For 10 minutes, Shapira, an adjunct lecturer at Harvard and the CEO of Global Public Speaking, watched the speech for the first time. She cried and called her dad.
“Have you ever seen this?” she asked him. “Oh my God.”
For anyone who has watched the speech, it was a familiar reaction. And yet Shapira, who has watched hundreds of speeches, had never seen it. Neither had Steven D. Cohen, a professor at Johns Hopkins whose research examines the communication behaviors of effective leaders.
It underscored a surprising contradiction about Valvano’s speech: Among sports fans, it remains a sacred text, an inspirational call to action that has helped grant nearly $400 million for cancer research.
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