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> I have found that audiences genuinely appreciate when you speak powerfully and simply

Unfortunately, that only works if the speaker has interesting ideas to share. Often, obtuse language hides the lack of interesting ideas. Sometimes, there are no ideas at all.

Saying "most of our ideas were pretty bad" only works if an interesting idea comes afterwards. But such every interesting idea requires a lot of work; work that many speakers have not performed.

> "speak to me as if I am a very small child..."

A core component of that film is that the higher you go up the corporate ladder, the more distant and ignorant the individuals are. Further, they wear their distance and ignorance with pride - they have the luxury of remaining distant and ignorant and they're not afraid to flaunt it.

Don't get me wrong: it's a great scene, and speaking plainly is always something to aspire to, but the individuals in those scenes are supposed to be viewed as somewhat monstrous and lizard-brained.

The context is that Jeremy Irons' character knew exactly what was going on, he wanted the risk analyst to state it to everyone else in the room, and keep him on track and focused. Right before that meeting, there is a scene as the characters walk in where they are warned by the CEO's right hand man not to try and bullshit, since he would know.

I don't disagree with anything you've said - I was trying to make a tangential point: while the CEO is ignorant of financial analysis, and the quant is ignorant to the business ramifications of said analysis, both people lack humanity: neither character gave a damn about the wider consequences of their company's actions.

Steve Jobs may not have cared much for individual people, but for all his faults, he really did seem to care about humanity (in his own way). He preferred plain language because he deeply valued shared understanding, not because he wanted to flex on his overly cerebral underlings.

As another commenter said, the film was trying to make the opposite point: that Irons’ character knew full well — probably better than the other characters — what was going on.

But the detachment you mention can / is very important. When you’re working deep in the woods you really can’t see the forest for the trees. You may be working on a feature that will make the user’s life a lot easier, but the real customer is IT and your feature could be cut because the customer won’t like it (“this will add retraining cost”). In Margin Call, perhaps the thing that could increase your bonus is, from the overall company’s PoV a distraction because it’s more urgent to save the company (so bonuses can be paid out at all).

So a good manager operates at a higher level of abstraction. The best ones have a lot of experience so can see from the signals they get what’s happening at the lower levels of abstraction. Irons’ character is supposed to be one of those.

Of course the high level abstraction, when the boss fell upwards and doesn’t have the Fingerspitzengefühl to be able to see what’s below the surface, is a common problem. It can kill a company: look at how Welch and Immelt destroyed GE.

A good sign of this is also called out by a different commenter: opaque language is often used to try to cover up ignorance.

Fingerspitzengefühl: I didn't know about this work.

Wiki says: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fingerspitzengef%C3%BChl

    > is a German term, literally meaning "finger tips feeling" and meaning intuitive flair or instinct, which has been adopted by the English language as a loanword. It describes a great situational awareness, and the ability to respond most appropriately and tactfully. It can also be applied to diplomats, bearers of bad news, or to describe a superior ability to respond to an escalated situation. The term is sometimes used to describe the instinctive play of certain football players.

Thank you to share!

> where he tells the junior analyst to "speak to me as if I am a very small child, or possibly a golden retriever

That entire scene is gold.-

  - "Sell. Sell it all. Today"

Its a great compliment to The Big Short (2015). The Big Short gives you a nice explanation of what the heck is going on but mainly follows "outsider" points of view, while Margin Call gives a sense of the thoughts and concerns of the big banks at the time. Both how deluded everyone was, but also how flawed and human the systems were (as they ultimately reflect the people that built them).

I remember thinking, after watching Margin Call first and then The Big Short, that you could pretty much identify exactly where within The Big Short the (single-night) events of Margin Call would have taken place...

Both are masterful.-

I really do wish however that we had learned some of the lessons from that whole fiasco ...

Jobs communicates amazing well. But I don't think this can be reduced to just a skill "good communication". He communicates with passion because he has something he's passionate about and not in corporate terms. He's passionate that the objects around us, humanity, can beautiful rather than ugly and work in a beautiful rather than ugly way. If you step back and think, that's a big thing for humankind. We live a lot of our lives with objects.

I too have qualms about the practical Steve Jobs but he saw that the world was being built of out computer and it could be nice or it could be terrible. He put forward that vision and I think it was the power of that vision rather than doing speaking right that powered his speech here.

Jobs was known for his ability to convey complex ideas in a simple, engaging and often entertaining manner. His presentation style is amazing