By Merrilyn Astin Tarlton

Planning a law firm retreat and you’re mortified that last year’s catastrophe could be repeated? 

Worried that, even if you hire a speaker who comes highly recommended, you could end up with egg on your face if they say or do that one thing that is deemed “just wrong” at your firm. (Calling it the “legal industry,” referring to women as “girls,” wearing a sweater tied around their shoulders….)

Don’t just stand there and take the silly risks any more.

As a conference planner it is well within your rights to dictate guidelines for speakers and facilitators. As a consumer it is your responsibility to ask for exactly what you want. . . and what you don’t want.

Take TED, for example.

Do you think this small nonprofit dedicated to “Ideas Worth Spreading” would have reached its global proportions without that kind of control? Any TED speaker will tell you about the pre-speech arrival of The TED Commandments.

TED challenges speakers to make the “talk of their lives” in just 18 minutes.

In order to help you do that, they provide you with these tips/commandments (with, obviously, more explanation than there is room for, here):

• Thou shalt not simply trot out the usual shtick.
• Thou shalt dream a great dream, or show forth a wondrous new thing, or share something thou has never shared before.
• Thou shalt reveal thy curiosity and thy passion.
• Thou shalt tell a story.
• Thou shalt freely comment on the utterances of other spears for the sake of blessed connection and exquisite controversy.
• Thou shalt not flaunt thine ego. Be thou vulnerable. Speak of thy failure as well as thy success.
• Thou shalt not sell from the stage: neither thy company, thy goods, thy writings, nor thy desperate need for funding; lest thou be cast aside into outer darkness.
• Thou shalt remember all the while: Laughter is good.
• Thou shalt not read thy speech.
• Thou shalt not steal the time of them that follow thee.

While your guidelines may be far from this grand, you now know there is precedent. And you also know that TED is every speaker’s greatest aspiration!

Know also that the only way to get exactly what you want is by being totally and perfectly crystal clear about what it is.

BTW, check out Merrilyn’s terrific blog, Attorney at Work.