President Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863 on the battlefield near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. This speech was incredibly powerful yet it was only 272 words! Less is more.
Steve Jobs was the quintessential communicator and entrepreneur. He firmly believed that for a product or idea to be widely adopted, it needed to have a simplistic design. The iPhone and iPad have only one button. His presentations usually have 3 bullet points or 3 images per slide and that’s all.
In this day and age we are so inundated with information that 140 character bottom line summaries are more relevant than lengthy write-ups. This is why Twitter has been so incredibly successful. The best business model presentations that I see as a venture capitalist have a maximum of 10 slides with only 3 bullet points per slide; less is more works.
Executives and potential investors have extraordinarily short attention spans in this day and age given the many screens that we are addicted to like smart phones, tablets, laptops, watches etc. You need to get your point across in as few words as possible.
Pretend that each message that you send costs you $100 per word. With this in mind you will definitely embrace the winning methodology of less is more in business.