SlideMagic Blog

I am just reading this accurate blog post on Apollo Ideas: break up bullet point slides into multiple pages that focus on one idea each. Many of my clients object to this technique. “That’s too many slides! I only have 25 minutes!” They are choosing the wrong metric; number of slides, kilos of printout, presentation file size, it does not matter. Time is the only relevant factor. When you have 25 minutes to present, you bring slide material that will not exceed 25 minutes. That could mean: 50 slides, 750 gram of handouts, 5 paper flip charts, or a 70MB file.

I rediscovered an old bookmark of an excellent post on copyblogger today: “12 tips for Psychological Selling”. The key idea here is that any purchase is an emotional decision, facts and logic come in second.

The blog post is written with an online copy writer in mind, but some of these 12 tips can provide useful guidelines for PowerPoint presentation design as well. Especially for sales presentations, or even VC pitches for funding a startup. Maybe not every presentation is about selling something (a product, a company), in the end all presentations are about selling an idea.

1. People make decisions emotionally.
2. People justify their decisions with facts. Combined with 1: the numbers and stats in your presentation are probably be used to post-rationalize an emotional decision. They are not the key decision driver
3. Peole are ego-centric: what’s in it for the PERSON you are presenting to (not just the company he is working for)
4. People look for value
5. People think in terms of people: real-life situations, social interactions, stories are better vehicles to get a point across than logic, data, and analysis
6. You can’t force people to do anything: convince them.
7. People love to buy, people love to be sold to: HELP THEM do what they want to do
8. People are naturally suspicious: add testimonials, maybe even a bit of hard data
9. People are always looking for something: love, wealth, glory, comfort. Your presentation needs to link these desires with what you are trying to sell
10. Not really relevant here
11. People like to see it, touch it, feel it, taste it, smell it: good pictures, good diagrams, good demo screens
12. Most people follow the crowd, again testimonials, your customer list, etc.

Putting a summary slide as page 1 in your PowerPoint presentation is tricky.

• A diluted and boring summary might turn the audience off (“let’s check email on my phone”)
• A summary chart might “give away the point” of your presentation too early
• Some presenters might get stuck on page one and tell the whole story without using any other slides (sometimes this can be a good thing, a presentation with PowerPoint)

A good page one is a slide that gives the audience some clue about what’s going to happen and presents an interesting teaser about what is to come.

Now that I come to think of it - a good summary chart is like a good headline

The following image (purchased from iStockPhoto) adds another possibility to presentation opening concepts I discussed before (here, here, and here). “Let’s fast forward to the end before diving in”. Shrink the image to one side of the screen and add your teaser in big-font-text

No audience member […] has ever said, “it was exciting, useful and insightful but far too short.”

Read the full (short) post.

The University of Chigaco is now requiring applicants for its MBA programme to produce a PowerPoint presentation of a maximum of 4 pages with complete creative freedom. Any subject, any style, what you want. More details here in a post on Manhattan Review.

First of all, a very good initiative I think.

• 4 blank pages of PowerPoint leave a lot more room for creative self-expression than the classic short essay
• Visual communication skills are very important to become a succesful executive, there is not better way to test them than to ask for a real-life example

Now, how would I address this challenge (having completed a regular MBA application more than a decade ago…)?

THE CONSTRAINTS

First, let’s think about the constraints, and what it means for the sort of presentation you need to design:

4 pages maximum, it has to be short and to the point

The presentation will be printed and included in your file. This is a huge constraint.

• No video
• No animation (this a bad idea anyway)
• The color printer could be poor: avoid textured background (a bad idea anyway), avoid dark backgrounds (what if the black toner runs out), use pin sharp images, use contrasting colors
• Printed documents can carry more detail than projected slides (if they are printed out in full page), so you can insert more dense text on one of the slides if you want to
• You are not in the room. The slide needs to stand on its own

Seth Godin will be presenting about his latest book Tribes this morning in New York. The slides of the presentation are available on slideshare:

Seth Godin on Tribes

Why a PowerPoint documentary? This presentation uses a huge amount of slides (more than 200), mostly full-page images that are clicked through at a very high speed: the presenter only speaks a few sentences to each of them. The effect you get is similar to documentaries on for example the History Channel: the camera zooming slowly over still images with a voice over in the background. (Ken Burns is the master of the slow zoom, see a post on Presentation Zen) Not suited for slideshare. The notes are an integral part of this presentation. Because they are not very visible, this presentation is actually not that suited for publication on the Internet. The images are nice, but you do not get the message by clicking rapidly to the slideshare document. I would have included a black “subtitle” bar to provide background to the documentary. About Tribes. Seth is making the case that marketing is all about enabling a group of followers to interact with each other. More here.

UPDATE: a video of Seth’s presentation can be watched on Mixergy.com.

New “in the cloud” presentation development tools seem to be popping up all the time now. Today, I came across Zuiprezi which allows you create a “non-linear” presentation on a large virtual canvas in which you can navigate and zoom your way around. Read a review on CNET, and/or watch the video below.

While I see the advantages of a dynamic presentation flow, I still think that in most presentation situations a tightly controlled story line works best, especially when time is scarce, for example in VC startup pitch presentations (25 minutes, that’s it). When there is more time, non-linear presentations could work. Especially when a group of people needs to discuss, brainstorm and analyze a complex subject (for example a spaghetti-style workplan for a big engineering project). UPDATE: Another interesting application for this technology might be to visualize complex system dynamics analysis in business. At McKinsey I used to use it (it was called “Business Dynamics” there) to map complex interactions between multiple drivers. This analysis can be very insightful to spot recurring loops (and hence how to accelerate or stop them), but delivers very messy diagrams. See one here. Related postings on my blog: PPTplex, a Microsoft tool for zooming inside PowerPoint

MECE (pronounced “meesee”) stands for mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive. Management consultants (McKinsey, BCG, etc.) use it a lot. What does it mean? In simple language, a text is MECE where are no holes, no overlaps. For example, the following structure is not MECE:

• Prices …
• Volume …
• Revenues …

Revenues is the result of prices x volume, there is an overlap in this list. Why does being MECE matter? If you want to analyze a problem, it is important that you get all the component structure of the problem right: you need to get them all on the radar screen, and there should not be any dependency between the components. For example if you concluded that “costs are not the issue” and close the analysis here, you don’t want it to re-emerge somewhere else in your problem solving effort. Why does being MECE matter in PowerPoint presentations? If you want to tell the audience a story  you don’t want to confuse them by bringing up points again in an unclear structure. The logic should be clear. Should you apply it blindly in your PowerPoint presentations? No. MECE stories can have the perfect logical structure, but can also be boring. For example, in order to be complete, you need to address the rest of the world aftering discussing the most exciting markets US and Asia, even when they are not relevant. Be MECE when designing a story line structure, then adjust to make your presentation interesting and compelling.

Presentation Zen posted a good review about the presentation aspects of David Rose’s TED video about pitching your company to VCs. I watched the video, and would like to add a summary of some of the content that David is talking about.

• It’s all about you. The content of the presentation is about the substance of your business. But VCs look for things you are not directly presenting, but convey in between the lines about yourself.
• Integrity, realism, coachable were 3 characterization that stood out from the 10 or so “you” criteria David was listing (including more obvious ones such as passion, knowledge, etc.). Be a person that stands with both feet on the ground and is open to learn.

After discussing “you”, David moves on to discuss a structure of a pitch presentation. Many elements are not new (market, team, financials, etc. see video for details), but he adds useful thoughts to all of them (I use the words “don’t” alot):

• Start immediately with a very, very brief description of what you actually do, so the audience is not guessing through your talk but rather can focus on the content
• Don’t “pop” the buildup of excitement by going back, making a mistake, stalling.
• Don’t say anything that is not true (linked to the integrity point) above. (My addition, say “I don’t know” if you’re not sure)
• Don’t make the audience think/wonder about number inconsistences between slides, even if they are not errors (net sales, versus gross sales for example). It distracts, “pops” the flow
• Use real concepts instead of abstract ones, also in financial forecasts. Instead of cleaming 0.5% of a $1bn market, why would someone buy 1 product, how many customers do you think you can get, hence, what would your sales be.
• Give the audience a something to compare your idea against, to validate it (a comparable company, etc.(
• Finally, do a verbal wrapup (maybe with only a company logo on the slide), rather than a crammed slide that invites a repeat of the entire presentation

The vast majority of Google traffic that lands on my site is looking for advice on how to write a “McKinsey presentations”. Let’s discuss them a little bit more, including my logic why they might NOT be suitable for just any communication situation. Why do they look so good and professional? A few reasons (some of which are good recommendations for any presentation you prepare)

• They stick to a strict slide format: every page is laid out exactly the same, making the whole document look very consistent
• Pages have muted colors and no spectacular animations.
• Consulting presentations are almost always all about numbers, and this quantitative data is displayed and structured in simple and clean data graphs (i.e., not an ugly, busy cut and paste from Excel), and numbers are rounded
• Each chart has a single message, which is written out in the chart title and clearly supported by the numbers in the chart body
• They (sometimes over-)use a lot of frameworks to structure information: a time line, the impact of a number of forces, evaluation of pros and cons, strenghts and weaknesses.
• The presentation has a clear logical structure, taking you step by step through an argument. A lot of energy is invested in the PowerPoint slide sorter: re-shuffling charts until the story is lined up the correct way. This process is not only for communication purposes, it is an integral part of problem solving. Trying to articulate a logical story will inevitably highlights flaws in logic, sending you back to the drawing boards to do additional analysis or change your recommendations.
• It is full of summaries. If you have 30 seconds to read a document, you will find the full story on page 1, if you have 5 minutes, you can read the summaries of the next subsections (each section explaining 1 paragraph of the summary in more detail), if you have more time you can read the whole document.