What does good look like?
All thoughtful business people are curious what good presentations look like. Here are a dozen+ presentations (freely and publicly available online) from Boston Consulting Group. These BCG decks may not be in your industry, or your function, but they show a lot of rigor, creativity, and lots of logical structuring. This is how the best of the best convey their ideas. It’s always helpful to see how others do it. Enjoy.
- Next Generation Manufacturing (64pg, 3.2Mb)
- Reshaping New York City Housing Authority support functions (112pg, 1.8Mb)
- Loose Dogs in Dallas: Recommendations to Improve Public Safety, Animal Welfare (406pg, 11Mb)
- Projecting US Mail Volumes to 2020 (21 pg, 400Kb)
- Melbourne as a Global Cultural Destination (56 pg, 5.8Mb)
- The True Global Luxury Consumer Insights, 4th edition (65 pg, 3Mb)
- BCG Assessment of Pathways of Education, (16pg, 280Kb)
- (Iceland) Healthcare System Reform and Short-term Opportunities, (135pg, 6.9Mb)
- Value Guided Healthcare as a Platform for Industrial Development in Sweden (85pg, 2.2Mb)
- Corporate Ventures in Sweden (28pg, 1.5Mb)
- Shareholder Creation in a Hesitant Economy (19pg, 800Kb)
- Open Education Resources Ecosystem (23pg, 500Kb)
- San Pedro Bay Clean Truck Program (81pg, 700Kb)
A few things that I noticed when reviewing these BCG presentations:
- Executive summary upfront (usually page 3 or 4 or so)
- Titles that tell a story; each page answers the question “So What?”
- Lots of frameworks, buckets, and hypothesis-based consulting; the good stuff.
- Extremely varied length (16pg-406pg)
- Significant industry research to set context and establish credibility
- Visual presentations (conveying ideas and data with shapes, tables, graphs)
- Exhaustive footnotes and references
- Super consistent formatting
- Liberal use of benchmarking of competition and “best practices”
- Use of quotations from interviews and stakeholders
- Surveys to provide quantification of normally qualitative impressions
- Restrained use of colors and clipart
- Agenda pages (fly sheets) in between each chapter to prevent the reader from getting lost
Anything else you notice when reading these, or even comparing them to those of McKinsey?
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