If you are sitting in a conference room today, you are likely watching a professional commit a quiet act of value destruction. You are looking at a slide deck that serves as a teleprompter. The speaker is reading the words you can already see, effectively treating their own presence as a redundant audio track for a document you could have read in ninety seconds.
In management terms, this is a failure of operational efficiency.
When a presenter uses slides to repeat their speech, they are ignoring the opportunity cost of the room. You have a gathering of specialized professionals whose collective hourly rate is staggering. To spend that time on a low information density activity is a strategic error. It assumes that the goal of a presentation is to transmit data. It isn’t.
If the goal is data transmission, send a memo. If the goal is a review of the quarterly technicals, send an email.
A presentation exists to create a change in state. It is about humanity and energy adding value to the raw information. When you hide behind a prescribed format or a wall of bullet points, you are essentially liquidating your own brand equity in real time. You aren’t leading. You are just narrating a spreadsheet.
The clinical reality is that an audience has a finite amount of cognitive bandwidth. If they are busy reading your slides, they aren’t listening to your insights. You are forcing them to choose between two competing streams of information, which results in a net loss of retention.
True thought leadership in the financial sector requires the courage to be shorter. It requires the clarity to know exactly what the presentation is for. If the work doesn’t change a course of action, then the work shouldn’t happen.
The best version of you doesn’t need a teleprompter. It needs a point of view.
Don’t use slides as a crutch. Use your personal presence to provide the context that the data cannot. If you want to be missed when you are gone, stop giving us something we could have read without you.
Are you adding value to the room, or are you just filling the time?
I am a Canadian insurance and investment professional and the President and Chief Executive Officer of Chazz Financial Inc. and Chazz Capital Assets. I write about leadership, markets, insurance, investing, and decision making, with a focus on how structure and incentives shape outcomes.
I hold a business degree and I am a Fellow of the Canadian Securities Institute (FCSI®), a Chartered Life Underwriter (CLU®), a Chartered Financial Planner®, a Certified Health Specialist and a Mutual Fund Investment Representative.
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