Page 147 - The McKinsey Mind

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122 The McKinsey Mind

Everything has to be completely tailored for your audience.
A good leader knows his audience and how to relate to it.

Sometimes tailoring can even mean adjusting the structure of
your presentation. If you know your audience has, say, little
patience for supporting detail, what is the point of spending time
on it? Just move right to your conclusions. Here’s an example of
tailoring from Bill Ross at GE:

I still structure my pitches like we did at McKinsey—with
an up-front page, governing thoughts, and some discussion
of the background of the problem. Typically, though, I move
through them much more quickly. At GE, you don’t want
to spend too much time on that. You want to jump much
more quickly to the resolution. That’s fine—you just spend
less time on the charts that take people through the back-
ground. It’s my version of “tell ’em what you’re going to tell
’em, tell ’em, and then tell ’em what you told ’em.”

The structure remains; you just highlight different aspects of
it for different audiences.
Tailoring means more than just knowing your audience’s likes
and dislikes, however. You should also learn their language—the
thought processes they rely on and the jargon they use. This is pre-
cisely what Naras Eechambadi did in the example we discussed in
the section on prewiring:

The two months I spent listening to people in First Union
worked out very well for me because I got to understand
what kind of language people used within the company,
what kinds of things they were looking for, and what kind of
outcomes they wanted. For the purposes of my own think-
ing, I used a McKinsey approach to solving the problem. But