The Presentation Without Slides

At five to nine on Wednesday morning, Daniela Quintana stood at the side of a hotel conference room and checked her laptop one last time. Hers was the first talk of the conference. In the third row sat the three people she most needed to impress: the buyers from Verdemar, a chain of forty supermarkets. If they liked her company's delivery app, they would sign a contract for the whole year. "You'll be fine," her boss, Ernesto, said quietly. "Just don't go over twenty minutes."

She had thirty-two slides, full of charts and maps, and she had rehearsed them all week. On Sunday she had even explained the whole thing to her grandmother, Chela, who didn't own a computer. With no screen at all, Daniela had used a salt shaker as a truck and moved it across the kitchen table. "Now I understand it," Chela had said. "So why do you need all those pictures?"

At nine o'clock, the host introduced her, and Daniela clicked to her first slide. The screen flickered, turned blue and went black. The projector gave a long, tired hum and shut down. A technician hurried over, pressed a few buttons and shook his head. "It's overheated," he said. "I'll set up another one, but it'll take at least twenty minutes." In the third row, one of the buyers looked at his watch.

For a moment, Daniela thought about asking for a break. Then she remembered the salt shaker on her grandmother's table. She closed her laptop, walked to the front of the stage and picked up a glass of water. "Let's imagine this is a truck," she said, "full of tomatoes for one of your stores. It's six in the morning, and it's stuck in traffic. Nobody at the store knows. What will happen next?"

Without a single chart, she told them the story of that truck. She described the manager waiting at the back door, the staff with nothing to do and the tomatoes going soft in the heat. Then, with the glass in one hand and her phone in the other, she showed how the app would warn the store an hour earlier. People laughed when the "truck" nearly fell off the table. When she finished, eighteen minutes later, the room clapped loudly.

The oldest of the buyers, a grey-haired man named Mr. Arriola, came over while the technician was still plugging in the new projector. He picked up the glass of water and smiled. "I've sat through hundreds of presentations, and I've forgotten nearly all of them," he said. "This is the first one I'll really remember. Send us the contract on Monday."