What an Introduction Has to Answer in Sixty Seconds
An introduction has to answer three questions in about sixty seconds: what the speaker does, what they have done that is relevant here, and why they are in this room. Anything else is biography, and biography is what makes an introduction run long and land flat.
The relevance filter is what most people skip. An introduction assembled from a career history is a list; one assembled from the two items that matter to this specific audience is an argument, and the difference is entirely in what was left out. What belongs in the file rather than the frames is anything that belongs on a CV rather than in a room: full employment history, dates, and qualifications are checkable elsewhere and are not what sixty seconds is for.
The introduction is set out in five scenes: one stating what the speaker does now, one on the single most relevant thing they have done, one on the skill or perspective that follows from it, one on why they are in this particular room, and one closing on what they are looking to do next.
