Bringing Sexy (Charts) Back

Pictures do speak louder than words.  I loved how Ross Perot could wax prophetic about the economy by dumbing down macroeconomic policy to a series of charts. 
At the end of the day, there are a lot of different variables that drive your business. You should already have a ongoing communication to your Board and investors (and internally) around where you are at with your key performance indicators.  Packaging all of those up in way where everyone can understand it is really an art. 

My favorite example is Edward Tufte's famous work in which he visually shows the Napoleon’s failure in his advance on Russia as depicted in his (Tufte's) authoritative work ‘The Visual Display of quantitative Information’.  His work exemplifies how one can layer multi-variant data  in presentation
that tells a story explicitly.  "Explicitly" is a key.  How many times have we stared at an endless sea
of powerpoint charts that show data but don't actually inform us. 

For example, in our business we're focused on growing share and increasing the effective CPM.  We've "dumbed" down our roadmap by building a thermometer that layers in each initiative that increases eCPM as well as highlighting goal and stretch goals.  Its attached but I deleted all of the interesting bits just in case a competitor is looking at it.

Build explicit stories in the way that your report on your business.  Your job as the leader in your business is to summarize complex information so that better decisions that can be made or that ideas can be conveyed.