Years ago, when I was at Microsoft, I was booked to talk about Windows Phone development at a user group. Before writing anything, I did what I always did back then: I searched the event’s hashtag, found five or so people who went regularly, and got in touch. A couple of them were kind enough to chat on the phone about what they hoped to hear. One I never spoke to, but scrolling back through his tweets I found a complaint. Every Microsoft speaker he had ever seen had an “Apple Stutter”.

He meant that Microsoft speakers never wanted to give Apple credit. Any talk about mobile reaches the same point in the story: 2007, the iPhone, and the moment the smartphone was reinvented. Everyone in the room knows it was Apple, but a Microsoft speaker would hesitate, mumble something about “the industry” and hurry on to the next slide. I recognised it immediately, because I did it too. I had the Apple Stutter.

So I went all in. When I got to that part of the talk, I gave Apple every bit of credit it deserved for revolutionising the smartphone, and I said it loud and proud. A few days later, reading through the feedback, I found a tweet from the same man. I was, he said, the first person from Microsoft he had seen without the Apple Stutter.

Two things have stayed with me. Audiences will tell you what they want to hear, if you go and look before you write. And they can spot a speaker being defensive from a mile away. Give credit freely, even to a competitor, and they will trust everything else you say a little more.