fact that my July open session on presentation skills is now full. A new open session of "Presenting with Confidence, Impact and Pizzazz" is now scheduled for Central London on Thursday 4 October. Bookings can be made at: http://www.michaeldoddmedia.com/presentation_training.php By the end of the day it's expected that your speech-making will sparkle. But in the light of recent Australian political experience, all singing, dancing and the parading with pink tutus will be banned. Keep smiling, Michael