Page 129 - The New Articulate Executive_ Look, Act and Sound Like a Leader

120 DELIVERY

They had discussed the details in advance. Several minutes into the
spiel, the managing director said, “I’ve brought Andrew with me
today to elaborate on that part of the transaction,” and signaled his
associate to begin.
Andrew’s response was perplexing. He pulled his chair back
from the conference table, put his presentation deck in his lap, bur-
ied his face in it, and began to read the written text from the word
slides—verbatim. His eyes never came out of his lap.
Hardly able to believe his eyes, the managing director frantically
tried to make discreet hand gestures indicating that Andrew should
come back to the table. Andrew misunderstood the signal to mean
he was supposed to go faster. So he began to speak almost as fast as
he could read.
Meanwhile, the clients, seated on the other side of the table,
could only marvel at this bizarre act. By the time the managing

director finally interrupted his prodigy and took back the presenta-
tion, it was too late. In the end, the business—and the $30 million
that went with it—wound up in the hands of the competing invest-
ment bank.
Clearly what we had here was a failure to communicate. As so
often happens, almost everything that could go wrong did go wrong.
The deal went south. Instead of signing on, the potential partner or
clients walked away feeling they may have dodged a bullet.
Aside from the obvious fact that it was a bad call to bring the kid
in at a critical point in the selling process and the clear perception
that there was apparently little or no coordination between the man-
aging director and his junior associate—and certainly no planning
or rehearsal for the meeting—the presence of a wordy deck at this
inopportune moment did not help. Part of the lesson here is that
presentation decks can be a bane and a curse—and often do more
harm than good. That’s why I am not fond of them. Few people are.
Yet most people rely on them. So as in the case of all visuals, we have
to make sure they work for us, never against us.