Business Theater

Business Theater

Management by Mark Gordon | Managing Editor

Executives beware: Communicating with employees and customers is more than simply speaking.

Tim Kasper is one entrepreneur who knows how to play to the audience.

He's been a performer of some sort virtually his whole life, from bogeying down in family dance shows as a child while growing up in Fargo, N.D., to being part of a national singing quartet as an adult the last 16 years. Performing is a family thing, too, as Kasper's wife is also in the business.

Now living in Sarasota, Kasper is facing one of his most difficult audiences ever: Company presidents, chief executives and other senior business leaders. Kasper recently took on the role of running the Southeast market for Pinnacle Performance Company, a Chicago-based firm that uses acting skills and techniques to teach corporate executives how to be better communicators, from giving big-room banquet speeches to handling one-on-one chats with employees.

"We don't teach people to be actors," says David Lewis, the company's co-founder who hired Kasper. "We teach people how to use the techniques actors use."

Pinnacle's business model is to establish franchise operations in several regions of the country. In addition to Chicago, the company recently opened offices in Denver, Los Angeles and New York City. Clients the company has worked for since Lewis - another former actor - founded it in 2006, include Oracle, Walgreens and Kodak. And Pinnacle's board of directors has some national stars, too, including entrepreneur Rob Nelson, the inventor of Big League Chew bubble gum.

The Sarasota office opened earlier this year and in addition to the Gulf Coast, the region includes markets in the east coast of Florida and Atlanta.

Kasper, while devoting a lot of his time to Pinnacle, isn't totally giving up his other gig. He remains one-fourth of the Blenders, a band of singers that tours the country every Christmas season, performing in concert halls and at large corporate gatherings. The band, which has also performed with entertainers such as Jay Leno and Chuck Berry, released its first non-Christmas album last year and also won an Emmy Award for a local commercial in Minneapolis.

Even though the market for executive corporate training is a crowded one, Kasper and Lewis say Pinnacle has an edge with its curriculum, which includes a workbook with topics such as effective storytelling, how voice altering impacts a speech and how an audience can tell when a presenter is being untruthful.

One focus of the sessions is teaching executives the power that hand, body and even eye gestures have on what someone says. A roll of the eyes or a shift in a seat, Kasper says, could make a big difference in how an employee interprets what an executive says. Exercises in the gestures part of the training include movement studies, in which a student/executive performs a variety of gestures that are videotaped and later analyzed.

The Pinnacle Performance training sessions run for two to three days and normally have no more than eight people. Kasper says the idea is to be interactive and casual, yet educational.

"It's not fun to the point that it's not productive," Kasper says. "It's not a wacky, team-building improvisation where you don't learn anything."