Numbers and statistics usually bore people, but they are often necessary to use in business presentations. Your speech is not a press release, so let the audience consult one if they want the details. Your goal is to give the numbers meaning, so that their implications are better understood and remembered. One way is to provide the longterm view. A 3 percent annual growth rate may not sound impressive, but show how that compounds over ten or twenty years and what the difference would be if it were just 2 percent.

Or give the numbers relevance to daily work by linking small contributions to the company to the total. Show that success came by making a few more sales calls per day or by answering customer service questions sent to the Web site in half the prior time.

Or look at the bigger picture. The potential for a medicine may not be appreciated if you just look at the incidence of a disease in the United States instead of the entire world. Allowing employees to take off more personal time could be seen as a loss of work time, or you could cite the results of a survey of the greater work satisfaction and loyalty among those who were allowed more personal time.

Or you could make comparisons. There were 58,000 American military deaths during the Vietnam War, when the population of the United States was 212 million, which is 1 out of 3,655. There were 620,000 deaths on both sides during the American Civil War when the combined population of the United States and Confederacy was 32 million, or 1 out of 52.

Or you could relate an anecdote that puts the numbers into perspective or relates them to daily life. If your company is trying to create new malaria medicines, note that the disease threatens half of the world's population, yet the National Institutes of Health spent less than one-third of 1 percent of its budget on malaria research. Then tell the story of a family that is alive today because of your experimental medicine.