SlideMagic Blog

The last Board presentation is usually the only document in the company that more or less talks about everything what the organisation is about: strategy, financials, people, product pipeline. It is tempting to harvest the Board slide deck for sales and/or investor presentations. Here is why should not:

• Board presentations talk about you, not about your (potential) customer, not very useful in sales meetings
• Board presentations reveal your weaknesses, give a too transparent comparison to competitors.
• Board presentations are all about trade offs and choices, not a clear articulation of a way forward
• Board presentations have a boring agenda-like structure, not a captivating story
• Board presentations are usually stitched together last minute with input from multiple people, not the most creative story writing process
• Board presentations are designed for long meetings, not 20 minute pitches
• Board presentations are usually Boaring…

See an article on Forbes by Mark Fidelman with 20 tips to make better presentations. Due to the format of the article (an email interview with presentation design experts including me), the suggestions are slightly random, but useful nonetheless.

Busy investors do not have (want to make) time for long verbose cover letters/emails for your presentation. Write for a skimmer:

1. Keep it really short
2. Cut out all management buzzwords and padding (synergies, engagement, strategic, flexible, ROI, etc.) that everyone else is using and which have become verbal white noise. Use conversational, human language
3. Say how you got to her (our dads were in high school together)
4. Say what you want early on (advice, money, intro to someone), and ask for a very specific next step.
5. Prioritise interesting content of the pitch (unusual facts, case example, unexpected advantage over a well-known competitor (2x as many users as Facebook, etc.) over a well structured, complete, business school essay. You are not trying to get a grade for your mid terms, you are trying to get a follow up phone call.
6. Make it highly/relevant/specific to her: complements portfolio company x, y, z, matches what you spoke about at a conference last week.
7. Use typography to break the text, to make it easier to speed read: big concept, 3 (short) supporting bullets, another concept, supporting bullets.

A good novel has multiple levels of depth, the basic story, below that the deeper themes.

In presentation design I often apply similar techniques. The top level message screams from the chart through the use of colours (target: the listener), but for the reader, there are ways to find richer information to back up the bold conclusions you draw.

One example could be a simple table of pros and cons. Big colour contrasts indicate “in favour” and “against” for each of the criteria, but small text inside the boxes that is not meant to be readable for a live audience gives the more detailed explanation.

For TED-like big budget presentations, you it is worth to take out the detail. But most business presentations are used in multiple settings, it is just more efficient to have one set of slides supporting both of them.

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 a recent project, I had to visualise the 5 year IT spend plan of a very large company: different business processes, different applications, different responsibilities, different timing, some were build, some were buy, different budgets.

Rather than pages of bullet point slides, I went for a simple table that showed the applications by business division, around 60 boxes. Then this - relatively complex - structure was repeated over and over again, each time with a different set of highlights and colour codings. After the first few repeats, the audience will slowly start to recognise the position of the applications on the grid, and i can introduce more complexity.

Here are some techniques to deal with complex tables and lots of different data set:

• Colour: use similar colours to highlight similar items. Pick how you use colour: colour an entire box, add a coloured dot to a box, colour the line around a box. Use muted, calm colours for larger surfaces, use very bright, highly contrasting colours for small accent objects.
• Semi-transparent white to cover parts of the table you do not need for a slide. Use shape booleans to cut out pieces of the cover.
• Elimination: take the audience through a process where you throw out items bit by bit: here are the applications that we are not responsible for (out), here are the applications that we will not work on (out).
• Re-order: Flip rows and columns until you get a layout where similar items are grouped together.
• Shapes: squares, triangles, circles can make nice small objects to highlight different aspects.

Often, detail can be good. Big-picture pitches are vague and generic, and sometimes even insulting to an intelligent audience. Diving in deep in selected aspects of your story shows that you know what you are talking about, and often, the big innovation might be coming from something very specific.

This is detail to adds to, builds on, one story line.

Details that distract from the main story confuse. Going off on a tangent, getting bogged down, are not going to help to convince an audience that comes in cold and which has barely had the time to get used to your funny sounding English accent.

Leave the side tracks for later (if at all), wait for the key idea to sink in.

The new Keynote creates files that look like a single file on a Mac, but on other machine appear as a folder with multiple files in them. This has implications for online file sharing:

• Gmail: emailing a Keynote file as attachment does not work
• Box: file syncing, or sharing a download link does not work
• Dropbox: seems to have fixed the issue.

Has anyone had issues or is it just me?

Apple is known for making beautiful and easy-to-use software, but I am struggling with the new Keynote, especially with the simple task of colouring shapes, and the text inside them. I always pick the wrong colour box, and need to switch a number of different menus to complete very basic actions.

From a UI design perspective the user interface looks perfectly clean and organised. For power-editing at very high speed, it breaks down. This is the reason that the QWERTY keyboard was invented: the logical thing would have been to make ABCDEF keyboards, at high speed though they are less efficient.

Maybe it is me or is it that “the emperor has no clothes”? I got used to working in a certain way? I am in my mid-40s and my ability to learn new UIs slows down? I am not a typical Keynote user and it works perfectly fine for everyone else?

An executive summary that sits on top of a management consulting document is usually a page that summarises the recommendations, next steps, and decisions. It is meant for an insider, the executive reading it is likely to have a 90% understanding of what is inside the document. There is no need for graphics here, a few dry bullets with decisions will do the trick to remind everyone of what will happen next, and who will do it.

So, this is totally the opposite of the other use of an executive summary that I come across often: a short teaser to someone who has no understanding at all of what you want to achieve. Here, a dense text, or a dry list of bullets will do the opposite of attracting attention.

Feel free to step away from the habit of sending dense text pages to get people excited about your project. Instead, think of the time you want the recipient to spend on your document. Now, fill that time with the most visually pleasing and exciting way to present your case. Lower your expectations, you do not want to close a deal at this stage, you want a phone call, or a next meeting. Sending a short, visual presentation that can stand on its own without verbal explanation is a perfect reply to the request for an executive summary.