When I was a still a junior consultant at McKinsey, one of the senior partners on a team I was working on said that most consulting projects really generate only one truly original new idea/insight. The rest of the hard work is not really that original (1% inspiration, 99% perspiration as Thomas Edison put it)). Still, that one insight usually drives the entire recommendation.
At McKinsey, these truly new ideas were often the result of a novel way of combining facts/data sources for the first time and/or being able to quantify/compare things that nobody thought could be quantified.
Looking back at presentations and pitches I have worked on, the on truly new idea concept probably holds. Use it in your presentation design. Facts, and logic flows that everyone is already used to/knows are not interesting. It might be better to go quickly to that unexplored territory that you discovered.
Showing posts with label McKinsey. Show all posts
Showing posts with label McKinsey. Show all posts
3 things with 3 things each
Management consulting stories are always divided in 3 or 5 components (optimally starting with the same letter), and each of these is then divided into 3 sub components as well.
Connect, communicate, control. And to achieve connect we need to aggregate, accumulate, and accelerate. This works reasonably well in documents for reading (if the verbs are chosen meaningfully and not using a dictionary looking for words starting with C).
Verbal pitches are a bit different though. A human, person-to-person story is flatter, more linear. It is hard to go up one level, down to the second point if we do not have the hierarchical structure in front of us. Also, using too many words that start with a C make you sound like a consulting report, not like a genuine speaker.
Listen to yourself: if it sounds wrong it probably is wrong.
Connect, communicate, control. And to achieve connect we need to aggregate, accumulate, and accelerate. This works reasonably well in documents for reading (if the verbs are chosen meaningfully and not using a dictionary looking for words starting with C).
Verbal pitches are a bit different though. A human, person-to-person story is flatter, more linear. It is hard to go up one level, down to the second point if we do not have the hierarchical structure in front of us. Also, using too many words that start with a C make you sound like a consulting report, not like a genuine speaker.
Listen to yourself: if it sounds wrong it probably is wrong.
Consulting frameworks
I added a new set of templates to my presentation design app SlideMagic: consulting frameworks. It was an interesting journey back in time (I used to work for 10 years at McKinsey back in the 1990s).
Putting them in SlideMagic was interesting, it shows exactly what SlideMagic is supposed to do for business presentations. Take unnecessary complexity out of visual designs down to a level that the chart still says what it needs to say, but that you do not need to have a degree in graphics design to make them. I had to make slight deviations from the original here and there (Both SlideMagic and layman designers do not like curved shapes for example), but the end result is pretty good.
As to the content of these frameworks. They are more tools to help you think about a problem than slides that will get your audience jumping out of their chairs. Many of them are linked to classic micro-economics theory (demand/supply/competition). I think the strategic issues of many companies today have moved beyond these problems. Still some frameworks can work to kick start a discussion, they good old SWOT works great in group white board discussions.
Putting them in SlideMagic was interesting, it shows exactly what SlideMagic is supposed to do for business presentations. Take unnecessary complexity out of visual designs down to a level that the chart still says what it needs to say, but that you do not need to have a degree in graphics design to make them. I had to make slight deviations from the original here and there (Both SlideMagic and layman designers do not like curved shapes for example), but the end result is pretty good.
As to the content of these frameworks. They are more tools to help you think about a problem than slides that will get your audience jumping out of their chairs. Many of them are linked to classic micro-economics theory (demand/supply/competition). I think the strategic issues of many companies today have moved beyond these problems. Still some frameworks can work to kick start a discussion, they good old SWOT works great in group white board discussions.
How did you get there?
Many people who read this blog are considering a career in the world of presentation design themselves, I get many questions about how I got to be who I am today professionally.
The answer: it happened somehow over many years, there was no deliberate career planning. Once I was free from a big corporate structure, you can shape the projects you choose to work on. Finding the first projects was hard, and the work I did closely resembled my strategy consulting work at McKinsey.
When you build up your initial base of happy clients, words start spreading and you get increasing freedom to pick those project that interest you. There is a reinforcing loop here: you do your best work in the type of projects you like, which gives you more demand for more projects you like. In my case, I loved presentation design work, and the prize was: more pie.
But. This transformation took years. It required a certain skill base to start off with (10 years of work experience in consulting in my case). At first, you get highly unpredictable income. As a freelancer, you need to like working on your own. A super-specialised freelance business is hard to scale beyond increasing pricing. (See Seth Godin on dumbing down/scaling up, I smarted up and scaled down).
The answer: it happened somehow over many years, there was no deliberate career planning. Once I was free from a big corporate structure, you can shape the projects you choose to work on. Finding the first projects was hard, and the work I did closely resembled my strategy consulting work at McKinsey.
When you build up your initial base of happy clients, words start spreading and you get increasing freedom to pick those project that interest you. There is a reinforcing loop here: you do your best work in the type of projects you like, which gives you more demand for more projects you like. In my case, I loved presentation design work, and the prize was: more pie.
But. This transformation took years. It required a certain skill base to start off with (10 years of work experience in consulting in my case). At first, you get highly unpredictable income. As a freelancer, you need to like working on your own. A super-specialised freelance business is hard to scale beyond increasing pricing. (See Seth Godin on dumbing down/scaling up, I smarted up and scaled down).
Do you have it all?
Business presentation design requirers a combination of skills:
- Content story: the strategy consultant. Somehow all the raw material, content need to be in place. All in a logical order, no holes, no overlaps, all the items of check list need to be ticked off: need/problem, solution, market, competitors, business model, financials, etc. etc.
- Slide layout: the designer. Colours, fonts, look and feel, white space, layout, image cropping/scaling/positioning, diagramming.
- Data visualisation: the strategy consultant. Challenge one: pick the right message you want to emphasise from the thousands of options that a data set gives you. Challenge two: actually emphasise it with the right chart, the right colours, the right rounding.
- Pitch story: the movie director. Now take all the structured, analytical, and boring base material, and turn it into an exciting, emotional, convincing 20 minute pitch. (Note the difference between content story and pitch story)
- Outside reality check: seasoned business executive. What are the weaknesses in the story, what are the difficult (and/or obvious) questions the audience will ask, what elements of the story are totally obvious?
I was trained in 1 and 3, got 5 through the years, taught myself 2 (clean, good enough, but not at the level of a master illustrator), and trying my best at 4.
Many professional designers in the market will lack 1, 3, and 5: but they will still do fabulous work on presentations that have less hard core business content.
Many corporate executives lack 2, 3, and 4. They also will have trouble with number 5: being able to look at their story from a true outside perspective.
Management consultants lack 2 and 4.
Data backups
A good presentation uses very simple data charts. Often, in the last minute, changes are made to the data: it is easy to change a number in PowerPoint here and there.
In most cases the first versions of these simple data charts were extracted from very complicated Excel sheets. And here is where the trouble starts. After a few PowerPoint iterations, the presentation and the backup model is no longer consistent. This is fine if the presentation was a one-off event, but most of the time, the Excel model will live on for future iterations.
The solution is to include a worksheet in your Excel model that pulls the data exactly as it goes in your charts. Put in the correct rounding, everything. Anyone who wants to change the numbers, need to make changes in the Excel model to get the numbers to change.
And yes, sometimes that might involve a goal seek.
If these charts frequently change, you might even consider designing a presentation in Excel. Excel has the same chart and shape design tools as PowerPoint, and you can create direct links between charts and work sheets without having to copy things across. See a previous post (2009) on this technique.
In most cases the first versions of these simple data charts were extracted from very complicated Excel sheets. And here is where the trouble starts. After a few PowerPoint iterations, the presentation and the backup model is no longer consistent. This is fine if the presentation was a one-off event, but most of the time, the Excel model will live on for future iterations.
The solution is to include a worksheet in your Excel model that pulls the data exactly as it goes in your charts. Put in the correct rounding, everything. Anyone who wants to change the numbers, need to make changes in the Excel model to get the numbers to change.
And yes, sometimes that might involve a goal seek.
If these charts frequently change, you might even consider designing a presentation in Excel. Excel has the same chart and shape design tools as PowerPoint, and you can create direct links between charts and work sheets without having to copy things across. See a previous post (2009) on this technique.
Templates -> boredom
In big corporates, preparations for an important presentation often start with one person preparing the template for the presentation, emailing it around to all relevant business units to be filled out. The final presentation design is simply a matter of slapping the filled in templates together into one big, boring, 30MB, 200 page, 10-hour slide deck.
I am repeating my hobby horse here, this presentation is the problem solving deck that contains all the relevant data. The challenge now is to distill from all that information a compelling story. And that story might well have a different structure/flow for each business unit.
So, my suggested process:
I am repeating my hobby horse here, this presentation is the problem solving deck that contains all the relevant data. The challenge now is to distill from all that information a compelling story. And that story might well have a different structure/flow for each business unit.
So, my suggested process:
- Yes, create that template, send it out
- Create the monster file, clean it up
- Have a conference call with each of the business units about the data
- Then, give them freedom to express their story in their own way, with their own slides, within a strict time constraint
- Share the monster document as backup/bed time reading
The word template can have 2 meanings. One is the standard background layout of a slide (many use banners, logos, and other graphics, I mostly use a white page), and the second one is a series of tables and data charts without numbers and/or words in them. In this post I refer to the latter.
Content before structure
The other day I had a potential client on the phone who was under time pressure. She asked me whether I could work on the structure/framework of the presentation (and the template) while in parallel they would start filling things in.
When you start a project and need to cut up work among multiple team members, a skeleton or presentation framework can be really helpful: someone works on the market, someone works on the competition, while someone else takes on the financials.
When you get to the stage where you have to present your conclusions to others (i.e., the analytical work is done), putting structure before content is wrong. As a presentation designer you need to know the content first, translate that into a story, and in the process you come up with a structure which is engaging and convincing, a structure that often will deviate from business school presentation templates, consulting pyramid structures and other logical frameworks.
Problem solving: structure first, then content.
Convincing: content first, then structure.
When you start a project and need to cut up work among multiple team members, a skeleton or presentation framework can be really helpful: someone works on the market, someone works on the competition, while someone else takes on the financials.
When you get to the stage where you have to present your conclusions to others (i.e., the analytical work is done), putting structure before content is wrong. As a presentation designer you need to know the content first, translate that into a story, and in the process you come up with a structure which is engaging and convincing, a structure that often will deviate from business school presentation templates, consulting pyramid structures and other logical frameworks.
Problem solving: structure first, then content.
Convincing: content first, then structure.
Consolidation chart
This is a nice way to show consolidation in an industry. You can digest the chart in 2 ways: on the podium you see the big picture of consolidating financial institutions, reading in close-up on the screen, you can see the details. The chart could have been better if the width of the arrows would represent the assets under management of the banks, some of these acquisitions were bigger than others.
[Off topic] There is a populist discussion going on in the comments of the original post. I did a lot of strategy work in banking mergers and there are different ways to look at the concentration in an industry. The top level player count is an easy statistic, but what is more relevant is the choice that customers (especially small businesses) have on the ground. How many different bank branches are within a 10km range at any point in the US? If there are 30 banks, but each concentrate on a specific state, then the market looks very competitive, but on the ground, customers face a monopoly. On the other, if all 4 banks are represented in most small villages, the market could be competitive.
[Off topic] There is a populist discussion going on in the comments of the original post. I did a lot of strategy work in banking mergers and there are different ways to look at the concentration in an industry. The top level player count is an easy statistic, but what is more relevant is the choice that customers (especially small businesses) have on the ground. How many different bank branches are within a 10km range at any point in the US? If there are 30 banks, but each concentrate on a specific state, then the market looks very competitive, but on the ground, customers face a monopoly. On the other, if all 4 banks are represented in most small villages, the market could be competitive.
Boring frameworks
If your business has 15 sales channels, it makes sense to review their performance using the same framework: easy to compare, and you make sure that you are covering everything that needs to be covered.
If you work with management consultants, you will notice that they love this approach. You get presented with a framework, asked to fill it out and then - here is the mistake - the 15 analyses are put on the overhead projector for a nice morning-filling channel performance review session.
Analysis slides are not the same as presentation slides. Keep the boring, structured deck as reference material. But, when presenting: try to break the logical structure. Focus on what is different, remarkable, requires attention. And since each of the 15 channels are different, you will find that these stories do not fit into one framework.
If you work with management consultants, you will notice that they love this approach. You get presented with a framework, asked to fill it out and then - here is the mistake - the 15 analyses are put on the overhead projector for a nice morning-filling channel performance review session.
Analysis slides are not the same as presentation slides. Keep the boring, structured deck as reference material. But, when presenting: try to break the logical structure. Focus on what is different, remarkable, requires attention. And since each of the 15 channels are different, you will find that these stories do not fit into one framework.
How did she spot that?
When I just started out as a junior analyst at McKinsey I always wondered how my project manager was able to spot a mistake or inconsistency in my slides in a second. I had been working on this all night (sometimes literally), build all the spreadsheets, mastered all the detail, and in she comes and says after a few seconds: “that number looks wrong to me”, and yes, there was a bug in my analysis.
The secret is take some distance from your work. Look through the slides without connecting them to your Excel sheet. Sales numbers on page 3, should be the same as sales numbers on page 16. A soft drink can is unlikely to cost $50. Simple checks and a cool head.
If you do not check your slides, your manager, or your client will for sure.
The secret is take some distance from your work. Look through the slides without connecting them to your Excel sheet. Sales numbers on page 3, should be the same as sales numbers on page 16. A soft drink can is unlikely to cost $50. Simple checks and a cool head.
If you do not check your slides, your manager, or your client will for sure.
Place holder and data charts
I realised that most presentation slides I create fall in two categories:
- Data charts that have information in them that would be impossible to convey verbally (a graph, a table with financial information, a ranking of competitors)
- Place holders with some powerful visual (picture, typography) and is merely a placeholder for the story told by the presenter
Things go wrong if you mix them: showing hard core data with a cute picture will not work, putting up a detailed consulting framework as your place holder will not work.
You are not presenting slides
Back in the old days at McKinsey, my first project manager explained to me that I was supposed to “present the slide ” (Exhibit in McKinsey speak) to the client. This involved taking the audience (a small conference room) through all steps of the analysis.
And also we found... And then we found... And also we analysed... And also the team discovered...Presenting a slide is probably still useful in internal team meetings among management consultants or scientists, but in most story-driven business presentations slides are there to support you in a subordinate role rather than claiming the lead role. The slides run in the background, as you tell your own story.
Always beautiful
I try to keep ugliness completely out of my design work. Ugliness tends to spread like a virus that wants to take over your work.
Even if you make a quick mockup or even a paper sketch of a slide, it should look orderly, balanced, clean. This is what I learned on my first day at McKinsey, when a client walks in you should be able to talk her through the hand-written deck.
Even if you make a quick mockup or even a paper sketch of a slide, it should look orderly, balanced, clean. This is what I learned on my first day at McKinsey, when a client walks in you should be able to talk her through the hand-written deck.
Flattening a story
Business school books and consulting reports have a clear hierarchical structure. This is great for reading a document: you can skip what you do not need, and go right into then detail when you do need it more explanation.
In short stories, hierarchy can be boring, you sound like you are given a university lecture. I often flatten that hierarchy, making the presentation more sequential. Out go the slides with the 3-5 setup bullet points, and instead I just let the story flow. If I have to, I bring back the structure at the end of the presentation to sum things up.
This works great for 20 minute presentations, for marathon presentation days we might have to revert back to the business school rigour though. But there is a reason why marathon presentation sessions are so stimulating for the brain...
In short stories, hierarchy can be boring, you sound like you are given a university lecture. I often flatten that hierarchy, making the presentation more sequential. Out go the slides with the 3-5 setup bullet points, and instead I just let the story flow. If I have to, I bring back the structure at the end of the presentation to sum things up.
This works great for 20 minute presentations, for marathon presentation days we might have to revert back to the business school rigour though. But there is a reason why marathon presentation sessions are so stimulating for the brain...
Focus on the decision
Most business meetings are about getting to some sort of decision or agreement on next steps. So why not focus your presentation completely on that?
Take out or put in the appendix:
Take out or put in the appendix:
- Long-winded sections with historical backgrounds
- A detailed description of the process your team took
- All the dead ends you hit and excluded from the analysis
- Vast analysis that proofs a point that everyone already agrees on
- Market analysis for the sake of market analysis, without supporting a point you want to make
- Explanations of management theory and frameworks you used, extensive parallels with other industries
- Elaborate competitor profiles
Instead:
- Frame the options that you see
- Provide a summary why you think you need option C
- Quickly mention the evidence that everyone agrees on
- Boil things down to the decision about the more controversial parts of your argument
- Provide your logic, and provide deep fact-based analysis that support the points you are making.
A business school professor would not agree to this violation of providing an academic argument, but you ensured that your meeting will be as short and to the point as possible.
The ponder slide
Not all PowerPoint presentations are in front of 500-seat TED audiences. Many presentations get emailed around and read on screens.
Strategic decisions are usually a careful trade-off between options. Some choices are clear, fact-based and objective. Others are qualitative, and yet others are complete leaps in the dark.
To make a decision you need to have all of the factors on some page somehow. Yes, this dense slide violates all the rules about good presentation design. But there is one big difference: the audience that will appreciate it are insiders, who suffer from the Benefit of Knowledge (the opposite of the Curse of Knowledge [what?]). They have heard the arguments before and they are ready for decision time.
How to design a good decision slide for these people?
Strategic decisions are usually a careful trade-off between options. Some choices are clear, fact-based and objective. Others are qualitative, and yet others are complete leaps in the dark.
To make a decision you need to have all of the factors on some page somehow. Yes, this dense slide violates all the rules about good presentation design. But there is one big difference: the audience that will appreciate it are insiders, who suffer from the Benefit of Knowledge (the opposite of the Curse of Knowledge [what?]). They have heard the arguments before and they are ready for decision time.
How to design a good decision slide for these people?
- A table: options in the columns, arguments in the rows
- Group the options and arguments somehow, sort options by risk, how radical they are, something. Group arguments: similar arguments go together, if they are sort of the same thing, you collapse them into one. Group the factual arguments, to make the more contested ones stand out.
- Label your options and arguments for the audience with the Benefit of Knowledge, short labels or placeholders that are enough for them to understand the full picture. After months of discussions “Blink first” might be enough to describe a strategic scenario covering 25 pages.
- Frame the options so that the answers are in the same direction: I usually pick positive ones: no cannibalisation, retention of talent, limited competitive threat. Etc.
- Now the tricky bit: score options (1, 2, 3, low, medium, high) and use colours to distinctive good or bad. Re-group, re-sort options and arguments until you get the maximum number of continuous good and bad fields.
- Look at the result and tweak scores and weights until you reach your conclusion. If you had the push up the weight of the leap-of-faith type of arguments a lot to balance the factual criteria, you know what you will have to explain in your presentation
- Once you reach your conclusion you can make a hugely simplified version of this matrix, collapsing all similar arguments together and boiling it down to the 2 or 3 points that will tip the balance
How did you become a designer?
I get asked this question frequently by people who are considering a career change. Here is my story.
The first 10 formative years of my career were spent with McKinsey, a strategy consulting firm, working in the London and Amsterdam offices with projects pretty much in every country in Europe. My stay there was a bit different than the norm: 1) I stuck around for about 10 years, versus 2-3 on average, and 2) I did not specialise in one industry (banking, consumer goods, etc.), but rather did a functional specialisation: mergers and acquisitions, usually on the sell side. In short, I helped big Fortune 500 companies sell themselves to other big Fortune 500 companies. As a result, every project that I worked on was in a different industry, and I had to adjust rapidly to understand a completely new field of work (beer, pet food, DIY retailing, petrol retailing, grocery, retail banking, asset management, insurance, private equity, e-commerce, mobile payments, postal services and logistics just to name a few). Little did I know then, how useful this skill would come in a decade later in a briefing for a new presentation design project.
After leaving the Firm, I moved with my family to Tel Aviv where I started out as an independent strategy consultant. Soon, I got in touch with the Israeli high tech industry. The small startups could not afford (and probably did not need) me as a strategy consultant for 6 months but saw value in my PowerPoint slides for meetings with potential investors (these charts were still B&W, highly organised, full of consulting speak at that time). It was here that my gradual transformation to a presentation designer started. Gradual is important here, I think no freelancer figures out exactly his professional niche from day one. In my case it probably took around 2-3 years to stop calling myself a strategy consultant.
So, after the Israeli startups came the Israeli VCs, I started writing the blog, and in came international clients (most of my clients are in the US now), and increasingly the McKinsey-style big companies came back as clients, this time for presentation design.
So, here is the story. Two things to remember. Finding your niche takes time, and it depends highly on the coincidences that formed your specific skill set.
Good luck with your journey!
The first 10 formative years of my career were spent with McKinsey, a strategy consulting firm, working in the London and Amsterdam offices with projects pretty much in every country in Europe. My stay there was a bit different than the norm: 1) I stuck around for about 10 years, versus 2-3 on average, and 2) I did not specialise in one industry (banking, consumer goods, etc.), but rather did a functional specialisation: mergers and acquisitions, usually on the sell side. In short, I helped big Fortune 500 companies sell themselves to other big Fortune 500 companies. As a result, every project that I worked on was in a different industry, and I had to adjust rapidly to understand a completely new field of work (beer, pet food, DIY retailing, petrol retailing, grocery, retail banking, asset management, insurance, private equity, e-commerce, mobile payments, postal services and logistics just to name a few). Little did I know then, how useful this skill would come in a decade later in a briefing for a new presentation design project.
After leaving the Firm, I moved with my family to Tel Aviv where I started out as an independent strategy consultant. Soon, I got in touch with the Israeli high tech industry. The small startups could not afford (and probably did not need) me as a strategy consultant for 6 months but saw value in my PowerPoint slides for meetings with potential investors (these charts were still B&W, highly organised, full of consulting speak at that time). It was here that my gradual transformation to a presentation designer started. Gradual is important here, I think no freelancer figures out exactly his professional niche from day one. In my case it probably took around 2-3 years to stop calling myself a strategy consultant.
So, after the Israeli startups came the Israeli VCs, I started writing the blog, and in came international clients (most of my clients are in the US now), and increasingly the McKinsey-style big companies came back as clients, this time for presentation design.
So, here is the story. Two things to remember. Finding your niche takes time, and it depends highly on the coincidences that formed your specific skill set.
Good luck with your journey!
A new business language?
Most PowerPoint decks are not designed for standup presentations to large audiences, rather they are documents that are used to get a smaller group of people to agree business decisions (the implementation plan, next quarter’s budget, etc.). The language used in these documents has changed over the years.
First, there was the memorandum that was dictated and written on a type writer, later replaced by a word processor. It was full of fluffy and formal language and people quickly learned how to skip most of it by jumping straight to the “Executive Summary” on the first page. All of these documents looked sort of the same.
In the 1930s, the management consulting profession was invented. Engineering mixed with business resulted in scientific charts full of frameworks with fancy names and buzzwords. Like the executive summary, managers had to acquire a method to skim through the content quickly, ignoring padding and business school speak to cut through what the document really wanted to say. All of these documents looked sort of the same.
I think it is time to create a new business language that injects good design into the management consulting-style charts and I am trying to write my upcoming presentation app around it. Yes, all of the documents it produces will look sort of the same, but it will make business decision making easier and more beautiful on the eye.
First, there was the memorandum that was dictated and written on a type writer, later replaced by a word processor. It was full of fluffy and formal language and people quickly learned how to skip most of it by jumping straight to the “Executive Summary” on the first page. All of these documents looked sort of the same.
In the 1930s, the management consulting profession was invented. Engineering mixed with business resulted in scientific charts full of frameworks with fancy names and buzzwords. Like the executive summary, managers had to acquire a method to skim through the content quickly, ignoring padding and business school speak to cut through what the document really wanted to say. All of these documents looked sort of the same.
I think it is time to create a new business language that injects good design into the management consulting-style charts and I am trying to write my upcoming presentation app around it. Yes, all of the documents it produces will look sort of the same, but it will make business decision making easier and more beautiful on the eye.
Is this our strategy?
Young companies often have an ambiguous strategy. Nobody is really clear, and everybody has a different interpretation. The moment you need to write a press release or an external presentation it all has to be clear. That is why it can take a long time to agree on 1 single page of text.
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