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Writer's picturestevendeebrown

The First Public Keynote

Updated: Mar 1, 2021

Our CEO is a very high profile executive. He has industry involvement and brand that reaches beyond his role as CEO. He regularly communicates with our customer CEOs about their needs and plans. He reads business plans and market reports that I don't have access to. And part of my job is to read his mind and prepare his keynotes. In fact, I now believe reading minds is a core competency of a good executive communications leader.



My first CEO keynote project was for our annual sales conference or kickoff. Held every year in January, it's a chance for him to command the attention of all the executives and the entire sales team and deliver inspiration and gratitude, and set expectations. For those of you not familiar with sales kickoffs, one of the behind-the-scenes activities is sales management working with their sales team members to secure sales quota commitments. You can be sure that the sales quotas go up every year, and the CEO is the person telling them why it's important and why they believe the team and individuals can achieve their goals.


I mentioned in my previous post that my first task was to communicate the new strategy. So this would be a major theme of the keynote. The only challenge was that I didn't fully understand the strategy yet. Remember that a core competency of executive communications is mind reading...but I hadn't quite sharpened this skill yet. And you don't just ask go ask the CEO to explain it to you...and certainly not more than once. So I developed a tactic to hustle around the company to see who knew what, and piece the strategy and the story together. That may sound weird, like a Frankenstein story creation methodology. And when it was happening I thought it was unique to my circumstances. But I've come to appreciate this as another core competency of executive communications - internal networking.


The second CEO keynote was for our annual user conference. We kickoff the season in silicon valley, and then take the show on the road to major regions where our customers are located - EMEA, China, Taiwan, India, Japan, and Israel. Even in the pandemic, we've continued the regional events because of the unique cultural experience, language requirements, and local customer participation. It is a user conference after all. The event is kicked off by our CEO, welcoming and thanking our customers for their partnership and participation to make it a high quality event. And in this case, unveiling the new strategy and announcing some new products that demonstrate our investment in the strategy.


We don't publish those keynotes, so the first public one I can share with you is from the 5th annual Samsung Innovation Summit in Tel Aviv, Israel. Our CEO gave a talk on "Semiconductor Innovations for AI". I rather liked it, and I learned a lot about AI along the way. I look back on those first three keynotes remembering the stress. As well as appreciation for the lessons learned, and the many slides that have come about since then.

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