No Compromise On Openness.


This is the seventh slide in a deck of twenty that is posted online. It comes from an agency presentation that was made to an invited industry audience and it looks interesting. Yet, six of the slides are like this one or completely black.

Now I don't know if this was how the presentation was made, but I'm guessing that it wasn't and that this is a bit of censorship for proprietary reasons. That's fine. It's smart to keep your best slides back (as a very successful marketing speaker once told me). However, the way it's done is not. The opposite of openness is silence, not partial sharing. You're allowed to be silent.

But if you choose to share, you share it all or, at least, (via editing) give the impression that you're sharing all. If you give the impression that you're holding something back, it just comes across as a compromise.

Compromises rarely work and they will always be interpreted badly. Put up or shut up. But know that those are your smartest options.

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