You’re a leader, and so you stand before an audience all the time: press conferences announcing new products; employee seminars; strategy meetings; sales pitches and so on.

Try to remember that each of these functions are different, they involve a different set of goals; a different relationship with the audience, and a different level of control.

When you are standing in front of an audience of primarily strangers for say 10 to 30 minutes, there are limitations to what you can do.

Odds are, you are not going to be able to hard-sell your product or company; make the audience rethink their business models or change decades-old beliefs or strategies. You don’t even have enough time to comprehensively educate or talk about the pros and cons of any subject.

But here is what you can do: you can convince an audience that a particular subject, which you care deeply about, is worth further thought sometime in the future.

If you can inspire a group of strangers to devote a half-hour of thought to your subject in the coming weeks or months, you’ve hit it out of the park.

At first blush, this may not seem like very much at all, but that changes when you consider to whom you are speaking.

Your intended audience, whether you know them or not, consists – more or less – of people like you: smart; driven; with their own information resources and their own formidable abilities for getting things done.

Imagine what happens when you devote a half-hour, or more, to a subject. You research on the Internet; pick the brains of colleagues and friends; analyze the merits of integrating this subject into the ways you do business, and then you start concrete foundations for making things happen – if you decide this idea is worth working with.

During this process, you might spread interest in the idea to those you brainstormed with, and then they would spread interest talking with others, and so on and so on.

If one speech can get 10 people like you to think about and discuss an idea, you’re setting the seeds for some serious possibilities. Imagine what you can do if you inspired 50 people in your audience, or a hundred, and so on.

A successful disruptive speech is a force multiplier of leadership energy, creativity and mental processing power. It is very much worth the effort and resources.

But to do it right, you need to remember that such speeches are not hard sells, product announcements or mandatory employee seminars.

A good disruptive speech is viral: you are infecting your audience with a brilliant idea and hoping that it will flourish in their own minds.