7. Presentation Advice from Mark Twain: Brevity Takes Time

The celebrated American author Mark Twain was also a most prolific writer. Amazon lists more than 12,000 books consisting of various editions of Mr. Twain’s own works and works about him. So great was his output that his quotes alone—some actual, some apocryphal—have even more references on the Internet than do his books.

One of his most famous quotes, which is quite applicable to presentations, came from an exchange Mr. Twain had with his publisher. The publisher sent the author a telegram reading:

NEED 2-PAGE SHORT STORY [IN] TWO DAYS.

The writer sent back a telegram reading:

NO CAN DO 2 PAGES TWO DAYS. CAN DO 30 PAGES 2 DAYS. NEED 30 DAYS TO DO 2 PAGES.^F7.1

Mr. Twain’s pithy nineteenth-century observation captures the essence—and the chronic problem—of twenty-first-century business communications. Although email and Twitter have instilled a drastic decline in the verbiage (and the style, spelling, punctuation, and courtesy—but those are subjects for another time) of today’s exchanges, the most mission-critical of all business communications, the presentation, still suffers from Mr. Twain’s dilemma. The pressures and pace of modern life allow very little time to prepare pitches. As a result, the quick-and-dirty approach inevitably produces sagas that approach the length of doctoral dissertations, the equivalent of delivering a treatise on how to build a clock when all that is needed is to tell the time.

We can measure the consequence of this dilemma in another manufacturing operation, that of automobile wheels: The longer the spoke, the bigger the tire.

Today’s business audiences, driven by their own daily pressures, do not have the time—or the patience—to listen to the entire history of Western civilization when you take the floor.

Solve Mark Twain’s dilemma for your presentations. Invest the time and effort to prepare for your mission-critical pitch. Start early and do several drafts. Don’t leave the preparation time for your presentation until the flight to the city in which you will be delivering it. That approach will produce an epic of encyclopedic size—and a reaction of yawning sighs.

Oh, I know, your plate is very full, but which of your many daily tasks has as much impact as the brief window of opportunity you have when you present to decision makers? Andy Warhol’s much-referenced 15 minutes of fame have their equivalent in the precious moments you have in front of your live audience. Make those moments count by preparing thoroughly.

It will be well worth your while—and, even more important, your audience’s while.