Moving from Brevity to Aha! in Your Presentation

Jerry Weissman

In 1988, Bill Clinton, then the Governor of Arkansas, gave a nominating speech for Michael Dukakis at the Democratic National Convention. By convention rules, Clinton was allowed 15 minutes, but he brought an 18-page speech. According to The New York Times,¹ he read almost every word, rambling on for so long that the delegates began to chant, “We want Mike!” Ignoring their chants, Clinton went on and on and on. When, after 30 minutes, he finally said, “In conclusion...” the crowd roared their approval.

Later, in his autobiography, Clinton admitted, “It was thirty-two minutes of total disaster.”²

For his first venture onto the national political stage, Bill Clinton neglected to take a lesson in brevity from other national leaders’ speeches:

• Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: 272 words

• Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address: 700 words

• Winston Churchill’s “blood, toil, tears, and sweat” speech that launched Britain’s entry into World War II: 627 words

• John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address: 13.5 minutes

Barack Obama, Clinton’s Democratic successor, learned well from his predecessors. His now-famous speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention ran 16.5 minutes, and his own now-historic 2009 inaugural address ran 18.5 minutes.

Clinton ultimately learned his lesson. As president, he became a charismatic speaker, able to captivate any audience. After he left office, he leveraged that skill on the speaking circuit with fees for his keynotes earning him eight figures annually.

The best business example of the value of brevity comes from that most mission-critical of all presentations—the IPO road show. I have had the privilege to work with many companies developing their road shows. When a company offers shares of its stock to the public, the CEO and the CFO go on an arduous two-week tour, delivering 70 or 80 iterations of the same presentation. Inevitably, as the tour proceeds, each iteration of the presentation gets longer and longer in a phenomenon known as “presentation creep.” Targeted at 20–25 minutes, by the end of the road show, some presentations have been known to run as long as 40 minutes. Except for one company.

Let’s call them XYZ. During XYZ’s road show, I received an excited call from an investment banker friend in New York who had just attended the luncheon presentation. He said, “This was the best road show you’ve ever coached!”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because they did it in 15 minutes, and the investors were delighted to get back to their offices.”

It is doubtful that you will face the same challenges and stakes in your presentations as national leaders and IPO road show executives do, but you can learn from the masters. Your audience doesn’t need to hear every encyclopedic detail of your business proposal. They have neither the time nor the patience—especially in this Twitter-driven world—to listen to long presentations.

Keep brevity in mind while you are developing your presentations, and when you are finished and ready to present, take one more look at it and find more material you can omit. Follow Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s famous advice: Less Is More and its corollary: “When in doubt leave it out.”

The Elevator Pitch in One Sentence: How to Describe Your Business Succinctly

In a Wall Street Journal article about the Herculean tasks facing President Barack Obama—the economic crisis, the environment, health care reform, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and North Korea—columnist Peggy Noonan referenced Clare Boothe Luce, a noted twentieth-century playwright, journalist, ambassador, and congresswoman. Ms. Luce “told about a conversation she had in 1962 in the White House with her old friend John F. Kennedy. She told him, she said, that ‘a great man is one sentence.’”

Ms. Noonan then went on to define that one sentence as “leadership [that] can be so well summed up in a single sentence that you don't have to hear his name to know who's being talked about. ‘He preserved the union and freed the slaves,’ or, ‘He lifted us out of a great depression and helped to win a World War.’ You didn't have to be told ‘Lincoln’ or ‘FDR.’”³

As a conservative columnist and former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, Ms. Noonan said that Barack Obama was “replacing his sentence with 10 paragraphs,” and recommended that he should try to narrow his focus because “an administration about everything is an administration about nothing.” Jon Stewart, a longtime supporter of Mr. Obama, echoed Ms. Noonan on an episode of his The Daily Show, saying, “So, Mister President, while I am impressed with your Renaissance man level of knowledge in a plethora of subjects, may I humbly say, ‘That’s great! Now fix the economy!’”⁴

The one-sentence recommendation is also applicable to business with particular regard to the universally referenced elevator pitch—so named to describe the way you’d describe your business if you stepped into an elevator and suddenly saw that hot prospect you’ve been trying to buttonhole. The allusion is intended to limit the pitch to the length of an elevator ride. Unfortunately, most such pitches in business are often as long as elevator rides in the Empire State Building, the equivalent of what Ms. Noonan calls Barack Obama’s “10 paragraphs.”

A guide to help you create a succinct elevator pitch can be found in the words of Rosser Reeves, a prominent advertising executive with the Ted Bates agency during the middle of the twentieth century.

Mr. Reeves coined the term “Unique Selling Proposition,” defined in his biographical sketch in Advertising Age magazine as “the one reason the product needed to be bought or was better than its competitors.”⁵

These USPs often took the form of slogans—Reeves oversaw the introduction of dozens, some that still exist to this day, such as M&M’s^® “melt in your mouth, not in your hand.” He argued that advertising campaigns should be unchanging, with a single slogan for each product.

To pitch or describe your own business, develop your own USP along Rosser Reeves’ guidelines. One of the most common complaints about presentations is: “I listened to their pitch for 30 minutes, and I still don’t know what they do!”

The USP is what they do.

The one sentence Peggy Noonan recommended for Barack Obama would undoubtedly satisfy Jon Stewart—as well as every man and woman in America: “He brought America back from economic collapse and kept us strong and secure in the age of terror.”

Getting to “Aha!”: The Magic Moment

Dr. John Kounios, a psychologist at Drexel University in Philadelphia, defined The “Aha!” Moment in a Wall Street Journal article as “any sudden comprehension that allows you to see something in a different light...It could be the solution to a problem; it could be getting a joke; or suddenly recognizing a face.”⁶

The “Aha!” Moment.

According to William Safire, the master etymologist for The New York Times, the first to express the moment was Chaucer in a fox hunt in his Canterbury Tales.⁷ Archimedes undoubtedly experienced it when he noticed the displacement of water in his bath, as did Sir Isaac Newton when he saw an apple fall from a tree, and Alexander Graham Bell when he called to his assistant, “Watson, come here; I want you.”

The “Aha!” Moment.

Oprah Winfrey and Mutual of Omaha engaged in a protracted legal battle over the advertising use of the phrase until they finally settled out of court.

The “Aha!” Moment.

History is filled with quests for the defining moment—that magic instant of Eureka or epiphany, that sudden turning or tipping point.

You can achieve the presentation equivalent of the “Aha!” Moment with your audiences if you learn one very simple technique—but be forewarned that the technique breaks rank with common practice in business today. Standard Operating Procedure is to load up the PowerPoint deck with all the information that the presenter thinks an audience needs to evaluate a proposal and make a decision. In other words, the slide show is meant to stand alone. You will read about the folly of this approach in the next section on graphics, but it will be from the design point of view.

For now, let’s look at the point of view of the presenter. If the slide show is viewed solely as support for the presenter—as it should—then the presenter’s narrative can go beyond the information on the slides to provide substance and even add value. The presenter can go even further to lead the audience to a conclusion about the slide—with information that does not appear on the slide.

Picture this: The CEO of a start-up company seeking financing makes a pitch to a venture capital company. During the presentation the CEO puts up this simple slide:

The CEO discusses each of the benefits briefly and then summarizes, “So you can see that our product provides a rich set of benefits to our customers.”

All very well and good, but imagine if the presenter were to add the following statement in the narrative only, “These benefits bring our company repeat business, repeat business brings us recurring revenues, and recurring revenues grow shareholder value.”

The “Aha!” Moment.

Endnotes

1. R.W. Apple Jr., “The Democrats in Atlanta; Dukakis’ Speech Offers His ‘Vision of America’,” New York Times, July 22, 1988

2. Bill Clinton, My Life (New York: Random House, Inc., 2004)

3. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124596573543456401.html

4. http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/232256/thu-july-2-2009-robert-kenner

5. http://adage.com/century/people005.html

6. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124535297048828601.html

7. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/magazine/05FOBOnLanguage-t.html