The 2019 ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit, in Denver, Colorado, took place in early July. Keynote speaker on the first morning was General Paul Selva.

To rise to the second most senior post in the biggest military that the world has ever seen, you need to be quite something. For all my pretensions of cynical seen-it-all, I admit that I approached this speech expecting something pretty special. I was not disappointed.

But the most special thing about it is how it presents itself as so ordinary. No wild histrionics, just an enormous message backed by calm matter-of-fact details. If you didn’t listen carefully you could imagine he was discussing the weekend’s shopping, yet the descriptions, details, data, are mind-boggling. It is that characteristic that makes me think that this would be an ideal copybook example to the senior business people who make up nearly all of my trainees. When you are dealing with resources and concepts on this scale, delivering an all-singing, all-dancing performance is of no particular use. Unless, that is, you happen naturally to be an all-singing, all-dancing type of person, in which case you probably wouldn’t be in his position.

It is all so deceptive: this is technically spot-on. He runs sentences together when he wants to sweep us along; he gives us pauses – sometimes quite long ones – when something needs to sink in; he couches data in terms that anyone can understand; and it all acts subliminally under his aura of calm. This is damn good. He gives added meaning to “owning” an audience.

Regular readers of this blog, knowing my obsession with paperless speaking, will wonder as I did what that small sheaf of papers is doing in his hand. He barely looks at it, and when he does he never needs to, reeling off his data and statistics from memory. He periodically peels one sheet off the top and puts it to the bottom, and seems to do it more often than there seem to be pieces of paper which is puzzling. Is it there simply to supply something for him to do with his hands?

And then, shortly before the end, (at 15:30 actually) he reads a quotation from Albert Einstein. That is an absolutely justifiable use of paper, because it shows us he is not paraphrasing.

I’m glad I watched that speech.