Great Orators and their Stories – #1 Alain Neumann
I have had the desire to pay my respects to some great minds who have perfected the art of oratory for a long time. That is why I will now start a series “Great Orators and their Stories” in the IF blog. In it I will write about people who have given me a lot through their talks. I will tell stories they told which had a particular impact on me. Let me start with Alain Naumann, simply because his first name starts with an “A” (lets try and do it in alphabetical order).
Alain Neumann is an advisor to enterprises in Switzerland. I first heard him at a meeting organized by HP. Then I invited him to talk at an InterFace Blue Friday. Although this was a few years ago, we were already in the age of power-point and beamers. Alain, however, made a point of using the overhead projector. He had numerous slides, and after having put them on the overhead, he threw them into the waste. (After his presentation, he picked them out of the rubbish and carefully sorted them ).
At the orator’s desk, Alain Neumann is a whirlwind. His talks are entertaining. He likes to contradict prevailing prejudices and plays “the nail on the chair of those who feel they are infallible”. Listening to him makes you thoughtful and confident. He believes in “empowering people” and preaches team work. One of his stories stuck in my memory. It is the “tale of the nut chocolate”.
Switzerland is famous for its chocolate. For example, a medium-sized enterprise in Switzerland produced a brand with whole nuts in it. It was not easy, because when the nuts got cracked, they often broke. What is more, splinters from the shell often found their way into individual chocolate bars. Besides being detrimental for the taste, this was also a legal problem. People might sue for damaged dental outfit, because, after all, hazelnut shells are rather hard.
That is why a small team of engineers intensely but in vain sought a method for the nut cracker to both keep the nuts themselves intact and prevent any shell splinters from reaching the chocolate material with absolute certainty. The attempt seemed hopeless until an apprentice commented (in the most beautiful Swiss-German dialect, which I cannot copy): “You would have to slide into the little nut like a little worm and open it from the inside”. When the engineers heard this, they hit on the right idea. They developed a method of drilling “little holes” and explode the shell from the inside by pressurized air. That was the breakthrough. The discard rate of accidentally split nuts dwindled to zero and ever since that day the Swiss nut chocolate has become splinter-free!
Alain Neumanns calls himself a human and day labourer.
I plan to continue this series. In the future, I want to write about the “great orators” Hans-Jörg Bullinger, Hans Strack-Zimmermann, Augustinus Henckel von Donnersmark, Klaus-Jürgen Grün, Rupert Lay, Simon Grand. And perhaps others will be added to the list.
RMD
(translated by Evelyn Gemkow)
Loading ...