You’re out on your own. You’ve got a few months of severance and some freelance work from the old employer. Instead of beating the street for another full-time job, you’d rather hang out a shingle and knock on some doors for a few more clients. But selling consulting by cold-calling is like selling appendix operations door-to-door: Unless they need one right away, they look at you like you’re crazy.

So you’ve got to get in front of lots of people at once, in hopes some business will come your way.

You’ve got to give a keynote address at a communication conference. There are two ways to do it:

You can come up with a big idea that’s truly going to help communication practitioners be more effective. But this takes more time than you have, and maybe more brains.

Alternatively, you can use the formula that most communication-conference keynoters employ:

First, take the best dozen anecdotes from your spotty career and dress them up to sound heroic. Then, repeat them in Toastmaster’s talks and chapter events until you actually believe, for instance, that you once walked into the CEO’s office and asked him whether he did or didn’t want you to tell him when he was full of b.s.

Now, plug those well-honed yarns into the Communication Keynote for Dummies Forumla®, which involves saying two things realquickbacktoback: an insult, and a lie.

1. The insult: That members of the audience are worthless drudges doing meaningless work. For instance, at an employee communication conference, you might tell the audience that the “formal communication” that they’re responsible to produce represents less than 10% of the information employees take in from the organization. This will have a powerful effect on a group of sincere communicators who already doubt their effectiveness; now to their doubt you have added shame, and you have them right where you want them.

2. The lie: The drudges can become heroes, if only they will use their copious discretionary time and their unlimited power to transform the entire organization to conform to their superior instincts as communicators. For instance, one might tell an audience of communication managers that, in addition to juggling all their campaigns, events, vehicles and departmental issues, they ought to venture forth and change HR policies and procedures to eliminate the thousands of credibility-killing “say-do” gaps. And when they’re through with that, they ought to go knock some supervisors’ heads together until those unwashed bastards get on message too.

I know what you’re thinking: The audience won’t appreciate being insulted and will object to being lied to. Not so! In fact, some of them will love this treatment. (Many grown-ups are looking for father- and mother-figures, and the more smug you are, the more comforted they’ll be by your authority.)

Others may respond less enthusiastically to your attack, but they won’t have the courage either to claim they don’t see themselves as Bartleby the Scrivener, or to admit it’s not their purview to close the organization’s “walk-talk disconnects.”

This leaves only a handful of punch-bowl turds to ever-so-politely suggest during the Q&A that you are a phony. Since you already know this—after all, as a consultant you’ll take any nickel anyone pays you, and you get most of those nickels in exchange for doing the tactical 10% that you deride—you accept it with a shrug and a smile and the hint of a wink and you say, “We have a difference of opinion.”

It’s that simple! Of course, I could describe some advanced techniques, like the “Keynote Cadence.” (Dramatic pauses make you sound smart!) I could teach you how to sprinkle in context-free anecdotes about great companies in utterly different industries and even other eras to remind the audience of what losers they are. I could arm you with rhetorical canards like, “Now, I know I’m going to be very unpopular when I say this.” And I could show you how to introduce a communication model that’s at once simple enough to explain in one PowerPoint slide but complex enough to require months and many thousands to understand fully and implement in your organization.

But basically, anybody can follow the CKDF®, which works today every bit as well as it ever did.

The question is, do these talks do anybody any good? They sure do! They get you in front of some hundreds of eager, ambitious, troubled communicators every year, talking to them as the voice of God. That leads to clients and clients pay you money and money pays the bills and when the bills get paid everyone’s happy.

Except for your audiences, who trudge away with less than the nothing they brought to your talk.

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