“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.“ Pretty wise words from Aristotle. Malcolm Gladwell calls it the 10,000 hours you needed to gain proficiency at a skill. Cal Newport argues that skills and proficiency create passion, not the other way around. Good review for his book So Good They Cannot Ignore You here.
If I were to draw it out. Here is my generalization of consultants, lawyers, bankers, and the lowly analyst. Consultants are PowerPoint.
Consultants spend hours making slides. It’s a common sight to see consultants pouring over their PowerPoint slides – moving pages around, adjusting the colors on graphs, mulling over wording, checking verb agreement and proof-reading. Presentations are also called “deliverables” because they are the products that we deliver to clients. It is a core part of the job, but commonly misunderstood.
To the casual observer, it might seem excessive or a waste of time. Who knows, some might even think it is narcissistic – like someone who spends too much time in front of the mirror in the morning. After all, isn’t it the content that is important? Why bother with all the structured presentation? Couldn’t this all just be put into a written document or memo?
“Oh, you are so good making pretty presentations.” I have heard this more than once and it drives me a little crazy. The “pretty” part of the presentation is the equivalent of choosing the garnish for a plate of pasta, or the jacket design for a book. Are clients paying $250-$500 per billable hour for presentation jockeys? Doubt it.
So why do consultants use PowerPoint so much?
1. It forces brevity. Good presentations are succinct. They may have a 60 page appendix, but the executive summary will be terse and have a point of view. Using the analogy of a tree, the presentation is the fruit. The consultant may have paid their dues with endless late nights, analysis and interviews, but the end result is a presentation. There is no glory in showing the client all the gory details. You need to really boil it down to its essence. Apply the 80/20 principle, and give the client only the good stuff. Harvard Business School essays have a limit of 400 words, which is damn tough to do.
I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time – Blaise Pascal, mathematician logician, physicist
2. Executives are short on time. Often times, the executive sponsor of a project will really only commit 10-12 hours of total time for a 4 month project. The client project lead will be working with you on a day-to-day basis, but you have to remember that executives are short on time, and long on opinion. They are not going to read a 100 page MS Word doc.
3. Communication is the goal. Consultants are hired to effectively solve problems. This often means persuading people to take action. It’s not enough to put smart things on paper; there needs to be results.
Often times, pieces and parts of the presentation are used by the client to “sell” the recommendation to other people – the boss, peers and others.
4. Executives are visual people. Maybe it’s because they deal with lots of information (reports, emails etc) every day. Maybe they just watch too much TV like everyone else. Graphs, tables, lists, groups, diagrams all help to convey a lot of information in a concise way. Each of the shapes below can help convey meaning. They are archetype frameworks:
5. Most people are terrible at it. This might be counter-intuitive, or just cynical, but most people are terrible at putting together compelling presentations. Just go to www.slideshare.net and randomly look up presentations. They are generally awful. Full of text, no narrative, no takeaway. They are essentially a compilation of facts, or a copy/paste from a document.
Big win for consultants. As long as people are crappy at distilling complex problems into easy-to-follow, logical recommendations that are easily communicated to executives. . . more billable hours for us consultants.
Consultants must structure their thinking. This is the only way to present your ideas clearly to clients. One excellent tool is the pyramid principle by an ex-McKinsey consultant by the name of Barbara Minto. She authored a book called The Minto Pyramid Principle which essentially defined the way consultants structure most of their presentations. Most consultants will know what the pyramid principle is, even if they don’t know the author.
Pyramid Principle: Just like the name implies, the idea is that the presentation logic looks like a pyramid. The main recommendation is on top. It is built on mid-level recommendations, each of which are supported by smaller facts, data, analysis, benchmarks etc . . .
In the graphic below you can see that the top of the pyramid (executive summary) has 3 recommendations. Each of those recommendations have supporting pages.
This type of presentation starts with the conclusion first. It is a tops-down type of thinking that is very structured and how executives think. Big idea followed by smaller ideas. This format helps you “cut to the chase” quickly, which is good for many reasons:
Yes, I know that most high-school term papers used a more bottom-up type of reasoning where the punchline was at the end of the 50 page paper. Trust me, that is not how you want to present in the boardroom. You do not want to start with lots of boring data points and save the good stuff to the end.
Caveat: Two types of presentations where you won’t use the pyramid principle:
Should I buy the book? It’s up to you. It is $135 and bit of a boring read. If inclined, you can buy it directly from the author here. As a consulting trick, just go to amazon.com and read the 45 reviews posted. That will get you 80% of the way there.
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Source: http://commons.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gizeh_Mykerinos_BW_1.jpg
What’s the so what?
You will hear this phrase used on projects a fair amount. It is certainly not the best usage or even politely worded, but it is critical: Your presentations need to have a point.
Since consultants are paid for insights, recommendations and results (and often paid on an hourly rate), clients understandably get impatient when it looks like we are wasting time. You can also envision the Death by PowerPoint meeting where the consultant is simply regurgitating back things the client already knows. The client is thinking, “I could have told you that. Come on! Get on with it already.”
If your manager says, “What’s the so what?” Your PowerPoint slide (report, or update) is not saying anything. It is just data, or information – which is generally not a good thing. Here are a few ways to fix it:
Improve the content or flow
1. Analysis: Get off the couch and dig deeper into the data. Link it to other data, group it differently, run regression, look for outliers, find the “a ha” insight
2. Story-telling: Take a step back and see how this slide fits in the overall narrative. Does it belong somewhere in the presentation? Is it even necessary?
Make it easier to understand
3. Writing: Writetighter bullets. Get rid of the jargon, long-winded prose, strange sentence fragments and other poor writing hygiene
4. Title: Rewrite the title so it says exactly what you want the reader to understand
5. Highlights: Emphasize your point by using different colors, or using a call-out box (sometimes called “kicker box”) to reiterate the point at the bottom of the slide
6. Appendix: Don’t fall in love with your work. If the slide is informative, but does not have a compelling point. . . worst case, move it to the appendix.
Death by PowerPoint. Presentations can be boring. We have all sat in large conference rooms held captive by a speaker wielding a poorly thought-out PowerPoint. To misquote a bumper sticker, “PowerPoints don’t kill, people do.”
Don’t put lipstick on a pig: Some people respond to this problem by trying to “spice up” their presentations with animation, photos, or colorful font. Definitely a poor choice. Since most of us consume 10+ hours of media daily with all our computers, iPads, TVs, smart phones, we are a pretty jaded group. Clip art is not going to impress. It’s like putting lipstick on a pig, or putting a leather-bound cover on a poorly written essay.
Keep it simple. Simple is often the most effective. The slide below is from a presentation made by Home Depot at the Raymond James investor conference on 3/16/12. Even the casual viewer can see the main points of the slide within 10 seconds:
If it is good enough for McKinsey and Company. . .
Most people know that McKinsey and Company is a top strategy management consulting and is considered one of the most prestigious places to work. What many people don’t know is that prior to 2009, McKinsey printed most of their client charts in black and white. Color and graphics can help, but are not required. Unsurprisingly, content is king.
