Produce Powerful Presentations (Collection)

12. The Elevator Pitch in One Sentence: How to Describe Your Business Succinctly

In a Wall Street Journal article about the Herculean tasks facing President Barack Obama—the economic crisis, the environment, health care reform, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and North Korea—columnist Peggy Noonan referenced Clare Boothe Luce, a noted twentieth-century playwright, journalist, ambassador, and congresswoman. Ms. Luce “told about a conversation she had in 1962 in the White House with her old friend John F. Kennedy. She told him, she said, that ‘a great man is one sentence.’”

Ms. Noonan defined that one sentence as “leadership [that] can be so well summed up in a single sentence that you don’t have to hear his name to know who’s being talked about. ‘He ...