Page 144 - The McKinsey Mind

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PresentingYour Ideas 119

More importantly, discussing your results outside the context
of a large meeting increases your chances of getting those decision
makers to buy into your ideas. In the intimacy of a one-on-one
meeting, you open up your thought process to them in a way that
is difficult to do in more formal settings. You can find out their
concerns and address them. If someone takes issue with a particu-

lar recommendation, you may be able to work out a compromise
TEAMFLY
before the big meeting, thereby ensuring that she will be on your
side when the time comes.
To illustrate just how useful prewiring can be, we present a
story told to us by Naras Eechambadi, now founder and CEO of
Quaero, Inc., but previously the head of knowledge-based mar-
keting for investment bank First Union. Naras used prewiring to

great effect when he joined First Union:

When I left the Firm I went to First Union to head up a
group called Knowledge-Based Marketing. At the time, it
was a very small group, and we wanted to grow it very
rapidly. I had to present a business case to John Georgius, the
president of First Union, to get the funding to scale it up over
a three-year period. Using the interviewing techniques that I

had learned at McKinsey, I spent my first two months talk-
ing to people in different parts of the company to discover
their attitudes toward and expectations of our group. It was
a very useful exercise, just structuring the guides and making
sure I heard everybody. It was also part of the selling process.

Naras’s ability to listen resulted in multiple benefits:

I discovered that our group meant different things to differ-
ent people. Some people expected too much; some people
didn’t expect enough. I got a sense of where the political land

®
Team-Fly