Last week I took a call from a friend who was taking her kids to their first football match at a local non-league Club. She wanted to know what time the game kicked off. I told her ‘3 pm' as it was on a Saturday. ‘Are you sure?' she retorted, ‘Have a look at their website.'

This may sound like an obvious point, but it is the most common mistake new speakers make. How can you attempt to share skills with people you don't know? They may be at a more advanced level than you think, and they think the company is playing a joke on them when you are on stage. If you are a sales guru, you can't talk marketing strategy to the cleaners.

This has been a hot topic at quite a number of Speaker conventions and a topic that has caused much debate over the years. If you look at our profession and how it has changed over the last few years, keeping it real has taken a back seat.

Today speakers are popping up left and right, and the market in many countries has become over saturated.

For three years Caspar Berry was a professional poker player in Las Vegas. Now the MD of a highly successful business that encourages responsible risk taking in organisations by teaching the definition of that elusive calculated risk. His decision to become a professional poker player was one risky decision that has ended in success.

What does it mean to find the cause of an event? In the aftermath of the actions of Kweku Adaboli there will be a trial and doubtless more than one investigation by UBS and the FSA each concerned with apportioning reasonable blame and establishing the facts with a view to preventing such events from ever happening again.

With one phrase, Lt. Col. Tim Collins, commander of the 1st Battalion of the Royal Irish, summed up the task in hand for the British forces waiting to remove Saddam Hussein from Iraq in March 2003.

Collins, known as "Nails" by his men for his tough-guy attitude, was addressing his 800 men, an arm of Britain's 16 Air Assault Brigade, at Fort Blair Mayne, a Kuwaiti desert camp 20 miles south of the Iraqi border.

Here is the full text of his extraordinary and electrifying speech:

The problem spotting a superstar

In 1996 at the FIFA gala dinner in Zürich, the Brazilian football player, Ronaldo Luíz Nazario, received the World's Best Footballer of the Year award as the youngest ever. However, very few of the guests attending that evening could have imagined the circumstances Ronaldo had found himself 4 years earlier.

Perfection is worth striving for

In an article in the New York Times in 2006 entitled "Federer as Religious Experience" David Foster Wallace describes how the Swiss tennis phenomenon, Roger Federer, in a semi-final match at Wimbledon against Jonas Björkman, not only beat the Swede, but destroyed him.

Who wants it most?

Six months ago I went to Kingston, Jamaica to visit what I would venture to call the world's most successful athletics club, the MVP Track & Field Club. At the latest Olympics the MVP sprinter's won nine medals. I still remember the morning I arrived to the MVP training center.