We'll be welcoming a slew of new hires around the world in the next month...

We're excited to be bringing new people to our team alongside the many other new hires we've brought on board in the past year.

One of the internal training programs we provide is called "Speak on the Shoulders of Giants." We have been teaching this program on communication so long that we've created our own internal textbook on the subject, as we have with many other topics.

As the title describes, we pull our lessons from the greatest speakers, or "giants," of all time. One of those giants is Demosthenes, a great orator in ancient Greece.

Demosthenes, who struggled with a speech impediment in his childhood, spent countless hours practicing speaking to improve his skills. Being born at the tail end of Athens' era of power, he was able to study the great orators of Greece who came before him such as Pericles.

Thanks to his diligent study and his own clever maxims, he went on to become one of the most respected orators – and litigators – of his day.

Public speaking can be a scary thing for many people. However, it is teachable... and in my humble opinion, some of the greatest speakers are actually natural introverts.

Their skill all depends on whether they use the right techniques for communication or not.

Our workforce gets weekly practice with verbal communication... 

We have a weekly all-hands call where our entire firm on three continents comes together at the same time to learn from each other and see what's going on around our world.

Each of our teams around the world is given two minutes to brief the rest of the firm.

We encourage our people to follow one of Demosthenes' famous quotes, "All speech is vain and empty unless it be accompanied by action."

A paraphrasing of this advice is also how Demosthenes responded when asked about the three most important aspects of any verbal communication: "Action, action, and action."

Our teams know that we will all get bored very quickly with "Here's an update of what we did last week."

If the team accomplished anything worthy of sharing with the rest of our global firm, then it should have something about it that will make a difference – in other words, a point of action.

It might be a useful checklist, or it might be an article the team wrote that everyone in the company could apply in their division or department.

It takes time to analyze what you've done and determine what can also be valuable to others.

Like Demosthenes taught, it's important to make your course of action clear and talk about how to execute it.

I hope you find this useful for your communications, whether it's in the form of speeches, e-mails, or text messages.

Whenever I present at a conference or teach at a university, or even as I write this article, I make a conscious effort to remember Demosthenes' teachings.

"What would the audience do differently for the betterment of their lives, were I to provide this communication?"

For my update this week, I'm inviting you to attend one of our webinar sessions...

Over the past month, I've been presenting my webinar called "The Real Story of Bull and Bear Markets: What does it mean for 2022?" to many different executives and investors.

The media likes to slap the word "crisis" onto practically every event... So far this year, we've seen inflation, debt, food, oil, geopolitical, and war crises. In this webinar, I discuss the real impact of all these events on the equity markets.

We've received great feedback and we will be offering the webinar to all of our Altimetry Daily Authority readers.

I hope you will join us (it's free!). You can find the registration link right here.

Love, joy, and peace,

Joel Litman
April 22, 2022