Recently, I’ve been wrestling with a secret fantasy of walking away from everything I own to go gold mining in Alaska.
It’s all because of the reality TV program, “Gold Rush”. The show follows a bunch of hapless greenhorns who are struggling through trial and error, mostly error, to strike it rich in the gold fields of the Klondike.
The miners know from their testing that there is gold in the ground, but to get at it, they need to dig out tons and tons of earth. They need to sort out the rocks, wash away the dirt and carefully separate the gold from the sand.
In the end, from each massive scoop of earth they recover a tiny amount of gold to take to the bank.
Unfortunately, in far too many presentations I see, it’s as if the speaker were a miner who hauled the tons of dirt directly in to town and dumped it all on the floor of the bank lobby. The bank president would surely refuse to have anything to do with it. He simply isn’t equipped to deal with it.
That’s what happens when a speaker dumps reams of data on the audience, whether verbally or through PowerPoint slides. The audience shuts down. They aren’t equipped to process so much raw data while sitting in a presentation.
It’s the miner’s job to refine the earth and present the banker with only the gold.
It’s the speaker’s job to refine the data and present the audience with only the most significant and relevant facts, trends and conclusions.
That’s the gold we want from you.
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