Stakeholders in PowerPoint

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.

Big corporates and paying freelancers

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".

Why should freelancers be treated differently?

• Freelance staff are closer to employees than suppliers of stationary. Usually, employees get paid promptly.
• In transactions from big corporate to big corporate, one order does not mean that much. For a freelancer, one project can be a month of income.
• Freelancers usually work on very dynamic projects and are usually (required to be) extremely flexible: last minute changes, weekend work. The stationary supplier does not have to deal with this and can plan everything way ahead. You want your work done quickly, you should settle the bill quickly, it goes both ways.
• Freelancers don't have the administrative power (= people in the accounting department) to chase payments, PO numbers, invoice numbers. Freelancers work on verbal agreements ("sure I will do that by tomorrow"), it is not fair to hit back later by claiming they did not file the PO number in time.

What can be done?

• For smaller projects, many of my clients expense the project cost on a corporate credit card (the one they use for travel expenses), and recoup the cost later. This puts the responsibility back with the decision maker
• Ask about payment policy before you enter into a project, if it sounds difficult, move on as a freelancer
• As a decision maker / buyer of freelance talent, clear the ground and help your freelancers by removing obstacles in the bureaucracy. One solution is to put in a big annual purchase order which is paid by actual hours or projects put in.
• (Here is another approach by a Dutch cartoonist: a public Twitter / cartoon campaign, not everyone will be able to pull this of though)

In general, I think corporates should create a separate purchasing track for paying freelancers. It will pay of through the quality of talent that a company gets access to.

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Cover image by Fokke & Sukke, highly recommended cartoons if you can understand Dutch

Stress-testing a new corporate PowerPoint template

The PowerPoint template is usually an after-thought in a corporate brand image project. Business cards, letterheads, envelopes, are considered more important than the look & feel of almost any document that is exchanged among employees and external investors, clients, etc.

As a result, you will find the PowerPoint template guidelines at the back of the brand book, written in language that is aimed at a print designer, it uses non-standard fonts, and its programming was a copy paste from Adobe InDesign.

Here are some things you can do to stress-test a suggested PowerPoint template that is handed to you by your graphic design agency:

• Click view, slide master, and see whether it contains dozens of layout slides that are leftovers from Microsoft's default master, ask why you need them
• Check the file size of an empty presentation, any huge image hiding in the master?
• Copy past an old presentation into the new master, see what happens. How much time do your employees have to spend fixing things?
• Try an empty text box and an empty shape: what are the standard colours, standard fonts? Do the bullet points look decent, or do they come in weird shapes and/or colours
• Are there any random guidelines all over the slide that no one needs?
• Open the presentation on your children's computer, how does the template look? Especially the fonts
• Create some bar and column charts. Are the colours and fonts correct? 
• Open the deck on a Mac and see what happens
• Try writing a big headline, maybe one that runs over 2 lines, are any logos or other slide items getting in the way?
• Same for a big rectangular table, can you fit it, or is there a logo or other graphic element sitting in the one of the corners that gets covered?

Make the PowerPoint template one of the most important end products for your graphics design agency. And as a briefing, don't ask them to work on an empty slide, instead send them an actual presentation (i.e., slides with content) and ask them to design a look for them.

When in doubt, you can always use the empty master from the SlideMagic store (free), and adjust the accent colour, add your logo to the bottom right, and you are good to go.

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Cover image by Estée Janssens on Unsplash

Mary Meeker slide makeover

Mary Meeker published her 2018 Internet Report: hundreds of PowerPoint slides filled with dense information. This is a presentation for pondering and study, rather than seeing it as a backdrop for an entertaining TED talk. For this purpose, the slides look pretty decent. I picked a random slide from the beginning of the deck and tried to improve things a bit in "SlideMagic-style"

Here are some things I changed:

• The KPCB template features the very heavy coloured bar at the top of the page, I took it out, and tried to apply the fresher green colour that was used for the branding of the web site of the document
• The duplications of the titles were eliminated
• The vertical chart axis and grid lines are not required, I took them out
• I edited the title to make it shorter, put the growth point in the title, the absolute hour value as a bubble
• The columns don't add up because of rounding, I left it that way, but usually, I would change the value of the biggest column segment to make the numbers add up, it somehow looks sloppy when there are "calculation errors"
• The legend was hard to read and difficult to link to the data series, I moved them to the right
• I made the mobile data series pop more with stronger colouring
• I stretched the data chart a bit horizontally to use the maximum possible space

A complete purist would argue that this chart is actually the wrong one to support the 4% growth point, there are no growth percentages anywhere on the chart.

I put up the above slide on the SlideMagic template store, anyone can download this one free of charge.

Maybe you don't know your story well enough

Some poor, rambling presentations might be the result of the speaker actually not understanding the story well enough. A good presenter understands the story one level of detail deeper than what is contained on the slides. If you don't actually know that much about the subject you tend to hold on to the bullets on the slides, start repeating things, go in circles.

Some case examples:

• (Me as a junior analyst in my early days at McKinsey). You just did a big interview survey at the beginning of the project and had to present the current status of the organisation to a room full of executives of the client who obviously knew that picture better than you. Every opportunity was taken to to erode your self confidence. A few weeks and a lot of analysis later, I was full of confidence and could answer every question.
• (Me as a slightly more senior, but still junior, consultant at McKinsey). You were asked to present a piece of research/knowledge that was prepared by someone else in the Firm, you can obviously present the slides, but things get trickier when confronted with questions. Once you had complete a full project in this particular field, you could ace that same presentation, and add your own content for others to present.
• Some start up founders get themselves into trouble when it is time for financial forecasts, go-to-market strategy, product pipelines, etc. If you actually do not master these completely, it will show.

In short, it is hard to "wing" a presentation, you need to know your stuff in order to be really confident. In real life, "study more" is not an option, you are no longer in school, but designing your own slides rather than re-using ones made by others will force you to confront the knowledge gap and show that you did not really understand the meaning of the 3rd bullet point you just read out to yourself when rehearsing.

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Cover image by James & Carol Lee on Unsplash

Breaking the step-by-step guide

Most things we get taught are presented in a step-by-step sequence: history lessons starts with the stone age, kids need to play a boring flute before being allowed their guitar, presentation design goes from thinking about your audience, key messages, flow, charts...

As I am trying to refresh the coding knowledge that is still left from my 1990s computer science degree I now see how this approach totally does not work for me.

• Most concepts are not step by step, sequential. You need to increase your knowledge of all the steps involved gradually, rather than mastering step 1 100% before going on to step 2
• Brains get bored, and switching from skill training effort to another is a great way to expand your attention span.

Here are ways I sometimes dive deep into slide design, even at the beginning of a presentation:

• Often there is that one killer slide that you simply know has to be in the deck. Why wait?
• Nothing better to wake up a bored brain than quickly putting together a beautiful slide master with title pages, separators.
• "Sweat work" is another way to do something useful when creativity is stuck: plopping in a P&L, creating the team slide, all easy wins
• Super detailed comparison tables are nerdy slides that often don't make it past the appendix of a presentation, but, they put the entire story of a presentation on one page (yes, I know), and can serve as a great guide line for the story of the entire presentation, or as a check list to see that you have not forgotten anything. Better design that one first.

Hence, I stick to that zig zagging creative process.

PS. Think about this from your presentation's audience perspective as well. The logical, step-by-step, build up might work for a patient computer, not for easily bored humans.

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Cover image (of a Tel Aviv traffic jam) Photo by Jens Herrndorff on Unsplash

Quantification as a communication tool

The backbone of almost any management consulting project (and final presentation) is some sort of quantification of options. In essence, the quantification is the communication.

Strategic options can be hard to compare, evaluate. Uncertainty, risk, lack of information, dependencies, short term, versus long term. Throw these in an average politically charged management meeting and the outcome is almost certain: indecision.

A quantification is convenient: simple rank the "score" and the answer rolls out. Every option can be compared objectively. Well, objectively to a certain extend. With all the wild assumptions and predictions, you can pretty much force an Excel model to go anywhere.

But that might actually be useful. The process of debating assumptions, seeing how much they actually matter, which ones are certain, which ones are a bit uncertain, and which ones are wildly speculative, weighing all the factors, is the communication process a consulting team and client will go through. At the end, the point estimate of "Option 3 wins with $52.3b value creation in 2035" might not be correct, but the thought process that went into the estimate means that option 3 is probably the most sensible option to take.

Why do people need to hire expensive consultants to lead them through this process?

• Some sort of objectivity, an outside party who has the run the numbers with a credibility at stake
• Raw horse power: knowledge how to run complex calculations involving risk and options (and an infinite supply of available human capacity in a certain time span)
• Privileged access to information: data from another country, disguised industry benchmarks, etc.
• And the guts to make broad "20% of the effort, 80% of the result" assumptions where it is appropriate

The analyst in the basement sees an endless stream of modifications of assumptions in the spreadsheet, but the client is getting the decision she wants.

Presenting the results of such a project can be tricky. The slides themselves can be super simple (a ranking of 5 options by value created in 2035), but the sequence how to take people through is complicated. Discussing your Excel sheet page by page is not going to cut it. 

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Cover image by Tobias Fischer on Unsplash

Text slide selector

I am experimenting with options on the SlideMagic template store. In this product, you can now select number of text lines, bullet style, and whether you want a side image or not, and the store will serve up the requested template. This is a very basic option implementation, I am looking into more sophisticated slide selections that could be useful for data charts and process diagrams for example, which would make it very easy to adjust the number of steps/years/months in these types of diagrams.

Subscribers to the SlideMagic store can download these charts (or a whole bundle full of text charts) free of charge. 

McKinsey slide make over

I found this slide in a recent McKinsey article:

I created a make over of this chart, making it simpler:

• Remove the icons, they are faint and not clear
• Cut down unnecessary text: capture, create value, out of the business, you can say the same thing with much less text
• Use this created space to increase the font size
• Center the text, the paragraph shape of the existing text in the round shapes does not look good.
• Re-order some of the terms in the text, to make it fit the shape better, some might not like "business models" now appearing before "services" for example.
• Move around the text blocks until they fit the shape more or less. The off center moons will never lead to a perfect composition.

Here is the result:

The slide might look a little bit less sophisticated, but it is definitely easier to understand, and quicker to create. And that's what business presentations should all be about.

I have added a modified version of the original 3-circle Venn diagram to the SlideMagic template store, you can find it here. Subscribers can download this template free of charge. If you are interested in learning more about McKinsey presentations, check out older McKinsey-related posts on the blog

The smartphone snap

People re-use slides for different audiences. And 10 years ago, you would still be able to skip a few slides quickly when they contain confidential information if - by accident - you forgot to delete the product roadmap that you used in last week's Board meeting. (Or you forgot to mark them as "hidden").

The smart phone with super high resolution cameras means that nothing is safe anymore. There is the accidental smartphone snap, but also the professional "slide harvesters" diligently recording every slide in your deck. An HD video just needs a millisecond to capture the slide that is being skipped.

Here are some other confidentiality pitfalls to watch out for:

• Data that still sits in the underlying Excel sheets, even when you take the data labels of your chart
• Hidden slides in presentation mode that are there for everyone to see when you send a PowerPoint file
• Speaker notes
• Collaborator comments
• File names or URL names that can still persist in a document even after its is PDF-ed
• Tiny footnotes that give away important information

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Cover image by Ben White on Unsplash

Starting a new book...

People are spending too much time designing their own decks and sitting through other people's presentations, using hours that could have been spent on making better decisions, inventing something great, or simply connecting with your family.

I am attacking the problem on multiple fronts (app, template store), and am now starting to dust of the book that I put out a few years ago. I want to raise the quality of its production, and make it much, much more practical with easy links to templates in the app and the store.

Watch this space.

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Cover image by Angelina Litvin on Unsplash

Saying no to "send info to Microsoft"

I am a huge fan of the improvements Microsoft has been making to PowerPoint over the last few years, it now outshines Keynote.

One thing though, is bothering me: after every recent update it is very hard to say "no" to the question whether Microsoft can record every single one of your clicks to make the program even better. You can simply accept or learn more.

On a Mac, I managed to make the window go away by repeatedly clicking on the red cross in the top left corner of the pop-up window, hopefully that registered as a "no".

The mix is almost perfect

In my spare time I am (finally) making efforts to lay down musical tracks that were playing in my head for a long time. Part of the learning process is watching documentaries of musicians going over and over and over again until that mix is just perfectly right. (This skeleton in the studio image says it all). And these are the 1980s and 1990s, for many of today's electronics musicians, it is all about polishing and mixing so it seems.

There is a parallel here in presentation design. Instead of editing the footnotes the night before the presentation, get a good night of sleep or do one more live rehearsal of your story. Time better spent.

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Cover image by João Silas on Unsplash

First impressions

An investor double-clicks an attachment, you make a first impression already which is totally disconnected from the idea you are trying to pitch:

• The slides have a reasonably professional feel: not the standard Microsoft Office template, not a 1990s bevel and gradient template, no times roman font, slide formats are more or less consistent throughout the presentation, images are not cheesy and/or stretched
• The slides have a grown up language, which shows that the author understands the audience: no padding with buzzwords, no 101 introductions to a subject that any VC is supposed to master, no presentation cliches ("in this ever faster changing world where we all have become digital nomads")
• Early in the deck it is at least clear what you are doing
• The email addresses are not gmail, and the company domain has some sort of place holder in a consistent look & feel with the presentation. LinkedIn pages of founders are consistent and up to date.
• You are sending a PDF, not a PowerPoint document, and it fits in a 10MB file

These are examples of the digital equivalent of the first impression you get with a handshake. Your deck is compared to all other decks this VC has seen in her career in more or less a second. And she has developed the intuition, what sort of decks usually are associated with good deals, and which ones to avoid.

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Cover image by rawpixel on Unsplash

Presentation = agenda

In some cases, a stand up presentation is an emotional story telling performance that moves your audience to do something they did not know they wanted to do 60 minutes before.

However, not every presentation is like this. The majority of slides are presented in small conference rooms, the "trenches" of the economy, where middle management tries to get a decision agreed in the middle of opposing viewpoints, office politics, and interpersonal meeting dynamics.

In these meetings your deck is actually the agenda for that meeting. Make sure things get discussed, make sure people have the facts, make sure the right trade offs are presented, and make sure a decision is made in the end.

Think about this when putting your deck together. Which facts are obvious, which facts are disputed, what info is counter intuitive, what is likely to spark a big debate, what not, etc. etc.

The presenter is telling a story, but also orchestrating a number of humans.

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Cover image by Vincent van Zalinge on Unsplash

Recycling the presentation

Cities are recycling their presentations to lure Amazon to put a new HQ there to pitches other candidates. 

I see this many times, a company that needs to pull out all the stops to present at a major conference or pitch competition. Ideas and energy of that pitch are re-used numerous times in other presentations. It is often that wake up call to get your act together, take more creative risk to present your idea with "nothing to lose".

There is a cost element to it as well. How can you get more return on that expensive video work? You need to try to find the balance between a personal and relevant pitch (rule #1 of sales presentations), and re-usable content. For videos, I usually request to have a clean version of the file without specific text banners or voice overs that cannot be separated. In that way you can re-use the assets for other projects.

Btw, these city pitches are very interesting. Here are 3 very different pitches. I think Detroit is the most inspiring. What do you think?

Cover image by Steve Harvey on Unsplash

Send decks, not links

A short summary of Mark Suster's blog post where he argues that startups should send VCs the entire file, not a link:

• Tracking, tracing, monitoring, of who read what where and how long actually discourages people
• He likes to file his documents to come back to them later to look at development and self-destructing links to not allow that
• It adds friction to an already short 3 minute process
• (And I would add: do what the VC is used to, and most of them have been dealing with decks since the 1990s)

What is a good deck for sending? Well, one that does not contain confidential information: product pipelines, salaries, etc. Assume that your competition will read the slides sooner or later, and there should be no harm when this happens. I have seen it on the other side with my clients, they would forward me a deck of a competitor and we would actually not get any info out of it, but rather admire that powerful pitch that the others created. So, it might actually be a benefit if your competitors see your slides :-)

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Cover image by Dmitry Ratushny on Unsplash

How to start a new presentation slide

When starting a new slide, most people think of what to write in it, then worry about composition which usually involves moving text boxes around so that everything still fits on one page.

Next time, start with the composition, then do the writing. Think how a few boxes and arrows can visualise common business concepts in a slide:

• Something is bigger than another
• Something is growing
• Torn between opposing forces
• Reinforcing loops
• Ideal fit or a mismatch
• Trade off
• Dead end
• A sequence

Put the shapes, align and distribute them, now add some text

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Cover image by dylan nolte on Unsplash

"Factoids"

Often your manager will ask you to put some more "factoids" on the slide: small, vaguely relevant bits of information related to the topic that have no natural home on any specific slide in the deck. Read that description again, and think whether the audience really needs more of them.

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Cover image by quan le on Unsplash

"Please upload your slides 30 days in advance"

This tweet says it all:

Conference organizer: Please upload your slides 30 days in advance

Me: pic.twitter.com/rd7wjTPcyh

— David Robinson (@drob) May 7, 2018

Yes conference organisers want to 1) ensure that the presentations they offer are decent, 2) make sure the workflow of decks one after the other works on the conference desktop, but... most speakers will make changes to slides (especially the slide order) when they are rehearsing for the performance.

Suggested strategy:

• Ask for a rough draft, outline, or old presentation well in advance of the conference to eliminate potential issues in terms of presentation style and technicalities (fonts, etc.)
• Create a very credible deadline shortly before the conference for the actual slides.

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Cover image by Curtis MacNewton on Unsplash