When Introducing a Speaker

I have heard - and endured - many introductions of speakers. Here are a few modest rules for those given that important task:

1. Keep it brief. The audience wants to hear the speaker, not you. I've never heard a lengthy introduction which justified its length.
2. Do your homework. Audiences can sniff out when the person doing the introduction knows little about the speaker or the speaker's body of work.
3. Don't read an introduction which has already been distributed to the audience. Unless you have the voice of Richard Burton, they will justly regard the repetition as a form of torture.
4. Don't set an impossibly high bar. If you tell the group that the speaker is stunningly eloquent or witty, you have just created a foundation for failure.
5. If possible, mention something interesting about the speaker which the audience may not know. I once introduced a politician and noted that when he was a young FBI agent, he had tracked Nazi spies in South America. Few people knew that and it served as a small appetizer for his speech. Of course, the interesting item should be positive and in no way embarrassing.
6. Don't step on the speaker's lines. Let the speaker deal with the topic of the speech. If you intrude on that territory, you risk saying something which the speaker wanted to mention.
7. Do nothing which may "upstage" the speaker. If you are a great speaker, use some restraint. There should be only one star.