You have finished this huge strategic or business plan and you need to present it to the top management team of your company. You sent the deck before the meeting and they probably page-downed the slides. How to create a good summary presentation for the meeting?
Just summarising the big document (and then we did this and then we did that and then we went on to do this), is not going to get you a decision. The opposite, a super high-level presentation with generic buzzwords is also not going to cut it.
Your presentation should be a deck specifically for the meeting, not one for reading later (you sent that one already). It can be based on your big document, but it will be different.
- Make it very clear what you actually want (more budget, more people, permission to explore M&A opportunities, etc.)
- If your project involves some decision (maybe even with a controversial recommendation), make the trade off very clear. Some sort of pro and con overview.
- Your manager is not a complete outsider who comes in cold to the subject. So you can cut the emotional, stunning visuals, and focus on those elements of the trade off that she might not know about yet. Show the new and original analysis you did that support conclusions that are new. Leave out the obvious analysis that confirm things everyone already knows.
- Feel free to deviate from the structure of your big document. The big document is reference material, the presentation is your tool to get an important decision approved.
Do not summarise a document, get a decision approved.
Art: Hieronymus Bosch,The Conjurer, 1475