Let's take the word presenting. Let's play with it.

Could it mean bringing ideas, and information into the present? 

For instance, could we say that the job of a candidate for office is to bring into the present—into the listener’s awareness—the information about her past (her track record, perhaps, or how our economy got into this pickle), make palpable the dangers from overseas, and make vivid the picture of the future she wants to lead us toward?

None of these things are actually present at her speech. Her past is buried in her memory unless she tells the story well. The foreign threats are oceans away. The future is a bank of fog to be sculpted. And yet her job is to make us feel the importance and power of each of these absences.

To make the absent present! That's a good definition of presenting. Suppose you're a pharma brand director selling your marketing plan to senior executives. Is your product present? Probably not, because more than likely your product is an idea--a molecule-- and has been embodied by manufacturing. It's everywhere and nowhere. It's an idea!

Is your market present? No, it's absent because it doesn't actually exist. It too is an idea. We conceive of all that drives people to buy and sell and give that conception a name: the market. It too is everywhere and nowhere. It is also an idea.

And of course your plan is an idea--an idea that is developed based on an accumulation of information about the market. The only way to introduce your idea to your audience is through the skillful use of symbols--words and images.

Suppose you're a manager of a Hedge Fund, and you want to raise assets under management. Does your product exist in the room in which you're presenting? Well, yes, it does to a certain extent, because the product is you and your judgment, coupled with the judgment and expertise of others on your team.

But in the selling of investment management services, the product is value, and what that value means to the recipient. Is that value present? No, it's not. The professional presents her idea for creating value, and if the prospect is convinced that the idea will work, he buys it.

It seems to me that presenting is a performance art designed to bring the past, the future, and the invisible into the present. The tools of the art are too numerous to name, but the main ones are words, pictures, stories, and logic--not to mention the intangible human traits of the speaker, and the speaker's ability to connect her idea to what already exists in the minds of her audience.

Because the human mind cannot hold many thoughts at once, the skilled presenter creates one present at a time. A film director does the same thing. He shows one scene at a time. The film director has many more tools, such as music, and moving images, and environmental sound. But the presenter only has her voice, her skilled use of language, and her ability to paint pictures with story telling or visual aids.

The driving force of presenting is imagination, and the verbal skills required to make the absent present.

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