SlideMagic Blog

With a bit of Photoshop editing you can create an effect of a PowerPoint shape flying through some loop. I uploaded a new slide to the template store that uses this effect. Over the arrow, I positioned a second layer of the image, but just with a piece of rope with its background isolated. The arrow expanding outside the frame of the image (yes, I look those), adds to the motion feel in the slide.

Click the image to find the slide on the template store, subscribers can download it free of charge.

Cover image by Blake Wheeler on Unsplash

I added a nice image background with binoculars to the template store. When looking for images in presentations, try to find ones that have a lot of white space and/or depth, pay attention where you place your text, taking into account the overall composition of the slide and the contrast of the letters with their background.

Click the image to be taken to it on the template store, subscribers can download it free of charge.

Cover image by drmakete lab on Unsplash

Yesterday’s meeting blog post made me think of an other topic: junior analysts (lots of them among my readers) and whether they should go to the meeting with the CEO or not.

During the early years of my McKinsey career, there were many, many occasions, where I did not get to go to meetings where my work would be presented, and it was explained to me that too many people in the room would harm the meeting dynamics. A valid point: sitting in a huge conference room full of consultants does not create the atmosphere for a candid discussion about strategy.

But there were other concerns my seniors might have had:

• The junior analyst might not be able to present the slides, not having the right “CEO language”, going of on a tangent, explaining how he did the analysis, without the so what
• And even if we did not let the junior analyst present, he might come in with odd remarks that throws the discussion in the wrong direction, vent his uncomfortable feeling with the broad assumptions that were made in the analysis (that were actually justified), thereby undermining the credibility of the whole deck.

If you are just starting out as a consultant, it is worth your while thinking about the above.

But there are advantages of taking a junior member to these meetings now and then (feel free to use the following with your seniors):

• Taking turns makes sure that the entire 15 people team does not sit in the room at once
• Analysts can actually learn a ton from these meetings that will make the whole team perform better:
  • You see how these analyses are actually used
  • You get to learn that CEO presentation skill that you can put to work even when presenting to more junior clients
  • You might come in handy when a very detailed question about the data comes up
  • You get credibility with your client team members
  • You will get a motivation boost
  • You will need less time briefing to follow up on next steps
  • (Junior analysts are always good at serving coffee, making copies when needed)

Elon Musk emailed some productivity suggestions for Tesla employees a few days ago:

[quote]

• Cancel large meetings or if you have to have them keep them “very short”
• Walk out of a meeting or end a phone call if it is failing to serve a useful purpose.
• Avoid acronyms or nonsense words. “We don’t want people to have to memorise a glossary just to function at Tesla”
• Sidestep the “chain of command” to get the job done. Managers insisting on hierarchies will “soon find themselves working elsewhere”
• Ignore the rules if following them is obviously ridiculous.

[/quote]

Corporate management styles are changing. Emails become informal, memos turn into visual documents, more and more people know how to avoid boring bullet point presentations, and the attitude towards meetings changes as well.

It is easy to simply walk out of a meeting if you are the one paying everyone’s salary at the end of the month. A junior analyst is not expected to stand up say “my presence is not serving a useful purpose, goodbye”. Instead, these people would just mentally leave the meeting by glancing on their phones.

However, there is something you can do. Especially in smaller project teams, you could include and agree a walk-out policy in the kick off meeting of the work. In that case, your superiors might actually feel embarrassed when it is time to exercise that walk out option.

Photo by Samuel Zeller on Unsplash

I added another slide to the store that is border line PowerPoint cliche: man-standing-on-top-of-the-world-wondering-what-is-next. Click the image to be taken to the template store, subscribers can download the slide free of charge.

Cover image by NASA

Now and then, I use the good old traffic light chart to present the progress in a project: who has given “the green light” and where things are still stuck. These icon-style shapes are easy to create in PowerPoint. I usually start with Googling a few example images/icons, then see what basic shapes are needed, to finish with the composition I like.

Click the image above to be taken to the traffic light slide in the store, subscribers can download it free of charge.

I have to be cryptical not to give away the confidential details of a project I am working on, sorry.

Some opinions are universally agreed upon, no facts, backup, or convincing is needed. (Unless you want to disprove the common understanding). Still, many consultants cannot resist and launch an effort to quantify something that is blatantly obvious, but is extremely hard to quantify exactly.

In a legal case, this non-issue, all of a sudden turns into a major obstacle:

• Shaky assumptions can easily be attacked from left, right, and center, putting the credibility of your entire presentation at stake (what if all the other analysis was this “sloppy”?)
• Lots and lots of data takes time to present, and all of a sudden this issue which is either already agreed upon, or not important at all, is taken up 75% of the presentation time and discussion. The “after taste” of the meeting is the impression of expensive consultants that could not defend their numbers.

Always ask yourself: do I need to convince the convinced, how important is this issue, and when is the best time to bring it up (if at all)?

Cover image by Vladimir Kramer on Unsplash

The Internet is littered with PowerPoint templates that fall roughly in 2 categories, I would classify them as follows:

1. “Potpourri”-style
2. “Adobe InDesign”-style

Potpourri. These are the slide templates that have been around since the mid 1990s.

• Not very pretty: a very “PowerPoint” design with gradients, bevels, shadows that is often trying too hard
• Hard, if not impossible, to integrate with prescribed corporate template files
• Filled with cliche icons and stock photos
• Sites offer “tens of thousands” of slides, but they are highly inconsistent across designers

Adobe Indesign. Recently, print/web designers have been branching out into the world of PowerPoint: creating very pretty designs that look a lot like the finished product that is created in Adobe InDesign. But there is a reason that InDesign-style presentations do not work very well for everyday business presentations:

• They tend to ignore the way PowerPoint works with template slides: instead “hard coding” text boxes, shapes, and images on a blank page. This is very hard to customise as a non-designer, and it is impossible to fit into a corporate PowerPoint layout
• They mostly are designed around paragraphs of text. Headlines are big and bold, but text is incredibly small. From a distance the grid of images and paragraph text looks pretty, but it is impossible to read.
• The compositions are dependent on exactly the amount of words, pictures, paragraphs that are presented in the template slide. Have more text, one more option, less text, and you have to redesign an entirely new grid layout.
• Custom fonts make porting the source files between devices hard (most people don’t even bother and in no time the presentation will end up in Arial).
• The layouts are all about presenting lists, or blocks, there is no visual movement that is important in business presentations: cause-effect, pros and cons, trends, sequences.

This tweet passed by recently:

Yes, I agree that the excitement about attending the actual conference is not anymore what it used to be, and people are starting to make fun of giving a presentation TED style…

But, the main TED conference, the local TED sessions, and the online library have made a huge change about how people prepare and deliver presentations. And, maybe even more importantly, by showing what a good live presentation actually is, they might have changed the agenda of many corporate meetings. Rather than everyone politely sitting through hours and hours of slides that will never be TEDTalk (next year’s budget for example), it might be better to just do a Q&A / discussion.

Cover image by Gisela Giardino

I have a few very long standing clients, often going all the way back when I started my presentation design business. They are mostly very large corporations where I work for many departments. Inside these I have followed along very junior analysts which are now rising in the ranks of the company.

I have seen this scenario in multiple versions:

In the very early days, they would be the ones in the background, providing me the data analysis for a presentation design project that would cover a much wider area than they would be responsible for.

Then they would contact me on their own (outside these big projects) with little slide requests and we would find a way to work together on a very small budget. And step-by-step, this analyst would pick up slide design skills, basically establishing their own minimal slide library of designs they could always fall back to (see an earlier post about this). As a next step, they would become bolder in the way they structure their presentations, having the courage to cut words, add an image and even some humor here and there in their slides.

These people can now produce pretty decent slide decks, not master pieces of design, but effective documents that speak the language of top management, enabling them to leave the analyst/engineering pool and making the next step in their career. This ability to teach yourself these basic presentation skills has been a big factor I think why they are moving ahead.