Harish K Saini
January 13, 2026
You spend millions on strategy consultants. You spend months debating the “2026 Roadmap” in the boardroom. The plan is brilliant. The numbers work.
Then comes the Town Hall.
You stand in front of 500 employees (or 5,000 on Zoom). You present the strategy.
And you look out at the audience—or the silent chat box—and you see it: The Eye-Roll.
They aren’t excited. They are bored. They are checking their phones.
By the time you finish slide 45, the energy in the room is dead.
Why did a brilliant strategy die in the auditorium?
It isn’t because your employees are lazy. It is because your presentation is suffering from a condition known as Content Obesity.
The "Content Obesity" Crisis
The term Content Obesity, as defined in the book The First Yes, refers to the organizational tendency to “stuff” decision instruments with audit-grade detail because leaders conflate completeness with quality.
Corporate leaders often treat Town Halls like legal depositions. They think: “If I tell them everything, they will understand.”
The reality is the opposite.
According to the 40/30 Paradox cited in The First Yes, the average length of corporate presentations has grown by approximately 40% since 2020, while the executive attention span (processing bandwidth) has contracted by 30%.
When you dump 60 slides of text on your workforce, you are effectively DDOS-ing their brains. They don’t hear your message; they just hear noise.
Internal Marketing: Treat Employees Like Customers
The fatal error companies make is believing they don’t have to “sell” to their employees.
- External Marketing: You use emotion, visuals, and simple narratives to sell your product to customers.
- Internal Comms: You use bullet points, jargon, and complex charts to sell your strategy to staff.
This is a double standard. Your employees are “customers” of your strategy. If they don’t “buy” it, they won’t execute it.
The Fix: The "Cinematic" Town Hall
To fix the Town Hall, you must stop building a Report and start building a Campaign.
- The “Trailer” Concept
Don’t start with an agenda slide. Start with a 60-second visual “Trailer” of the future state.
- The Shift: Instead of listing “Q3 Objectives,” show a visual mockup of what the company looks like when those objectives are met. Anchor the vision in a physical reality.
- Kill the “Orphan Data”
A common pitfall identified in The First Yes is the use of “Orphan Dots”—status indicators without context or trajectory.
In a Town Hall, never show a raw spreadsheet.
- Bad Slide: A table of 20 KPIs.
- Good Slide: One massive number (“$50M”) with a Green Arrow pointing up 4. You narrate the context. The screen reinforces the feeling of winning, not just the math.
- The “Hero’s Journey” Narrative
Stop presenting “Pillars.” Start presenting a Story.
- The Villain: What is threatening us? (e.g., A competitor, a market shift).
- The Guide: What is the new strategy?
- The Hero: The employees. (Show them exactly where they fit in the fight).
Conclusion: Culture is Strategy
Peter Drucker famously said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”
But if your Town Hall deck is boring, your culture is starving.
Don’t let your “Future of Work” presentation look like a relic from the past.
Treat your Town Hall with the same design rigor as your Super Bowl ad.
Ready to Engage Your Workforce?
Service Spotlight: Internal Communications Design
We transform dense strategy documents into inspiring Town Hall Keynotes and Onboarding Experiences.
- The Goal: Adoption, Alignment, and Retention.
- The Output: Cinematic slides that turn “Compliance” into “Culture.”
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Harish K Saini
January 13, 2026
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