The mistake of thinking corporate communication needs to be boring

I worked at SBT, Record, Band, RedeTV!, and Globo Internacional. Different networks, different formats, different audiences. But in nearly every company I visit today as a keynote speaker — corporate or otherwise — I find the same belief: that being taken seriously means being monotonous.

It doesn't. And that misconception is costly.

What companies get wrong

Many people confuse seriousness with the absence of personality. The result is training sessions nobody remembers the following week, internal presentations everyone pretends to follow while scrolling through their phones, and leadership speeches that sound like an HR memo read aloud.

The problem isn't the content. It's the delivery. Information with no hook to capture attention is information that never lands.

Humor as strategy, not as accident

When I talk about humor as a communication tool, I'm not talking about cracking random jokes or trying to be funny at any cost. I'm talking about a strategic choice: using timing, contrast, and surprise to make a message stick.

That is different from humor that demeans, distracts from the subject, or makes the audience question the authority of the speaker. The goal is never to have the audience laugh at you — it's to have the audience remember what you said. There is an enormous difference between the two, and that difference is what separates a memorable speech from an embarrassing presentation.

How this plays out in practice

An unexpected opening that breaks the expectation of "yet another slide presentation." An absurd analogy that locks in a complex concept. A well-timed pause that gives the next message greater weight. None of these things require leaders to become comedians. They require an understanding that communication is, above all, a competition for attention — and that excessive seriousness, without form, loses that competition every time.

The core point

No company loses credibility by communicating well. It loses credibility by communicating poorly and insisting that this is professionalism. Humor used well is not the opposite of corporate seriousness. It is, in many cases, what ensures that a serious message actually reaches someone.