Frederick Talbott focuses on leadership communication, helping teams and individuals master professional speaking and storytelling, overcome speech anxiety and turn the resulting energy into dynamic focus and advocacy, master motivational listening, and develop positive leadership awareness and resulting success. He is a heralded trainer and convention speaker who celebrates every audience member and customizes every program to best meet client needs. His workshops and keynote addresses feature a blend of applied wisdom and focused takeaways, storytelling, humor, and transformational thinking.

He also shares training and consulting in creativity; the power and process of foresight and strategic visioning; dynamic transformational thinking, applying problem finding, analysis, and solving and opportunity identification and development; conflict resolution (negotiation, conciliation, and mediation for managers) ; news media relations; crisis communications; team building and leadership (including team reunification and peacekeeping) ; communications law and ethics; humor in the workplace; strategic thinking; and time and change management. He also specializes in powerhouse public relations and advertising copy and campaign development.

He created The Talbott Method, a process that teaches participants how to overcome speech anxiety (stage fright) and convert the resulting energy into dynamic advocacy. Corporate, government, association, and educational clients have included IBM, Goldman Sachs, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USF Holland, Bank Administration Institute, Bristol-Myers Squibb, TAP Pharmaceuticals, New York Life Insurance, the U. S. Army, the U.S. Navy, the Tennessee Valley Authority, Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI), Bell Atlantic, BellSouth (now AT&T), the State Government Affairs Council, and others. He is a powerful and positive convention and meeting speaker, executive and management trainer, and counselor; a master speech and advocacy coach; an award-winning journalist; a public relations and crisis communications specialist; attorney; mediator; consultant; humorist; author; songwriter; and blues harmonica player.

Fred is the author of Shakespeare on Leadership, Churchill on Courage, and his business humor book JJ’s Business Bullets. He is a veteran investigative journalist whose work was heralded as innovative, objective, and often bold and courageous. As a humorist, he contributed material to NBC’s Saturday Night Live (“Weekend Update”), Jeff MacNelly’s “Shoe” cartoon, and by request taught humor writing to the White House speechwriting team in the summer of 1991. From 1993-2009 he taught leadership communications to students from 84 nations at Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management while also earning superior evaluations from the school’s executive programs participants. He led the journalism sequence and management communications program at Old Dominion University from 1983-1993.

He is the first MBA professor in the nation to require every student to perform the most challenging speech--a standup comedy routine. Innovations also included crisis communications “boot camp, ” using song writing to teach concise and compelling writing, and generating business plan excellence by having students target a top Silicon Valley venture capital firm. Fred’s teaching, framed in his belief in inspiring every student, has been featured in The New York Times, Training, Training & Development, Entrepreneur, and on CNBC’s Power Lunch. His public relations advice has been featured on page 1 of The Wall Street Journal. He was honored with major Vanderbilt University awards for his promotion of opportunities for persons with disabilities, affirmative action, and the advancement of diversity initiatives and earned seven teaching honors at Old Dominion University. He was the founding faculty sponsor of 100% Owen, named the top collegiate public service club in the nation in 1996.

During 1998 and 1999 Fred helped more than 800 American and overseas banks eliminate public fear of the Year 2000, or Y2K, challenge and turn the event into a positive customer relations and marketing success. In 2003 he predicted eventual economic chaos would result from the Federal Reserve’s lowering of the prime interest rate to one percent.

Fred earned a J.D. and master’s degree in journalism from the University of South Carolina and a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Florida Southern College. He is a member of the South Carolina Bar and earned mediation certification in South Carolina and Tennessee. He resides in Naples, Florida.