There’s a strange comfort in beginnings and endings.
Maybe it’s human. Maybe it’s universal. We frame our lives around birth and death, just as we frame our stories around the classic trio: beginning, middle, and end. Even cosmology plays along: Big Bang, cosmic expansion, heat death. Alpha. Middle. Omega.
But somewhere along the way, especially in the boardroom, behind the beamer, we’ve forgotten the middle.
And that’s exactly where the magic should happen.
Stop the Bullets
Back in the pre-2007 era, I was a victim of—and at times a contributor to—the PowerPoint industrial complex.
You know the type: slide after slide of bullet points, a ClipArt here, a yawn there. One-hour meetings that felt like they added a year to your life, but not in a good way.
Then one day, like Neo in The Matrix, I decided to stop the bullets.
No more endless slides. No more soul-numbing info dumps. Just stories. Real ones. With structure. Emotion. Purpose.
But here’s the paradox. Even in this rebellion, I found myself reinforcing the same structure I’d been trying to break free from. I became really good at strong openings, trained that if you lose your audience in the first minute, you’ve lost them for good. I nailed the ending too—a loop closure, a punch, a call to action.
The middle? That became the afterthought.
The Middle Is the Message
It hit me recently: the middle is where everything actually happens.
It’s where Neo learns he is the One. It’s where Frodo decides not to trust the ring. It’s where the Matrix stops being a metaphor. It’s the messy, nuanced part—the journey part.
In corporate storytelling, we gloss over the middle. We rush through it with bloated presentations and dense reports, scared to take the time to connect, explain, resonate. We think the job is to deliver everything. But storytelling isn’t about everything.
It’s about essence.
TED Got It Right
One of the few formats that nails this balance is the TED Talk. It’s no coincidence that the original acronym stood for Technology, Entertainment, and Design—not Teams, Emails, and Deadlines.
TED Talks have boundaries. Fifteen to twenty minutes. Every word earns its place. Every visual serves the narrative. And they know something most corporations forget: time is precious, and attention is sacred.
Just like a tight 45-minute TV episode, you don’t want to miss even a second of a great TED Talk. It’s edited with intention. And that’s the point:
Good storytelling is editing.
So why, in corporate life, do we tolerate 60-minute slogs that could’ve been a 20-minute story with a 10-minute Q&A and a virtual mic drop?
Respect the Clock, Elevate the Story
If you have an hour, aim for 45 minutes. If you have 30, aim for 20. Leave room for questions, silence, reflection—even surprise.
Surprise your audience with a gift of time.
And don’t fill that time with noise. Fill it with story. Think of your presentation like an episode of your favorite show. Heavily edited. Dialogue that matters. Scenes that move the plot. A middle that keeps people watching, not checking their phones or mentally filing expense reports.
Treat your audience not like a captive group of stakeholders but like viewers of a season premiere. Build the anticipation. Deliver the arc. Leave them wanting the next episode.
The AI Assist: Not a Cheat, But a Co-Writer
Let’s not forget the tool in our pocket that’s rapidly becoming the ghostwriter for a generation: AI.
Yes, people will say, “You can spot when something was written by AI,” as if that’s a bad thing. But spotting AI isn’t the point. Feeling the story is. Use AI not to replace your voice, but to amplify it. Let it challenge you, push you, edit you, co-create with you.
That’s what I’m doing here.
This post started with a brain dump. A voice note. A string of digressions. And I told my AI: You’re not just transcribing. You’re storytelling. Start strong. Land it even stronger. And treat every sentence like it matters.
Because it does.
What's on your mind?