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Lately I’ve been obsessing about how to make a big story very small.  Specifically, I’m planning to shrink a mountain of information to three pages in an industry presentation. And use pictures not words to tell the story.

Ha! Good luck, you may think. Well, with my antennae up for a plausible approach, I’m inspired by people who’ve “been there, done that” in this mission of creating the incredible shrinking story.

An executive from Levi Strauss once shared a parable at the national conference of Business for Social Responsibility, now known as BSR.  Still early in its development, BSR was struggling to define its itself. Though the organization had a singular focus on making the world a better place through sustainable business practices, the needs of its constituency ranged widely. The little guys didn’t necessarily have the same agenda as the big corporations. Hearing a parable about a king who persists in having his messenger cut his life’s story in half, over and over, until it fits on one page was a worthy lesson for the task before the membership. (Years later, it’s interesting to see that BSR references itself only by its acronym — that’s taking shrinking to the extreme!)

And then I found a soulmate in Josh Silverman, President of Skype. He shared his career path in the New York Times article, “Learning in Business by Following the Heart.” Silverman’s first  job on Capitol Hill taught him a lesson or two in leadership communication:

In Washington, no matter how complex the issue, you have to boil it down to one page. That’s an invaluable skill for a leader.

The process of distillation isn’t easy. I recall one CEO telling me to “cut it in half” after presenting a positioning statement that was already half the length of every previous articulation of the company’s value proposition.

Done.  Two sentences. Now, back to those three pages I mentioned earlier.