“Something might be ideal as an online video, for example, whereas others would make more sense as a speech or a tweet,” he says. He goes on to say that it is now incumbent on leaders - and their communications team - to know what works best and where. This choice matters a lot more than it used to, especially as there are now so many options to choose from.” So whether you're a politician or a CEO or anyone else, you're no longer just picking the message you want to send but also the medium by which you send it. “The difference is that lots of other communication methods matter as well. “I think speeches still matter, and I think they'll continue to matter,” he says firmly. Are they as important as in previous generations? Litt is in no doubt. With this in mind, it seems pertinent to ask whether speeches still matter. From tweets to YouTube videos, television clips to Snapchat, the landscape in front of them brims with opportunities to promote their message. Leaders around the world have all manner of communications options to choose from. This was probably the biggest challenge and the area where I had to do the most learning on the job - and I had to do a lot of learning very quickly.” I certainly hadn't experienced writing speeches to incredibly tight deadlines under the level of scrutiny that an American president operates by. “I came in with some experience of writing speeches - not a tonne - in fact, I hadn't had a lot of experience doing anything.
“My experience in the White House was pretty different to other speechwriting jobs because of the sheer amount of time pressure,” he explains. Fiercely modest and self-deprecating - both in person and in his book - Litt freely admits that he was somewhat thrown in at the deep end. It's quite a story, and one that Litt expertly captures in his bestselling memoir, which combines laugh out loud humour with deep insight about the art of wordsmithing for a nation's chief executive. A few years later and he was meeting with the president and tasked with drafting many of his most high-profile statements and addresses.
The answer, increasingly so during President Obama's time in the White House, was David Litt, a former campaign volunteer who started working in the White House with only minimal experience as a speechwriter.
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