Presentation Advice from Mark Twain

April 16, 2009 by Jerry

mark_twain This month marks the publication date of yet another book by Mark Twain, the great American writer. Amazon lists 8,517 Twain items consisting of various editions of his own works and works about him. The current release, Who is Mark Twain?, is a collection of twenty-four previously unpublished pieces that were handpicked by Robert Hirst, general editor of the Mark Twain Project at the University of California, Berkeley. Mr. Hirst had plenty to choose from. So prolific was Twain, his quotes alone—some actual, some apocryphal—have become a cottage industry.

One of the most famous—and quite applicable to presentations—came from an exchange Twain had with his publisher. The publisher sent the author a telegram reading:

NEED 2-PAGE SHORT STORY TWO DAYS.

Twain 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.

Twain’s pithy 19th Century observation captures the essence—and the chronic problem—of 21st Century business communications. While email has instilled a drastic decline in the verbiage (as well as 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 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.

The consequence of Twain’s dilemma can be measured 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 to 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.

And while you’re going through those iterations, keep in mind the advice of another artistic icon, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: Less Is More—and its corollary, when in doubt leave it out.

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

Tomorrow: Presentation advice from Mike Nichols

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