Page 132 - The McKinsey Mind

05 (103-126B) chapter 5 1/29/02 4:50 PM Page 107

PresentingYour Ideas 107

sumer goods manufacturer, and now a professor at the Fuqua
School of Business: “I’ve put half-baked ideas into great presenta-
tions and seen them soar, and I’ve put great ideas into bad presen-
tations and watched them die.”
Unfortunately, in today’s corporate world, a lot more ideas are
dying than soaring, if the experiences of our McKinsey alumni are
typical. The poor quality of presentations in their new organiza-
tions came as a shock to many of them. Here are a few typical
impressions (with the names changed to protect the innocent):

I look at the kind of presentations our senior managers give
to each other and to our customers, and it’s depressing. Peo-
ple don’t know how to structure an argument. Their presen-
tations are just stream of consciousness. This was the most
startling change for me when I left McKinsey.

—An alumnus in the health care industry

I’m always amazed at the poor quality of the presentations
here. We tend to have words or outlines put on PowerPoint
slides; people actually think that’s a presentation. It’s not. If
all you have is bullet points with nothing to show graphically
with a chart or schematic, then in my mind, you should put
it in a memo that you send out before the meeting. We have
a lot of meetings where we read outlines together. No charts
for anything. It’s like kindergarten.

—An alumnus in financial services

I worked with a senior executive who always took hours to
build to a point. The “so what” of his slides seemed to be