by Tim Calkins
DATE
Put the date on the front page!
The date is always important, because there will usually be many versions of a presentation floating around an organization. People will meet to discuss a new product launch dozens of times. The Brazilian expansion project will be the subject of many, many meetings. A date makes it clear which version, or which update, this is.
It is easy to overlook the date because you don’t need the date for the meeting itself. If people at the meeting need to know the date, they can just look at their phones. You will need the date later, when you look back—when you have five versions of one document and you want to find a particular draft of the presentation.
NAMES
One of the elements that many people forget to put on the title page is the names of the team that created the presentation. You always should answer this simple question: Who wrote this?
People frequently move around a big company. Some people get promoted, others get transferred and others leave to pursue new opportunities. As a result, the team working on a project in November might be very different than the team that worked on it in March. At the time of a presentation, it is often quite clear who is on the team. A few months later, the situation may have changed.
If you know who worked on a particular update, you can go back to ask them about key assumptions. You can also get information on how it went.
LOCATION
Many presentations will include the location on the cover page. This can be helpful to provide some context, although it isn’t essential. For example, I don’t typically put the location on the front page of my presentations at Kellogg, since the majority of them are in Evanston.
2—Purpose
It is always best to start a presentation with a statement of the purpose: What are we doing here? You can think of this as the destination check. Where is the airplane heading?
The purpose could be to
review an annual marketing plan,
discuss the latest business results or
consider a new product recommendation.
There is always a purpose! Remember, one of the first things to sort out is the reason for the presentation. If you don’t know why you are having a meeting, you shouldn’t be presenting in the first place. Just cancel it and save the time.
Putting the purpose right up front is useful for both the presenter and the audience. For the presenter, it grounds the presentation and increases the chance that it will be focused. For the audience, it clarifies the goal of the meeting right at the beginning. As speaker Scott Berkun observes, “If it takes ten minutes to explain what your point is, something is very wrong.”1
3—Agenda
Every presentation should have an agenda. This is a basic, simple rule. An agenda provides structure. It highlights what is coming when. It is a map for the presentation.
The agenda goes at the front of the presentation and shows the basic flow. It should generally reappear several times. If you have five items on the agenda, you will probably show the agenda six times: once to show the overall flow, and then five more times as you move into each section. With each section, you note where you are by putting a circle or square around the section. The agenda serves as a series of signposts.
The main reason to have an agenda is that it helps your audience to know what topics will be covered and when. This plays a critical role in setting up their expectations. When should they expect to see the recommendation? How many sections are there to get through? All of this will put your audience at ease. TED’s Chris Anderson notes that it is critical to set the overall direction for a talk: “When the audience knows where you are headed, it’s much easier for them to follow.”2
You never want your audience to be unsettled. If they don’t know that you have the agenda and flow worked out, they may well get antsy as you walk through an analysis of customer complaint trends in Japan over the past seven years.
I was in a presentation recently where there was no agenda. It was a major problem. The meeting was scheduled to last from 2 to 3 p.m. The presenters got started right on time, laying out an interesting review of the business. They took us through an impressive segmentation study and a competitive analysis. But then it was 2:30 and we still hadn’t gotten to the recommendation.
And then 2:40 rolled around. I started to get a little nervous. I wondered, “When will we see the recommendation?” By 2:45 I was concerned, thinking, “Maybe there is no recommendation at all! Or did I schedule the wrong time for this?” At 2:50 I couldn’t wait any longer—I jumped in and started asking questions.
It turns out the team did have a logical recommendation; the meeting was just running longer than anticipated. It didn’t end well, though. We rushed through the recommendation, which resulted in a very frustrating finish. Not surprisingly, we didn’t agree on anything. We just decided to meet again.
An agenda is also a useful tool for the presenter. Creating the agenda forces you to have a flow and structure to your presentation. If you have to lay out the sections, you have to think through what you are going to cover when. The simple process of writing an agenda ensures that there will be some logic and organization to the presentation. What comes first? What comes later?
Sometimes you will write the agenda and realize the entire presentation isn’t going to work—there are too many sections, or the flow doesn’t seem to make sense. This is useful feedback. It reduces the chance you’ll move ahead with an ineffective presentation.
The agenda can also help you manage the time. If you see minutes slipping away while you are presenting the first section, you know you have a time problem. If you realize this early in the meeting, you can take steps to address it.
An agenda shouldn’t be too long or too short. As Harvard’s Steven Pinker notes, “Like all writing decisions, the amount of signposting requires judgment and compromise: too much, and the reader bogs down in reading the signposts; too little and she has no idea where she is being led.”3
It doesn’t make any sense to have an agenda with just one thing on it. What is the point? Even an agenda with two items seems rather modest. If this is the case, you will want to break up your argument into more sections.
You can’t list too many items, either. An agenda with ten or fifteen things on it is just not going to work. It’s too much. You might be covering too much in your presentation, or you are cutting things into sections that are too small.
If you find yourself with an exceptionally long agenda, you should consider splitting the topic into several different meetings. An agenda with fifteen items could turn into three agendas with five items each.
4—Executive Summary
Say this with me: “I will always have an executive summary.” Now let’s say it again: “I will always have an executive summary.”
The reason why an executive summary is so important is simple: your audience is busy. They have a full plate of activities. They are worried about different issues, both at work and at home. They have a very limited attention span.
This means that you have a very narrow window in which to get through to your audience. How long? It might be just a few minutes. Then the distractions will appear. The CEO reaches for their smartphone and starts checking email. They talk to the person next to them. Worst case, they get up and leave.
A good executive summary highlights the key points. It recaps the presentation in just a few simple sentences. Most important, it states the point of the meeting. Remember Scott Berkun’s advice: “If it takes ten minutes to explain what your point is, something is very wrong.”4
In most cases, the executive summary will include the recommendation—communicate what you are going to cover and recommend right up front.
There are some situations where you might delay the recommendation. Instead of saying, “We recommend Plan A,” you say, “There are two options to consider: Plan A and Plan B.” Generally, you will take this approach if you know your audience will not
support your recommendation. If the CEO loves Plan B and you are recommending Plan A, then you want to be careful how you approach the discussion. You may be better off building to the conclusion. Putting it right up front might put the CEO on the defensive.
An executive summary is incredibly useful for your audience. If they agree with the overall direction, they can tune out and focus on other things. If they have questions, they know where to focus.
An executive summary should generally be one page, with a headline and perhaps five or six bullet points. This forces you to be concise and distill the key points from your presentation. A three- or four-page summary doesn’t really work; it has too much detail. By the time you get through the summary, the presentation itself will seem unnecessary.
The executive summary can go before or after the agenda. Leading off with it often works well; you first lay out your basic story and recommendation, and then you show how you will walk through it step-by-step.
The executive summary and agenda should be linked. If your first point is “Our business is performing exceptionally well,” then it would make sense for the agenda to start with a section titled “State of the Business” where you explain how well the business is doing.
Some people like to write the executive summary at the beginning of the process. Other people prefer to write it at the end. In many cases, it ends up being a bit of a circular process; you do a draft and then come back later to revise it as the presentation takes shape.
5—Conclusion
You need to end the presentation on a solid note, and the best way to do this is with a strong conclusion page.
Without a final page, people don’t really know that the presentation is done and the show is over. Great performances always end decisively. At the end of a movie, the credits appear. At the end of a play, the curtain closes. Singers usually save a great song for the finale and call out, “Thank you so much! We love you, Tokyo!” as they walk off the stage and the lights come up. All these steps tell the audience the production has ended. In most meeting rooms, there isn’t a curtain to close. You can bring up the lights, but you don’t run credits (though it could be nice: Copying—Jon Phillips; Financial Analysis—Jennifer Simpson; Market Research Insights—Peter Kim; Lunch—David O’Reilly).
Ending without a conclusion page can lead to an awkward moment when the presenter is standing, looking at the silent crowd. Or you might end up with an inspirational line, such as “Well, that concludes my presentation,” or “Any questions?”
The final page is important whether the presentation has gone well or poorly. If it has been a successful presentation, you want to leave everyone nodding their heads. This is the time to really hit your points and seal the deal. If the presentation has been a struggle, the conclusion is your chance to frame the argument one last time and shed some light on what is coming next.
A good summary slide simply recaps the main points. It should be a short page; this is not the time for in-depth information. You shouldn’t put financial data or market research findings on a summary page. Just list the main points you covered.
Remember that the conclusion slide is not the place to introduce new information, either. You don’t want to drop in something like “And so we proposed a $22-billion acquisition” on the final slide as people are packing up and getting ready to head out.
Some people like to just run the executive summary slide from the beginning of the presentation again at the end. This simple approach can work well.
Another approach is to close with the next steps: What happens now? This is a good way to connect the presentation to action. If everyone at the meeting agrees that three things will now happen, there is a good chance that those three things will actually happen.
7
FIND THE STORY
* * *
Now comes the task of actually building the presentation. This is the time when you start creating pages and putting together the slides. You lay out your case. This is the hard work. As Winston Churchill wrote, “The foundations have to be laid, the data assembled, and the premises must bear the weight of the conclusions.”1
At the heart of a presentation is a story, a logical flow of ideas and information. Finding the flow isn’t easy but it is perhaps the most important step when it comes to presenting. Communications coach Carmine Gallo notes, “Creating the story, the plot, is the first step to selling your ideas with power, persuasion and charisma. Succeeding at this step separates mediocre communicators from extraordinary ones.”2
With a strong flow, a presentation will work. One page will logically lead to the next page. It will feel intuitive and natural. Questions will come up and then be answered. Your audience will follow along, nodding. It will seem easy, and this will help you sell your recommendation. As psychologist Daniel Kahneman notes, “When you are in a state of cognitive ease, you are probably in a good mood, like what you see, believe what you hear, trust your intuitions, and feel that the current situation is comfortably familiar.”3
A weak flow, on the other hand, leads to a difficult presentation. With tenuous connections from page to page, the presentation feels scattered. Your audience will be searching for information, flipping ahead or looking back.
Getting the right structure is essential for a strong presentation, much like getting the framing right is important when constructing a house. “If you’re trying to make a case on the page, at a presentation or in giving a formal speech, structure is something that you need to be intensely interested in,” observes Sam Leith, a columnist at the Financial Times.4
Finding the story isn’t easy. Life is complicated. The issues facing a business can have multiple dimensions. There is a remarkable amount of data to work with. Turning a complex situation into a simple story requires real effort.
A Presentation Is a Story
The best way to identify the flow for your presentation is to think of it as a story. You aren’t presenting information and data; you are telling someone a tale about the business.
People naturally tell stories; this is what humans have been doing for thousands of years. “You just let the speaker take you on a journey, one step at a time. Thanks to our long history around campfires, our minds are really good at tracking along,” notes TED’s Chris Anderson.5 Presentation expert Nancy Duarte agrees, explaining in her 2011 TED talk, “There’s something kind of magical about a story structure.”6
With a good story, things feel logical. Points build from one to the next. It moves along. It is interesting.
Consider a story like this:
Did you hear what happened yesterday? Peter was late for school, so he was speeding down Main Street. When he turned onto Union Street, a policeman saw him. Instead of stopping, Peter just took off. Crazy, right?
He headed down Union Street, took a quick turn on Pleasant Avenue and then looped around to the high school. The policeman was right behind him, lights flashing, so he tried to cut through the shopping plaza. But another officer cut him off. He was arrested and is in real trouble. I don’t know what he is going to do!
The story feels natural. It starts with an introduction, then leads to the situation. There is a sequence of events. The sentences connect, one to the next. There is enough information. There aren’t random, unrelated facts. This is a strong story.
Now consider this one:
Peter drove to school today. I think he was driving his father’s old Buick. You remember that old car? It is blue and pretty scratched up. I drove in it last month; I think we went out for lunch. It might have been to Wendy’s. Don’t you like the bur-gers at Wendy’s? He was late so he was speeding. I usually try to stay under the speed limit so I don’t get a ticket. Have you ever gotten a ticket? I got one last week. One hundred dollars! That is so frustrating; I really can’t afford a ticket, especially because my clutch is going bad. Do you know how much it costs to fix a clutch? A policeman saw Peter and chased him to school. Who do you think is going to win the football g
ame on Saturday?
This is the same story, only now the flow is chopped up. There is a lot of random, scattered and irrelevant information. It is hard to figure out where the story is going or what to pay attention to. What was the point here, anyway? It simply doesn’t work as a narrative.
Finding the Flow
To find your story, it is useful to think about several things.
BEGIN WITH THE KEY POINTS
Start by thinking about the key points. What are you trying to get across? In most cases, this will relate to your objective.
At this stage, you should ignore the detailed data; your focus should be the significant points. For example, “Sales are growing quickly” is an important point. “Sales are up by 7.8 percent” is more detail than you need at this step in the process. Later, you will need specific data to support your argument. You will need charts and graphs. This is not the time.
Jonathan Copulsky, former CMO of Deloitte, draws a distinction between horizontal and vertical logic in a presentation. Horizontal logic is the flow of the pages. Vertical logic is the structure of each page. As you work on the story, focus on the horizontal logic. You shouldn’t worry about the details on a particular page until you know it is going to be in the final document.