Last week I had the pleasure of giving my annual lecture on how to give presentations at the University of Zürich.

My one message was as always: presenting is storytelling. I discussed this single message from multiple perspectives, including how a good presentation has a single central message.

Getting to this one message is not straight forward. It requires restraint and discipline. But, why a single message? First, because it is hard enough to get one right, where by getting it right I understand getting it in the head of the audience. And second, because the medium of a presentation does not allow for cramming more in it.

One message is particularly hard when you start from a tone of data. Finding the one message that resonates with the audience, and that is worth their time when you might have zillions of data points can be highly challenging not just because of the size of the problem, but mostly because when you are inside the problem it is hard to see what is interesting from the outside.

An excellent example of bringing data to sing, as the TED site puts it, is Hans Rosling’s first TED talk. During my lecture I showed the first 5 minutes of the talk as an example of how even dry statistical data can have a vibrant story to tell.

At the end, a student challenged me: "This is so stripped down that it looks like a sales pitch. Are you saying that a presentation should be nothing more than a sales pitch?"

In a way, a presentation is a sales pitch. Like a sales pitch, it is stripped down of many details. And like in a sales pitch, you are asking for something: you want the audience to get excited enough about the subject so that they spend energy doing something about it.

But, a presentation is more than a sales pitch. A good presentation has a formative mission, too. You cannot transmit all data related to the problem, but you must provide the framing of the problem. This is what the audience must take away, because once they know how to decompose the problem, they are equipped to go and learn from the data on their own.