Presenting your results nicely goes a long way in convincing people

I believe that presenting your results in engaging and intuitive ways makes it much more likely that anything you do is successful. This applies to any new business, a research paper and (at least in theory) to politicians' arguments.

I particularly like this graph showing the size of banks before (in color) and after the crisis (in black). This one further divides banks by countries, which puts in perspective the size of each bank relative to its home country:

The Information is Beautiful site also displays cool data in (mostly) interesting ways.