Research On Rhetoric Strategies Of Entrepreneurs' Public Speaking

The study takes Jack Ma’s four speeches targeted at three different audiences,the young students,Alibaba employees and entrepreneurs,as the research object,and adopts the framework of New Aristotle’s Rhetorical Criticism,reconstructing the rhetorical situations,deconstructing the rhetorical text,and evaluating the rhetorical effects,to analyse these four speeches,to explore how Jack Ma uses the rhetorical strategies to show Alibaba’s responsible international corporate image,to persuade the audience to trust Alibaba,to encourage employees to work for the ideal,and to advocate entrepreneurs to face the crisis,change themselves,and seek breakthroughs.Firstly,the rhetorical situations are reconstructed from the speaker,the background,and the audience.As a speaker,Jack Ma built up from nothing,rose from obscurity,kept on fighting despite repeated setbacks and ultimately got great success,which is an important reason that he won the respect of the youth,the employees and entrepreneurs.He also worked as a foreign tour guide and college teachers before,which gave him insight into the emotional changes of the audience,enable him to speak efficiently and response appropriately in different situations,and shape his "chatting" speech style.As the founder of Alibaba and the president of Zhejiang International Business Association,Jack Ma needs to build Alibaba’s image,help the public learn Alibaba,create unified values and collective identity for Alibaba’s employees,and enhance the group morale of Zhejiang businessmen in his speech,so he has to take these content as focus when choosing speech content and discourse style.Through the analysis of rhetorical background,we found that the rhetorical content of Jack Ma’s speech is constrained by various factors such as the type of speech,the time and place of the speech,the historical background and the attitude of the audience to the topic of the speech.Through the stratification of the audience,we found that Jack Ma’s public speaking in the Internet era has transcended the limitations of time and space,so he must be aware of the globalism and cultural differences,fully demonstrating his respect for multiculturalism and his understanding of different attitudes and diverse values.At the same time,however,each speech should target a specific audience,taking the differences in the audiences’age,social background,and educational experience into account,adjust timely the appeal points in the speech,which in turn produces good speech results.Secondly,according to the classical rhetoric theory "Five Arts",the rhetorical text was deconstructed form four aspects of "invention,organization,style and delivery".For invention,Jack Ma carefully selects a series of arguments to build his calm,frank,sincere,and reprehensible entrepreneur personal identity,as well as Alibaba’s responsible organizational image to appeal to ethos-speaker credibility;using arguments focusing on common,history,crisis and vision to appeal to pathos-the audiences’ emotions;flexibly using relevant arguments such as causal reasoning,deductive reasoning,inductive reasoning,and analogical reasoning to appeal to logos(logic)to convince audiences.For organization,the four speeches are different:in the 2015 Hong Kong and Taiwan speeches,Jack Ma mainly explained the essential elements of entrepreneurs to the young students through the strategy of extending his own feelings to others;in the speech of the annual meeting in 2017,Jack Ma carried forward the cause pioneered by Alibaba’s predecessors and forged ahead into the future to make the employees immersed in the situation,thus effectively created a sense of belonging to the collective identity;in the 2018 World Zhejiang Businessmen Shanghai Forum speech,Jack Ma mainly promoted the confidence and morale of Zhejiang businessmen from macroscopic to microcosmic,from the country to the individual.Broadly speaking,these four speeches are composed of six parts:the opening remarks,the topic,the arguments,the questions of to do what and how to do,the answers to the questions,the end.For style,Jack Ma’s words are very vivid,using exaggeration and metaphor to appeal to humor,delighting the audience’s soul,increasing the audience’s trust in his speaking,and thus stimulating the audience’s emotional resonance and winning the audience’s approval.For delivery,Jack Ma’s grasp of sounds,gestures and other body movements is quite perfect and has a strong appeal.At each speech scene,Jack Ma delivered the speech freely,humorously and with ease.His tone is swaying,which is easy to infect and drive the emotional involvement of the audience,triggering inner recognition and echo.Thirdly,the study made a simple assessment of the rhetorical effects of the four speeches from the responses to the rhetorical situation,the reaction of the audience and media reports and evaluations.From the response to the rhetorical situation,Jack Ma achieved his goal of attracting talents from Hong Kong and Taiwan,attracting social capital and promoting the image of the organization through pubic speaking.From the reaction of the audience,Jack Ma made the employees so enthusiastic that they screamed for him,and let the Hong Kong and Taiwan youths who did not know much about him agree with Alibaba’s values,and also allowed the originally skeptical audience to conduct a rational analysis of what he said.Judging from media reports and evaluations,public and expert comments to his speech are relatively positive,and the attitudes of Hong Kong and Taiwan officials to Jack Ma and Alibaba have also changed.