A Simple Tip For Better Business Presentations

I’m going to start with something that might sting: if you’re reading this article, there’s a good chance your presentations suck. Not “could use improvement” suck. Actual, genuine, ‘put-me-into-a-comatose-state’ suck.

How do I know? Because I’ve been trapped in conference rooms with you. I’ve watched brilliant executives turn into monotone robots the moment PowerPoint opens. I’ve seen game-changing ideas die slow, painful deaths under tsunamis of bullet points and corporate jargon.

This matters more than your hurt feelings. Presentations aren’t just meetings, they’re the moments when careers pivot. The CFO who can’t make budget cuts compelling gets ignored. The Marketing Director who buries insights under data gets bypassed. The startup founder who can’t sell the vision goes home empty-handed.

Yet somehow we’ve all agreed to pretend that boring presentations are just part of business. They’re not. They’re a choice, and it’s the wrong one.

The Great PowerPoint Delusion

Microsoft convinced an entire generation of business people that making slides equals making presentations. It doesn’t, any more than buying ingredients equals cooking dinner.

But PowerPoint is seductive. It gives you the illusion of progress. You can spend hours tweaking typefaces and animations while avoiding the hard work of actually thinking through what you’re trying to say. I know people who’ve built 40-slide decks without once asking themselves what they want their audience to do differently afterward.

Jeff Bezos figured this out at Amazon and banned PowerPoint entirely. His meetings now start with everyone reading a six-page narrative in silence. Sounds weird, feels awkward, works brilliantly. Why? Because you can’t fake your way through six pages of actual sentences. Every paragraph has to earn its place. Every argument has to hold up to scrutiny.

We’ve tried this approach with certain clients after watching too many strategy meetings devolve into slide-clicking festivals. The results were both uncomfortable and illuminating. Half the “presentations” that looked solid in PowerPoint fell apart when forced into narrative form. It’s far too easy to conflate busy slides for clear thinking.

Your Brain on Boring

The thing about human attention is that it’s not polite. It doesn’t pretend to care about your quarterly metrics just because you spent three hours making charts. Attention is earned, not assumed, and most business presentations never even try to earn it.

Instead, they assault the brain with information overload. Twelve bullet points per slide, in 12pt type. Charts with seventeen data series. Slides that look like they were designed by someone who gets paid by the word. The audience’s brain takes one look at this mess and quietly checks out.

According to Miller’s Law, our brains can hold about seven pieces of information in active memory. When we exceed that limit, something inevitably falls off the table. Usually it’s our message.

The best presenters understand this limitation and design around it. One idea per slide. Lots of white space. Images that support rather than compete with their words. They look simple, but that simplicity is sophisticated. It’s the difference between a Swiss watch and a dashboard full of blinking lights.

Stories Beat Spreadsheets (Every Single Time)

Humans are storytelling animals. We’ve been sharing information through narratives for 200,000 years, through spreadsheets for about 40. Guess which format our brains prefer?

Yet business presentations typically ignore this evolutionary reality. They start with context slides and background information, as if we’re all sitting around hoping for more data to process. We’re not. We’re hoping for a reason to care.

Don’t misunderstand the premise. This isn’t about dumbing things down or adding fictional elements. It’s about recognizing that even the most analytical minds process information emotionally first. Give people a reason to care, before you give them reasons to believe.

The Rehearsal Problem Nobody Talks About

Most people think presentation skills are about confidence and public speaking. They’re actually about preparation so thorough that we can forget about our slides entirely and focus on our audience.

One of our clients works in the VC space. She once told me she practices every pitch presentation at least 10-12 times before the real meeting. Not because she’s nervous, but because she wants complete cognitive freedom during the actual presentation. She’s watching for micro-expressions, tracking energy levels, ready to pivot should she feel her planned approach isn’t landing the way she wants.

Such a level of preparation seems excessive until you realize what she’s optimizing for. She’s not trying to deliver a perfect performance. She’s trying to maximize her ability to adapt in real time based on audience feedback. The extensive rehearsal isn’t about memorization. It’s about internalization.

Unfortunately, most presenters do the opposite. They practice just enough to avoid embarrassing themselves, then spend the actual presentation reading their slides and hoping for the best. They’re performing for their slides instead of connecting with their audience.

Data Doesn’t Speak for Itself (And Other Business Myths)

The modern business world has developed an almost religious reverence for data. Charts and graphs are treated like sacred objects that somehow prove points simply from their sheer existence.

Data is merely evidence, not argument. It supports conclusions but doesn’t create them. Yet presentation after presentation leads with analytics, as if the numbers will magically convince everyone of whatever point the presenter is trying to make.

I’ve watched Marketing Directors present customer satisfaction scores as if the data alone justified their budget requests. I’ve seen Operations executives show efficiency metrics without explaining what they mean for the business. I’ve sat through financial reviews where spreadsheets were projected onto screens as if their mere existence constituted communication.

This approach fails because it misunderstands how persuasion works. People aren’t convinced by information. They’re convinced by interpretations of information that align with their existing beliefs, or maybe challenge those beliefs in compelling ways.

The same customer satisfaction data can support arguments for increased marketing spend, better customer service training, or product development priorities. The data doesn’t choose. That’s our job. We’re there to make that choice clear and compelling.

Why This Matters More Than You Think

Bad presentations aren’t just annoying. They’re also expensive. They waste time in a culture already drowning in unnecessary meetings. They obscure good ideas under layers of corporate communication practices that help nobody.

More importantly, they signal incompetence in ways that presenters rarely recognize. When we subject our audience to poorly structured, visually cluttered, intellectually scattered presentations, we’re telling them we don’t value their time. We’re demonstrating we haven’t thought clearly about our own ideas. Basically, we’re showing that we don’t understand how to communicate effectively with smart people.

These signals matter more than most people realize. Promotion decisions, project approvals, budget allocations are all influenced by perceptions of competence that get shaped in conference rooms during presentations that people think don’t really matter.

Our competitors are still making boring presentations. They’re still cramming slides with bullet points and wondering why their ideas don’t get traction. That’s where our opportunity lies.

The Simple Fix Nobody Uses

The solution isn’t complicated, but it requires abandoning some deeply-ingrained habits. When you’re still fleshing-out ideas, concepts, and metaphors, the last thing you should be thinking about is slide design.

What’s far more important at the very beginning is creating the structure of what the final presentation will become. Define the goal of the presentation: What’s the take-away you want your audience to remember once you’ve finished? Where are they currently in terms of their knowledge of the subject?

The best presentations are delivered as stories – they have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Write your story out, as an essay or even just as outline notes. Define the introduction, the main content, the summary.

Now we get to the fun part. Break out a pad of Post-It notes.

Storyboard the presentation as if you were writing a play, or a movie script. Why? Because that’s exactly what you’re doing.

Craft the presentation to have a natural flow, leading both the presenter and the audience to the conclusion and summary. Write or draw on the Post-Its how you want the message to come across. Not literally – don’t write down slide titles or bullet-points. Just the information that you want your audience to remember once the presentation is over.

Fix the problems on paper way before you even think about slides. Refine and edit the Post-Its. Stick them to the wall, edit their content, change their order. Refine, iterate, and tweak until you have a basic skeleton of how the story needs to be told.

Once you’ve got the basic outline to your story, only then is it time to sit in front of your computer. When your written argument is bulletproof (pardon the pun) only then is it time figure out how to visualize it. The slides are there to illuminate the points we’re making, not to hold them up.

PowerPoint, Keynote, or whatever isn’t the presentation. The content is the presentation. Refining your message using analog tools keeps you focused on designing the optimal delivery of the content, rather than if the next slide should have a fade-out transition or a wipe right-to-left.

Your audience will notice the difference immediately. Clear thinking produces clear communication, and clear communication is so rare in business contexts that it stands out like a beacon.

The question isn’t whether you can afford to improve your presentation skills. The question is whether you can afford not to.