As many of you know, I walked across Turkey (click here if you want to see a map and photos).

At one point I was passing through a small town, and the group I had befriended suggested I have a drink with “Başkan.”

“Başkan” is “Mayor” in Turkish, so I was quite honored. I thought I was going to enjoy top-shelf whisky at a white-cloth restaurant with the town’s mayor.

That’s not at all what my new friends had in mind. They were playing a joke on me. “Başkan” was their nickname for the town drunk, the two of us weren’t going to drink top-shelf whisky, we were going to drink the most awful fortified wine out of a screw-cap bottle that I’ve ever had, and we weren’t going to sit at a white-cloth restaurant, we were going to sit on flimsy folding chairs on a balcony overlooking the town’s collection of vending machines.

Midway through our drinking session (actually, it was Başkan’s drinking session — I was discreetly pouring my cups of that awful fortified wine over the side of the balcony when Başkan wasn’t looking), a group of drunken teenage boys walked up.

“Who’s this?” they asked. Başkan told them.

Because I was a foreigner, the teenagers speculated that I was a spy. Because, you know, spy agencies regularly make their spies walk along the highway in the middle of nowhere, count cows, and wonder how much longer they’ll have to walk next to that smelly salt lake.

The teenagers decided that in order to defend the national honor against spies, they should throw me off the balcony.

I was nervous about this. They were drunk, but there were enough of them that I wouldn’t be able to fight them off.

“Wait,” one of them said as they closed in. “Maybe he’s Mossad.”

They backed off, but then another said:

“No, he’s American, he’s probably CIA.” The group closed back in.

I realized at that point that there is a spy hierarchy. You can throw a CIA agent over the balcony. But Mossad, hands off.

The teenagers decided that they couldn’t be sure, and so just to be safe, they would let me live. They said goodnight to Başkan and moved on.

You might ask what this has to do with your presentations. And here it is:

Be sure to drop a few names during your presentation. You’re probably not the CEO, so you won’t be able to use a phrase like “I ran this by McKinsey, and they said…”, but invoke someone else. Invoke Marketing, or Operations, or Customer Service, or whatever.

You don’t have to claim that they loved you. You don’t have to say “We showed this to Customer Service, and they loved it.” All you have to do is say something like “We ran this by Customer Service” or “When we ran this by Marketing, they suggested XYZ, and so we ABC.”

This heads off about half of the questions from the audience members who have decided that they are going to represent Customer Service or Marketing during the Q&A session.

And like I didn’t have to say much to the teenagers, you won’t have to say much about this during your presentation. This little bit is enough to make your audience think, “This isn’t just some crazy person running around with a half-baked idea and I need to be the voice of reason now. No, other people have seen this, and they are cool with it.”