glib is good

the elevator pitch has outgrown its original industrial-age metaphor and expanded into mass culture. Terms like biztweet, twitpitch, and twitch are fast replacing Otis’ creaky box-lift, but the idea is unchanged. Of course, some might claim this is a bad thing, that constant elevator-pitching is just another symptom of a sick, overstimulated, hopelessly sound-bitten society in which glibness rules. But an elevator pitch isn’t a sound bite. It’s an idea in miniature: a full three-master built to scale in a bottle. It’s got to be complete, logical, and watertight, stem to stern. A good elevator pitch is the antithesis of a sound bite—and the cure for the common cable-talking-head ramble. Bloviators and professional obscurantists can confuse the basic contours of reality by stringing daisy chains of selective facts into dark webs of bigotry and paranoia. Yet ask them to boil down their conspiracy theories, nebulous prejudices, and voodoo economics to an elevator pitch and they’ll crumble.

Maybe it’s time we learn what movie producers and angel investors have known for years: Glib is good. Lousy ideas often reveal their weaknesses when presented in crystallized form—if they can be crystallized at all. Gassy vagaries are something we can’t put up with in an elevator—or in life. The room’s too small and the ride too short for that sort of noise. Make sense, be bright, or get off.