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94 The McKinsey Mind

Which of your products or services produce most of your
profit? Which consume most of your expenses? Can you
find other instances of 80/20?

GENERATING THE END PRODUCT

Up to now, we’ve been dealing exclusively with the internal com-
ponents of the problem-solving process. Forming your hypothe-
sis, planning your work, doing your research, and interpreting
your results—these all happen within the confines of your own
office or team room. Theoretically, if you could get all your data
without interviewing, you could complete all those steps without
leaving your office, assuming you have a decent Internet connec-
tion (access to plumbing facilities might be convenient, too).
Now, however, we’ve reached the nexus between you (or your
team) and your client: the end product. By “end product,” we
don’t mean the collection of charts, slides, computer images, and
other props that you use to communicate your solution to your
audience; that will come in Chapter 5, “Presenting Your Ideas.”
End product, for our purposes, means the actual message that you
will communicate. This is a subtle distinction but a meaningful
one. Your interpretation of the data leads to a story, that is, what
you think the data means. You select those portions of the story
that you believe your audience needs to know in order to under-
stand your conclusion, along with the supporting evidence, and
you put them together into your end product. Finally, you’ll com-
municate that end product via one or more presentation media.
The message and the medium are separate entities, whatever Mar-
shall McLuhan may have said.*
*McLuhan, the celebrated Canadian communications commentator, is best remembered for
writing, “The medium is the message.”