SlideMagic Blog

We are constantly on a path to make company operations more efficient. First we tackled factories, assembly lines, supply chains, leaving us with that ballooning layer of middle management that spends time on meetings, memos, analysis, more meetings, doing the annual accounts.

But slowly things are changing. It is striking to see how state of the art analysis I was doing pretty much by hand at McKinsey in the 1990s (as in allocating cost to a product) is now automated and computerised. Projects that would require 3 months of management consultants can now be done with the press of a button.

One reasons for this is technology, but an equally important driver is the basic idea behind the original analysis. How to think about product costing, what you would have to measure, how to allocate it etc etc. Over the past 20 years, people have learned how to approach this problem, and mastered the skill of actually interpreting the data quickly.

Something similar is happening in the world of presentations. Long-winded memos are out, people now have the courage to say that a presentation meeting is useless, people have read thousands and thousands of business presentations that pretty much follow the same structure.

What does it mean for your presentation? (I am thinking of an “everyday” deck in a company, not a major TED Talk)

• Stick to the format/story line that people have gotten used to
• Cut all excess padding: things people already know are convinced of, buzzwords, background info
• Focus and spend time on what matters, what is unusual, unexpected, not obvious

Any business gathering, in any language is filled with hollow - English - buzzwords. Part of this is to blame on executives who want to show of by using “fancy” words. But a big part I think is simply people learning the new universal language in business: “Business English”.

Business English is spoken by non-native English speakers, unlike proper English, it has a very small vocabulary and people are in need of finding words/verbs/concepts to express common things. You hear others speak Business English, you read documents online in Business English, you see YouTube videos in Business English. And hey you learn, this is how you communicate.

Business language and culture are also deeply linked I think. Overhearing a conference room discussion as an outsider might soon completely ridiculous in terms of buzzword use, but to everyone on the inside, these are just verbal shortcuts that sound perfectly normal, and everyone knows exactly what everyone means.

The challenge is to be aware of this when you start talking to people outside of this inner circle.

Cover image by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

If you end up constantly changing a small bit of a chart or analysis, it might be time to change the whole thing. This all sounds a bit cryptical, 2 examples:

• At the beginning of the project you were clueless about the competitors in the market and created a big 2x2 matrix that shows the market environment. As the team becomes more educated you notice that the only thing you do is moving dots of a specific subset of competitors in the bottom right corner, and adding footnotes, text bubbles, and explanations. It is time to rethink how you show the market and ditch that chart you created on day 2 of the project.
• In the first week of the project your created a rough DCF valuation model. Now, as the project progresses, the team is increasingly interested in scenarios. You end up going back to that first model, tweaking and goal seeking assumptions, and then recreate each scenario manually again. Maybe it is time to throw the model out, and build a spreadsheet that can handle multiple scenarios quickly.

There is no point in doing a slide update when a whole new visual or analytical approach is required.

Cover image via WikiPedia

This is probably the most famous stock image around now. Read the full background story here, including who is the photographer, the other shots he took with the same models, and how it all spread over the past 6 months.

The creator of the one below did an exceptional job at finding the right expressions of the characters in the Photoshop.

Maybe the idea was not that new after all…

Post frequency will go down over the next few days as I am disconnecting from work for a couple of days. I hope you are enjoying the summer as well. Cover image by Malgorzata Frej on Unsplash

This is what Trump presented to Kim:

What do you think? It has the Duarte “What is, what could be”-type of approach.

My take. The idea of showing a movie is actually a good one. The whole movie is not my style, but it might just work given the audience (both Trump and Kim): sentimental, focusing on the individuals and the once-in-a-century-opportunity that is here to take or leave.

Thinking of Kim, there are 2 things that could have been emphasised more:

• I think he would be very sensitive to what his father might have thought of what he did for his country (or, maybe actually the ruling family itself). Some shots of his father with an approving smile could have fit right in.
• The film could have put in more “visions” of grandiose infrastructure projects, I think these will resonate better than advances in science or the economy.

When your boss says “Please create a presentation with the strategic plan for the management meeting next week”, she means “Please finalise the strategic plan and find a way to communicate it to the management team next week”.

Creating substance and presenting it are 2 different things.

• For a strategic plan, getting agreement on the substance is probably easiest to do on a few dense pages, maybe even in Excel that you can go over with your boss.
• Once that is set, the question becomes how to present it. For an internal audience who are pretty familiar with the company, this probably involves highlighting the bits that are different from last year, and putting that dense Excel in a slightly better layout as an appendix in the back.

Cover image by Celso on Unsplash

Everyday strategy presentations are not TEDTalks that makes the audience cry. The subject matter is usually a bit dryer, and the audience is not there to sit back and watch the show, instead, the objective is to get out of the room as soon as possible.

So, what can “move” a business audience? I thought back about decks I have seen, and here are some examples:

• A surprising fact, something that goes against the common believe of the audience. If you have one like this: put it incredibly bold on a slide (a simple comparison bar chart with 2 bars can be all that you need).
• A logic flow that involves 2nd and 3rd order effects: especially when discussing scenarios, game theory, options, uncertainty, possible outcomes. Thinking beyond tomorrow and see the inevitability where things are going on the current path, can wake/shake up the audience
• A brave quantification of something that people think cannot be quantified. Yes, you know you are wrong, but with ranges and focusing on what matters and what not, you can put things in perspective.
• Being complete, putting up all the available options for discussion, options that include “this is not how the industry does things”. This can sometimes be mathematical process of generating all possible combination of actions
• A case example, customer story, that could be extrapolated to the entire company and could have huge implications

This is not a complete list, but something to get you started.

Cover image by Tanner Larson on Unsplash

Yesterday, a request came in for a PowerPoint template that presents the stakeholders of a company. Well, here you are. The slide has been uploaded to the template store, subscribers can download it free of charge.

Most large corporations do a terrible job when it comes to paying freelancers on time. And I think they actually do not realize that the worst offenders miss out on talent. Unlike large design firms (established agencies and “design farms” in emerging markets), an independent freelancer has limited ability to scale up and if she is good, will be 100% busy. Project selection large happens based on how interesting the work, and how fun the client is.

Why are big corporate such a pain when it comes to paying freelancers?

• Large bureaucracies rely on rules and checks to control spending leaks (rogue employees going of and buying stuff without permission). And it is very cumbersome to have multiple sets of rules: the easiest way is one policy for all suppliers, ranging from the giant multinational all the way down to the individual freelancer
• These same IT systems have made it easy to manage numbers, key performance indicators. Often an important KPI for the purchasing department is days payable: if you get the bring the average up by even a bit, you have demonstrated progress.
• For the average supplier (stationary, lunch meals, cleaning services, car fleets) big corporates have a lot of value (and hence bargaining power), and suppliers will take the hit (and factor it into their pricing)
• Big corporates get the same treatment from their big corporate customers
• Because of the purchasing IT system, decision makers can blame everything on IT. “I want to pay you, the system just does not let me”.