[PaulHoule]

When I was in my business development phase I was taught to make presentations for C-levels at Fortune 500 companies like this:

Make a Powerpoint deck with 50 slides. Compact that down to 20 slides without losing anything.

Get to the point where you have 50 slides like that.

Repeat this process two or three times until you have a deck that is stupendously high density that gives the impression that you respect their intelligence.

---

At times in life Powerpoint has really been my medium, it is much easier for me to put together presentations by putting together various graphics and symbols in PP than anything else, and I've tried.

[OldGuyInTheClub]

My experience: The higher you go, the dumber they get.

[PaulHoule]

I thought that too when I got started but I learned otherwise.

[OldGuyInTheClub]

At the tail end of my so-called career and I have learned it again and again.

[jncfhnb]

Perhaps this belief contributed to your lack of a credibly titled career.

[OldGuyInTheClub]

Heh heh. I think that's wrong but well played.

[jncfhnb]

I’m a McKinsey consultant and this reads as kind of crazy. Nobody is ever doing anything with 50 distinct slides.

My general advice is a title that is a sentence that explains your point, then a visual that proves it and a sidebar of supporting insights so you don’t have to be an expert at reading the visual. Frankly I think it’s very effective and is very closely tied to writing guidelines. The important thing is getting your thesis up top. The title of a page needs to be the only thing people really need to read to understand what you’re trying to convey. The contents of the page are just the details of why you’re saying it.

Most people instinctively do this in reverse and have a page where they throw a visual onto the page and make the title of the page just an announcement of what the visual is; and then either verbally or with small text callouts explain why it matters.

[QuadmasterXLII]

McKinsey has a reputation for cataclysmically pointless powerpoints that trick the audience into thinking that they had a point. Could the style you are suggesting be connected to that reputation?

[jncfhnb]

I can’t say I agree with that. Frankly even most of the haters will dryly concede that the only thing McKinsey is good at is making powerpoints.

In my experience the slide decks are pretty solid, with occasional exceptions. For whatever reason the folks that work in the financial industry seem obsessed with truly pointlessly large decks that reach over 100 pages.

Otherwise I think the approach is good, clear, and concise.

* page one is a summary of pretty much every major point the deck will make

* if you only read the slide titles you’ll more or less recreate the summary on page one and get the story bit by bit

* if you want to understand that argument or question it you have the evidence for it on the same page

When done correctly it’s very much like reading good doc strings and collapsing or uncollapsing the function definitions to see the implementations

It’s the difference between good comments like

> sort the data by geospatial distance to the user

And classic bad ones like

> sort function

[PaulHoule]

My partner and I were primarily targeting finance at that time.

I didn't always present 100% of the "big and dense" slide decks; we could get people into a dialogue early on that would give us an idea of what to show next, a bit like a "choose your own adventure" book.

(Overall our approach was super effective at getting people to talk about their business, my partner got me to read https://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Question-Based-Selling-Powerf...; We were always finding out about stuff we weren't supposed to know like the desktop virtualization program at a famously secretive hedge fund, the closely guarded data cleanup pipeline for a real estate data vendor, the time a four letter defense contractor was grasping at straws on a project for a three letter agency, ...)

Here's an example of a slide deck I would present to a general audience, in this case a local startup accelerator

https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/chatbots-in-2017-ithaca...

which is not as information dense as one of my sales slides but when I give talks like that they always want me back. (Funny that one felt obsolete by the end of 2017 but I packed in enough neural network stuff that it seems a little prescient now... Like that time I gave a talk at the first thorium energy conference about the computational physics program that would lead to a reactor that was mostly standard stuff out of intro level textbooks but useful and correct if you want to down that path. I took the schedule of reactor development when the project was abandoned in the 1970s and shifted it up to the present. The crowd reacted viscerally that it would take that long to which my answer is "you've got to get started now"; I wound up with a test reactor circa 2025 and sure enough they are building one in China.)

[jncfhnb]

I do think it would differ significantly if you were trying to garner interest. Flexibility would help vs. a more structured presentation.

I can’t say I like the linked deck too much. Titles with no thesis. Visuals that don’t demonstrate anything on their own. It can work for speaking over. But it doesn’t actually convey information.

[PaulHoule]

It's not centered on a goal (other than getting more invitations to speak at conferences.) I'm not trying to persuade people to take a particular course of action unlike a consultant.

Somebody is going to go a talk like that and receive a bit more than they can absorb. They'll walk out with something that really sticks for them. It won't promote the feeling that "I took four days and spent $X to go to a conference and didn't get my money's worth."

[QuadmasterXLII]

Your statement of “dryly concede that the only thing McKinsey is good at is making powerpoints.” closely corresponds to my statement of “trick the audience into thinking they had a point”

[jncfhnb]

Don’t think so

[kqr]

This is the very thing TFA is against. It reduces complex arguments into one-sentence theses, one after another, luring the listener into compliance.

[jncfhnb]

I’m only skimming the article tbh but all of the slides I’m seeing look terrible and useless. I don’t see much text about reducing arguments to one sentence theses.

A one sentence thesis is good communication. That’s the point of a thesis statement. It’s the core idea behind most writing education. If you don’t have a clear thesis up front, then people have to divine what you’re trying to convey themselves bottom up from the arguments on the screen.

“Luring the listener into compliance” is frankly the reader’s problem. PowerPoints are presentations, not debate stimulus. They are generally intended for one person to convey information, not foster a group discussion. It would be very bad to blame the concept of a blog if you’re drawn in by persuasive writing to a false idea.

PowerPoints are bad when someone is using it and you can’t tell what they’re trying to tell you. Especially with regard to whether it has the verbal explanation or not.

[PaulHoule]

You can both be right. Like LLMs, McKinsey offers a combination of competence and bullshit. It hires bright, young, and freshly educated people who can go at problems with energy and a toolbox of the latest tools. Yet, putting a young person in a role like that is an hierarchy-disrupting tactic which can be seen best in the Church of Scientology where they find the youngest staff member they can find to be an "ethics officer".

A primary social hierarchy (Scientology, a corporation, Mao-era China) might feel threatened by various secondary and informal hierarchies (people who practice "the tech" on their own and make changes, workers who have the knowledge of how to do the company's task in their heads but not written down, sysadmins who keep a file of anyone who could possibly help them solve problems in their organization or with their vendors, fox cults, ...)

An accusation that is frequently leveled at McKinsey is that management brings them on to "launder" things they want to do, what I can say is that your slide decks are not just seen by the systems thinkers who are running the show but they are also seen by the people that the people who are running the show want to persuade.

[greentxt]

Yes, he should have titled it "the cognitive style of mckinsey consultants" rather than blame the software.

[copperx]

Isn't that exactly what a consultant wants, though?