The Power Presentation

Most people in business, including the most successful ones, are too busy living their stories to focus on telling their stories. They spend 12 or 14 hours every day working on competitive strategies, product launches, financial analyses, marketing plans, mergers and acquisitions, sales pitches the plethora of vital business details that fill your days, too. They live, eat, sleep, breathe, dream, and inhale their businesses. They see every single one of the trees, but not the forest. They rarely have the opportunity, or feel the need, to take several long steps back from the details to visualize the whole and then describe it compellingly.

For most businesspeople, when a situation arises in which they must sell their business story, their intense involvement in the minutia often proves a hindrance. They mistakenly think that for the audience to understand anything , they have to be told everything . That's like being asked the time and responding with complete instructions for building a clock.

The remedy is painfully apparent: Focus. Separate the wheat from the chaff. Give the audience only what they need to know.