Give the stage the board treatment.

Edition 09 of Reputation means business draws on two stages I stood on in September to show why the panel or keynote you agreed to as a favour deserves the same preparation as your next board presentation.

Perhaps your diary has a panel or a keynote in it that you agreed to as a favour. Someone asked nicely, and you are planning to prepare for it on the way there. Or perhaps there is no stage in your diary at all, and you have been wondering whether there should be or if that is a waste of time.

Either way, the stage probably gets far less of your attention than the next board presentation that is now on its sixth round of review. It is easy to see why, when a stage can feel like an hour of goodwill with a lanyard attached.

I would argue the stage deserves more of that effort.

Thirty minutes without a safety net.

On 8 September, I gave a keynote on executive reputation and AI at the LHH ICEO Executive Dialogue in Zurich. Thirty minutes, a room full of executives who are not easily impressed, and an argument I had to carry from one end to the other without anyone losing faith in it along the way.

A room gives you something a document never will: a live reaction and immediate feedback. You can feel when a point lands. You can feel it even more when one does not. Any question from the floor could find the gap I had missed in rehearsal, and everyone would watch me deal with it.

What the audience took away went beyond the argument itself. A good keynote changes how people feel about a subject, leaves them asking different questions, and sends them out seeing their own position differently from when they walked in.

The introvert holding the microphone.

Two days later, I hosted the Marketing Leaders Summit 2026 from opening to close: the welcome, the keynote introductions, a fireside chat and the panel. That asked for something quite different. My job was to read the room, find where the speakers disagreed, ask the question the audience was thinking and keep the whole evening moving.

At one point, someone in the audience asked a panellist about introverts on stage. I said I was one. Nobody believed me. In fairness, I was holding the microphone and running the room at the time.

Being an introvert has never meant staying off the stage for me. What I enjoy up there is sharing what I know and showing how I think, and none of it requires me to become someone I am not.

The feedback afterwards was overwhelmingly positive, with people describing the evening as fresh and energetic, a change from the stiff events they usually sit through. Several business opportunities have since come out of those two days. Some came from people who had watched me think on stage and wanted that thinking in their corner. Others came from people who were not even in the room, but saw the many posts from those who were.

Not every invitation earns a yes.

Every stage puts your name next to something: an event, an organisation, the other speakers, a subject. Those associations travel much further than the talk itself. They sit on the programme, in the posts afterwards and in search results for years, and people use them to decide what you stand for before they have heard a word you said.

So before you accept, look at who will be in the room and what you are being asked to talk about, and ask if you would be happy to have your name attached to both. If the answer is no, it is perfectly fine to decline. When it is yes, try not to let a preference for being off stage talk you out of it.

Once you have said yes, give it the preparation the board would get. Before you walk on, know what you want that room to remember about you, and the one point you would defend if someone pushed back. Do some research on the people sharing the stage with you. Then spend more time on the likely questions than on your opening remarks, because the questions are where people see you think live.

Most importantly, stay yourself and be prepared to improvise. Nobody expects you to have all the answers.