Prepare & give presentations like a McKinsey/BCG consultant

1. Introduction: Welcome to this course on how to create amazing presentations to impress your audience. I'm Lucas and I bring with me my experience of working at BCG as a consultant and later on at Amazon and other technology companies as a program manager and product managers. So hopefully you'll see a lot of those different experiences talking with different stakeholders coming through as tips in this course. And I'm also working with a McKinsey consultant or ex McKinsey consultants. And so what you'll see in this course is basically a combination of different presentation approaches and best practices from number one, the top consulting companies in the world. Number two, some of the top tech companies as well. So before jumping straight into the course, I do want to give you a very short overview of how it's structured and how it will be helpful for you. So we'll start off with an introduction to presentations, why, and how it's important. We then move on to the actual building blocks of what makes a presentation successful. So we've got storyline, which is how you structure your pages are slides within a presentation deck. We've got slight writing, which is how you structure information within a slide. Slight design, which is how you design the aesthetics and the visual impact of the slides to communicate your message is more effectively. So those three pieces deal with the actual PowerPoint. And we'll have one module on communication as well, which is how you verbally communicate those ideas and talk over the slides to deliver maximum impact. And that's it for the content. At the end, we have one page that basically puts all our key learning points together in one summarized version. So you can have easy reference to everything that we've covered in this course. I want to emphasize as well that this is not just about making pretty slides, not just about PowerPoint presentations. So this cost will be helpful for anyone who's looking to make some sort of communication and make some sort of presentation for your stakeholders. You could be a current consultant. You could be someone trying to get into consulting. Or you could even be someone that works with data and wants to share insights, right? So like a business analyst or data analysts or some sort of strategy, corporate strategy manager. A wide range of audience that could be pertinent for this course. And that's our target for today to maximize our impact in whatever role we have. One thing I'll mention as well. Last thing on this page is that we do have an assignment at the end of this course. This will be a very hands-on assignment where I'll give you like a mock problem that you might face as a consultant. You will have a stakeholder. You have certain things that you need to deliver in terms of insights to the stakeholder. And in that assignment, you'll get a chance to practice some of those concepts by making your own slides. And you'll be able to download some slides that I've made as well so that you can see how a BCG consultant might approach something like that. That should hopefully help bring some of these concepts to life as well. Without further ado, let's dive straight in. 2. What makes a good presentation?: The first thing to introduce about presentations is just remember this one key concept. If you don't remember anything else, which is you don't want to deliver a presentation that you wouldn't want to sit through yourself. So think about it from the perspective of your audience. When you're starting a meeting, your audience is probably wondering, why am I here? Why is this relevant to me? What do you need from me and what's the effort that I have to put into this meeting? So think about all that, make it easy for your audience as possible throughout the meeting in terms of engagement and following you follow ups with Nick stat actions, etc. So everything that you do in the present, do it with your audience in mind. And why is this important? There are three things that drive this importance. So the first one is because your presentation directly impacts how people think about you. Like whether you're a competed person, competent person, whether you are someone who is worth working with, an enjoyable to work with, and whether they should take even seriously. And you're asked like things that you are saying, things that you're asking them to do. A presentation is basically a proxy for your ability and you're getting assessed if we put it in a more Hunger Games style. So that's number one. Number two, as we mentioned before, your presentation should not be just for sure, right? It's not like you take half an hour, you take one hour and you just sit down and talk to them. There has to be a point behind every presentation if it's well organized. And the point can be anything, it can be I want you to do something for me. I want you to agree on what I'm saying and sign it off or I just want you to have visibility on the stuff that I'm working on. So there are different aims to a presentation, but always be very cognizant of what your aim is. And make sure that whenever you're going through the presentation, the other person also knows what your aim is, and so you're aligned on that. Then finally, it's also really important to understand your audience and cater to their interests. So if you're lucky, you get an audience who's super understanding. They are already invested and interested in what you have to talk about. But if not, then you have to think about what does this person care about? And how can I make this presentation relevant to them or interesting to them? At least, understanding your audience, understanding their organization, their role in the organization, what they're currently working on, why it's important to them is really critical so that you can link what you're presenting and frame it in a way that is interesting for them. Now we're going to talk a little bit about high level, what it means to have a good presentation. And in general, we can synthesize this into three key pillars. The first one is you have a coherent structure. Second one is clear visuals. So the aesthetics. And the first one is how you communicate it in a meaningful and impactful way. So you might have heard this if you've watched the introduction, but these are the three things that we tried to optimize for every time you give a presentation this course, then we'll take you through each of those three pillars and how to excel in each one of them. On the structure piece. Let's talk a little bit about it. What do we mean about structure? So when we say structure, we are talking about the flow of the story across the presentation from start to end. You have a clear agenda. You know what you're going to be talking about, and you have no surprises in terms of, oh, I've not seen this slide. I wasn't expecting this kind of information. So that's our overall structure. The micro structure that we've talked about is basically how you structure information within a slide. So imagine a slight is like a canvas and drawing canvas. There are different ways to fill up elements within this canvas. Going from top to bottom, left to right, we need to have a clear logical flow of how your eyes track the slides. That's our structure within the slides as well, that we want to optimize for. The second big pillar is visuals. Now this one, I won't spend too much time talking about it because I think it's self-evident. But the underlying principles behind visual is we always want them to be as uncomplicated as possible. So less is more just something that doesn't distract the audience. And that's the first principle. The second one is, it's got to be consistent across the slide. So if you're doing something on page one and you're doing something similar on page ten, let's say, then the visuals for those have to be consistent because of visual is a way of reminding the audience, Hey, I've seen this slide before, I know what to expect. And this is not a surprise to me. It makes it easier intellectually for them to follow you. So that's consistency. Then a bonus on top of that is if you can make your visuals and gauging. So this would be, for example, making things pop in a certain way, drawing attention to certain parts of the slides are adding logos so that it's more memorable and our ideas come to life a bit more easily. So those are additional things that you can do for visuals and finally, communication. So we've talked about this before, but this is how you talk through this slide. You don't want to be just reading off the words on the slide. Like, I don't know what you call it, but like kind of like dictation. That's probably not what we want to do. If we do that, the audience will either look at you only and ignore everything on a slide or ignore you and read through this light on their own, which is definitely not what we want happening. So communication is key and we want to communicate in a way that is value additive to what's on the slide. And in a way that doesn't distract the audience from having to focus on one thing versus the other at one time. 3. How to capture the essence of a slide: Alright, now let's talk about story lining. So we know why a presentation is important, how it's important. Now we want to talk about actually making the presentation. And if you watched the earlier videos, then you would know that, sorry lining is about structuring your presentation both across from start to end, across the slides, as well as within each slight how the information is structured. So that's the introduction to story lining. Let's jump straight into it. Now the most important thing that we care about, the storyline is always going to be the titles of the slides. So this is the first thing that we need to master in order to build a storyline. We need all the titles of our slides to be perfect and to make sense. Now when I say perfect, What do I mean? I mean that your audience, when they read the title of the slide, should quickly understand everything that's important and interesting about what's on the slide. So it should be a perfect summary, not too long, not too short, with just the right level of detail. And that's the baseline. There's an additional step after this that we'll talk a bit more about. But basically that is, this title also has to make sense within the context of what comes before and what comes after the slight, such that it flows like a story. But let's stick to the first part first, which is just the information has to be captured accurately and perfectly by the title of the slide. Let's take this slide as an example. Here, the slide title is we have three transformation initiatives that have driven a 228% outperformance versus the broader market over the last ten years. So let's take a look at the information below that. On the left you see those are the three transformation initiatives. And then we have a little arrow pointing to the right. So that's indicating to us the causality right, like stuck on the left-hand side is causing stuff on the right-hand side. Now once on the right hand side, right hand side is basically our information on outperformance. And here you can see what the baseline is, SMP and what the actual performance is of our client, which is the dark blue line. All the information is captured. Then we have the last ten years on the x-axis and small yada, yada, yada. And the key thing about this page then is when you're writing the slight title, you don't want to put too much information to overwhelm the person, especially if they can refer to it on the slides themselves. But at the same time, you need the right level of information so that when they read the slide, they don't immediately start asking questions and thinking like, oh, but like, where's this coming from? Or why is this important? Blah, blah, blah. So for example, if we look at this slide title, if we included all three initiatives, then that's probably a little bit too much information because they can just look down and see the three initiatives right there. If we exclude it, for example, the time period, then someone might be asking, Oh, like this 228% outperformance. Was that just last year because my data is different. So that's something that we need it to put in there as well, just to kind of anchor some of the data. So every time you put data, you do need some reference points and you do need some additional context to answer immediate questions. So this high-level summary of having information on the slide, how to summarize things in a title property to the right level of detail. 4. How to write clear slide titles: The next thing that we really care about in our slide titles is the simplicity and readability of it. So when I say readability, What do I mean? I mean that the English should be simple, clear, and concise, and concession is really important. So I see a lot of slide titles where you just start dropping a ton of detail and writing and very, very complicated English. And that's why the audience tends to get lost. So if you care about the client experience, if you care about your audience experience than the gold standard, is to keep it no longer than two lines. And you might sometimes hear people saying, you know, we can go to three lines. I'm off inflammation is all about showing things on the page. That's actually not the right way to do it. Because if you have a lot of information, that means that the audience is not going to absorb it. So you need to do the work for them and to pre-digested, pre separated into separate slides so that every time they see something, the initial reaction is not like, Oh, this is so much, I'm just going to shut off and do check my emails. Why can you toss? So that's not what we want. And in order to do that, everything should be as simple as possible, as concise as possible. And here you can see on the right are the three key things that I called out. Avoid the excessive and obvious detail. That's something that we mentioned the last time minute, limit it to one sentence so we don't usually have full stops in the title because a full stop suggests that you have two sentences, which suggests that you have two ideas. So every slight should only have one idea. And if there's more than one idea, or if there are ideas that are not related to each other than they should be split up into separate slides. Then the last part is using simple language, which we talked about as well. So that's the key points about being concise. Now let's look at some examples and talk through how we can go from not so good to very good. First example here, we've got transformation programs consists of blah, blah, blah, three pillars, three pillars. And here is where we start shutting off if we see so many words on the screen. So the key details that we removed here is just the detail behind the three pillars. Because these are things that don't really matter. You can just look at the slide and see the detail for yourself. Also simplify it from last ten years, 2013 to 2023. So again, this is excessive detail if you know what year it is currently. So stuff like that you can remove. Looking at the next example, the smartphone market in North America is projected to grow below around. And then we have a long list of reasons why. So again, if the context is clear, if the whole presentation you've been talking about North America, then we can assume that the market is North America. You can put it in a footnote or something, but things basically details which we have established contexts on. We don't need to put it in the title. And then the other thing is kind of the detail behind increasing consumer interests. But allow Why is there increasing consumer interests? We gave examples of that and even talking about this, I feel like I'm getting a bit bored. So tell the key story, the details that belong within the story that should then go into the slide title, that should be in the slide itself. Then the third example that we have, we looked at kind of like reasons for decline in profit. We gave a little bit of details behind margins, erosion of customer base and latch one-off CapEx investments. In general, these are important things because when we talk about declining profits, naturally, we want to know why that's happening. So those are important pieces. But what we tried to improve on, on the right-hand side is just increasing the concession of the language. So you notice here we actually didn't really remove any ideas. We just made it simpler, we just made the English easier to read. So that's something that you can easily fix this. Well, when you're going through the slides, just think about it like if I am someone reading the slides for the first time, is this too complicated for me? Will my brain shut off? And from there you can work out what's the right level of detail and right level of concession to build into the title. So here is one example of a slide that I don't really like. The reason I don't like this is because there's too much information in one slide. When I say too much information, I mean basically the different things going on that do not necessarily relate to each other directly, at least not explicitly. So there's no reason why they should be squeezed into one slide. When we build a slide, the thing that we want to have is only one key message per slide, per title. And that's something that we mentioned before, a small, but I think it's worth showing it here as a negative example to see why it's so important. In this slide. What I see is that three things going on. I'm not sure why they're related to one another. It's not explained clearly to me. So first idea that I see is our client has the largest market share in the UP. Second idea I see is on the right-hand side, the management has ambitions to expand in the US. That's not really related in the UK, unless we make that point clear why is related? Then the last part of the bottom-right is just the US market is ripe for disruption. So this actually relates a little bit to the top right. So I kinda see those two potentially fit in one slide if we really want it to. But the UK piece really just doesn't make sense. Then on the bottom left, we see just a bunch of random quotes that I like. Customer or consumer experience stuff that all our expert interviews, quotes that don't really fit anywhere. So this is an example of a slight That's way too crowded. And when I look at this is basically a data dump on me as an audience fewer, my brain will shut off because I don't want to do the processing work to understand why everything is in one slide. I want someone to tell it to me explicitly. So the way that we approach this or the way that I would approach it is I'll take out the US pieces. So anything on the right-hand side? I'll drop them in a new page. And then on the UK pot, I think the top-left part is fine as a standalone within one page. And on the quotes and stuff, I probably would not put the quotes just randomly on any pages. Biologists extract them. I'll wait for the right chance and the right messages that I want to land. And then put the relevant quotes in the same page. So you don't need to have all the quotes in one place. You can just drop them in wherever it's relevant as supporting continent anecdotal evidence. So that's the way that I would split this light up. 5. How to write insightful slide titles: Now this next thing is a very common mistake, or not a mistake, but something that's optimal that I see in many presentations, especially from people who don't have a consulting background. So this mistake is basically, instead of using your titles, which is really valuable real estate, and it's like prime attention space for your audience. Instead of using those titles to land key points, some people will use titles to just summarize what's on the page. So not even just telling us what's interesting, but just telling us this is information on x, y, z. And then they talked through it. And the most important points are like lending verbally. Now no one's going to remember what you say. Like, even right now when you're watching me speak, you probably won't remember exactly what I said, but the visual aids will be there. And that will remind you of why I said, always preserve the slight titles for the most interesting stuff. We don't want to be wasting that real estate on describing content that has no insight. So let me show you examples of this and you kinda see what I mean. So when we have weak story lining, this is basically just a description of the data that we're showing on the page. So here we have size of the global EV market. We have market share of home appliances like we know what this data is, but from reading this, we have no idea what the insight is. We have no idea what's interesting about that. So when you are writing your slide titles, always think what is interesting about this slide. Why am I putting this data up there in the first place? And if it's interesting, I have to say why it's interesting. If it's not interesting, then maybe I shouldn't even be showing that data because I could be spending the time talking about something more interesting. So that's how we try to create strong storylines. So for example, in the first example we talked about global EV market. Why is it interesting? Oh, because it's growing at 25.5 per cent per annum, which is attractive. It's not attractive. That's for you to make the judgment call and kind of get your insight that. But we need to know some numbers, right? And we need to know the scale of those numbers and what they mean to us. So that's basically answering questions that come up. If we just look at a descriptive title, if we answer those questions, then it becomes an interesting title. Second example, home appliance, market share. Why is this interesting? Oh, because it's concentrated. And three people have almost all of the cells. Does that mean that it's very difficult to disrupt? Maybe it means that there's not much opportunity for MNA, for example, these are things that sit behind why we're showing the data and we need to call that out more explicitly. Third, one, top pinpoints. When I think about pain points, my question would be, what other pinpoints? And should we care? So here we are giving the examples of the pinpoints, which are the insights. Imagine if you are a client and you're thinking, Hey, my customers are not happy with me. That's not gonna help me. I need to know why they're not happy with me and how important this is. Because if one person is unhappy, maybe I don't care as much. But if 63% of customers are not happy, then I need to do something about that and I need to know why they're unhappy. So always think about when you share some data, why you're sharing it, why is interesting? And makes sure when you find something interesting, that you communicate it clearly in your prime real estate, which is a slight title. 6. How to substantiate your slide titles: Now, on the other hand, now that we know we want to show interesting information on this slide, at the same time, those insights must always be substantiated. So we don't want to go too far in the opposite direction and say something like we should do X, Y, Z, and then that's it. So that itself also raises a lot of questions when people look at that page because there'll be thinking, How did you get to that conclusion? And maybe I don't agree with you. Maybe if I don't agree, if you and I don't see supporting evidence, then I get very angry and I get very aggressive and you lose me as an audience. So always try to balance between having the right level of insight and substantiating it with the right logic and the right data within the slide and the slide title. So let's give examples of this. For example, let's see. Number one, apec is expected to grow much faster than both the US and Europe. This is not too contentious because this is just data-driven observation. But when I look at this, my question is, is it growing 1% faster? Is it growing 10% faster? Why should I care? So that's my question. Second example, if I look at this is actually a recommendation. Now I'm saying, hey, we should focus on busy mothers because they are the most attractive. Now this is something that's a very strong position and we have to be careful about it because we need to substantiate that. So if I'm a client and I'm looking at this, I would not buy it. I will have no idea whether I should trust you and how good your data is. I would need to see some evidence behind it and need to see the logic behind that as well. Same thing for the third example. You can't just say we recommend to do X, Y, Z without giving the justification in the slides. So let's see how we would fix some of these mistakes. On the first example. Basically, when we say it's expected to grow much faster, we never want to rely on words to express magnitude. If we use words, we also have to substantiate with the numbers. So instead of saying much faster, we can just get the numbers right here is going to grow faster than the US because it's 28% versus 12%, 18. And now we can make the call and say, We think this is much faster. And then let's open for discussion. And why is it interesting? Because it will grow by Dr. 60 per cent of global, global sales growth. So always giving a sense of relative magnitudes when we call out one part as being more important than others. That will help us ground ourselves in the reasoning behind how arriving to some conclusions. Now, second example, busy mother segments. Okay, why is it the most attractive? It's because we are looking at the purchase frequency as well as the basket value. These together, maybe they tell me about my revenue, potential revenue behind this segment. And here we can see how they are potentially interesting. So ideally on this page, you can see on this slide title, you can see that purchase frequency and basket value. And ideally on the page itself, you might even be able to see like how they benchmark against some other segments. So in this case, we didn't have enough real estate and the title to put a benchmarking. But if we really wanted to make the case strong than we can show relative to other segments. How the busy mothers are actually so much more attractive because they are purchasing so much more frequently and so much more. Now, final example, we were making a recommendation to reallocate CapEx capital expenditures. We need to give a little bit more specifics on what exactly we are recommending. So how much are we going to reallocate and where is it going to go from and to and why. So here is where we need to justify in some of our recommendations. So in this case, came out with some placeholder numbers. It's going to save us 1.1 million or 1.1 million in extra revenues. So taking a step back, That's basically what we want to do. We want our slide titles to be watertight. So when someone looks at it, they don't lose trust in you as a presenter. They don't lose trust in you as an analyst, as a Strategy Manager, etc. And in order to do that, you need to preempt the type of questions that they might come up with in their minds when they read your slide titles. And you always must have an answer to those questions. Ideally the slide title, but if not very prominently on the slide itself. 7. How to use a storyline to structure your presentation: Alright, now that we know how to write our slide titles, hopefully, Let's talk about the other part of storyline, which is how those slight titles flow across the presentation. Now this is why I kind of alluded to at the start of the course, which is, it's not just about structuring the right slide titles, but also how the slides are structured across the presentation. So what we want is a storyline that flows if you read your slide titles from page one to two, to three to four, etc. And you read them almost like a storybook. It should have a logical flow and a logical narrative. And that's what we tried to do in this presentation as well. So the best way to approach this is to actually not slapped with PowerPoint is to start with a word document. Think before you even do any analysis, before you even put anything on two slides. What do I want out of this presentation and how do I get there? What are the key points that I want to land? And how do I structure those points? And you basically write them out in bullet points. In McKinsey they call this dot dash. And BCG, we just call them a storyline and we write down the bullet points or the dot dashes in a Word document from start to bottom. And each bullet point is one slide. Each bullet point is, one idea, is one slide. And then you can think about, okay, if I have all these different ideas, is this the best way to present it logically? Should I rearrange some of the bullet points? If I'm reading this or that logical gates and does that mean that I need more slides? Or maybe, oh, I see that I've repeated this point twice, so actually I don't need two slides to cover this. Let's delete the other one. So you can see all this advance planning comes even before you start building your presentation. And it's so helpful because it basically removes a lot of potential rework that sometimes less organized people might run into, which is they built slides and they just like at the end of it, they have no idea how this line is fit together and it just becomes a headache to manage. We don't want that. We want to start with a document from it with our storylines. Once we're happy with the storylines, then let us build out the slides in PowerPoint. So let's take a look at the storyline for our own calls here. So Russia is actually what I've been doing for this course, the way that I structured my slides. And you can see the dot dash or the storyline bullet points here. Ideally, what you want to see is when you read from top to bottom, everything makes logical sense. And on top of that, we shouldn't be just rearranging slides randomly because that means that we're disrupting the logic and something might not flow as smoothly as before. So pay close attention once you have a storyline that works. As we go into the slides, be careful about what you do to rearrange slides and make sure that the order of it still makes sense when you're done rearranging. So this is why a lot of the times and consultancies, the managers are the ones rearranging the slides, editing the titles because they are the ones who talk to the client and had the bigger picture in mind. And so they can be more closely attuned to what's a reasonable story to tell and what's not. But even for you, if you're not a manager, is still the same principle. You can design your own storylines and it'll be even more impressive if your storylines are already perfect and someone's looking at it and they say like, Hey, everything makes sense. Just keep doing what you're doing. That's what we want with our storyline. Now let's take a look at if we rearranged us likes randomly, how this would look. Now reading this, I'm not gonna go too much into it, but if you want to, you can pause and you can see that actually it just doesn't make as much sense in this case, because it's kind of like a tutorial video is a course. And the things that I want to lend are quite straightforward. It doesn't matter that much, but you can already see that it already has an impact on how you think about slight writing the order of stuff to approach it in, etc. So we don't want to have random order of slides and we don't want to have a presentation that's just a data dump with NO and logical flow. 8. What makes a great slide : Alright, now we're at the slight writing part of this course. So if you recall what I mentioned at the start of this course, slight writing for us is all about how you structure information within a slide. So think about a slight as having several components. You can analyze it in terms of your eye movements. They go from left to right, top to bottom. You can analyze them in terms of what information they're trying to convey. So it could be like quantitative data, qualitative insights or commentary, or it could be a mix of both. And then you can also think about how you want your slides to read in terms of the key messages that pop up. So when should the key messages pop out? Where on the slides should they be? How do you highlight those messages? So that's what we're going to talk about in this section of the course. Now, if you're a consultant or business analysts, data analyst, some sort of strategy analyst, or a business manager, then chances are you'll be presenting a lot of information and data heavy slides. So that's the first thing that we're going to look at in terms of slight writing. And we're going to look at how to present data in a way on a slight step. Makes sense, are intuitive and it's easy to follow. So here is a negative example, heaven, look at these two charts here. And I'm sure as you just glance over it, you already have some questions popping into your mind as to perhaps there's some missing information, some missing details. And hold those thoughts to think about how you would improve the slides. But at least on this page here, what I want you to think about is potential questions that you might ask yourself. If you are asking yourself some questions, if you're not totally happy with the way that these charts are being shown, what they're trying to tell us. The story is incomplete, etc. Have a think about how you would resolve those issues, how you would update those charts and slides in terms in terms of making it clearer for the audience. And we'll come back to this at the end of this section of this course. 9. How to show analysis meaningfully: Now when we talk about presenting data in a PowerPoint presentation, this is a classic view that is very worth your time to absorb and get very comfortable with. A lot of consultants use this same thing for business analysis. The structure of this page is very classic. So there's not much that you need to do to spice things up. And if you follow this template, chances are when you're presenting data. This is going to do the trick for you. So this template I'm talking about is basically the left hand side, right hand side structure. And what we typically tend to do is we have data on the left-hand side page. It could take up half of the page, could take up two-thirds. The ratio is up to you and how much you want to present in terms of information density. But that's on the left-hand side. On the right-hand side is where you have your key takeaways. So these are your insights, the key points that you think are important for the audience to understand and appreciate why it's so interesting to have this data here. And then at the bottom, you always want to have footnotes. So it's not enough to just put some data on the page and not explain where it came from or how you arrived at these numbers. Especially if you're doing some sort of complex analysis and you need to build credibility with your audience. It's always important to have footnotes to say, number one, where the data is coming from sources. And number two, any methodology notes, so assumptions that you made or some sort of calculations that you did in order to arrive at these numbers. And having these, you don't even have to talk through it. Having these gives you the credibility to then talk about why you actually want to talk about which is the numbers and the insights. So again, the structure of a very classic, data rich sort of presentation style. Left-hand side is the chart, right-hand side of this, the takeaways. And then at the bottom is your footnotes, which includes sauces and methodology. Of course, we can make variations of the template that we just saw. So instead of just having a simple chart on the left, oftentimes, as we go deeper and deeper into a project, or deeper and deeper into some analysis, we need more cuts off the data are more ways of looking at it through different segmentation lenses, some different filters, etc. So as you build it, as you build those views and analysis up, just think about how it fits within the left-hand side of the chart. And the principles are the same. You still show the chart on the left-hand side, but how much detail you then expose up can vary depending on how deep your analysis goes. So in this case is still relatively simple, but you've seen, you've seen how the bar chart basically it gets stripped out into different segments. Those segments then have their own characteristics such as your annual growth rate, which is your compounded annual growth rate, or Cayuga on the bubbles that you see towards the right of the chart. So these are details that you can always add and sometimes we even add light tables next to the chat. So potentially like the segment size for each segment that you see here, followed by some characteristics are some grove as much detail as you need in order for the interesting insights this emerging. But remember at the end, That's the day the structure stays the same. Left-hand side, right-hand side, and then footnotes. Now you can always choose to mix up the visuals a little bit in order to get the type of formatting that you personally like. So we can make adjustments to the main setup. But notice that the key elements are always going to be the same. So that's left-hand side having the chart and the data, right hand side having the insights and footnotes at the bottom. So the only things that we've changed is literally whether we're underlining the worst at the top for the chart titles. How're doing the transition from left-hand side to right-hand side here we've put an arrow. So just have a look at this and see what works best for you. I will say that this style is a little bit more specific to what we'd like to do at BCG. The previous page that you saw is much more typical of McKinsey, but at the end of the day, it's not so important how you present it as long as it's consistent within the page and across the pages. So what we don't want to see is like one page, we do it the McKinsey style and then the next page we do it the BCG style. There's no reason to be switching around. So pick one that you like and stick with it within one back, it should be consistent. I'm going to show you another example of a data-rich slide, but this time it's a little bit different in the sense that we have a mix of quantitative data, which you see on the column charts on the left. And qualitative data, which you see on the quotes in the middle of the page. So again, there's not too much variation. You can see left hand side is the data qualitative and quantitative and qualitative. And right hand side is a takeaways footnotes at the bottom. So key takeaway from this is, no matter what sort of analysis you're doing, quantitative or qualitative, as long as the analysis involves some sort of data and then some key takeaways from that data. Then this main setup that you have is a very reliable type of template that you can always use. And as long as you're consistent with it, as long as visually it's clear what constitutes the data and what constitutes the takeaways, then you're pretty safe to basically follow this framework of saying, Hey, here's the data and here's what I think is interesting about it. So let's discuss the key takeaways and that's why you call, you, come in with your narrative. So again, not too much variation here, just showing you how different slides can be structured following the same underlying principles. 10. How to make your slides reader friendly: Now we're going to talk through a negative example of a slide. So let's move on from the previous flight points about left hand side, right hand side, and the footnotes as the main setup. Now we're going to talk about what makes us light, easy to digest and what makes it hard to digest. So have a look at this picture and think about how you would feel if you're looking at it for the first time. My first impression would be, hey, this line is so dense, I'm not going to look at this light. I'm just going to lighten sonar or listened to the person and see what the person tells me is important. And so that's not really the point of the slide. The slide is there to guide a conversation and to show visually what should be highlighted or what's interesting about your message. That's not what we want to do it in a slide. So in this case, this is what we would call a busy slide. And basically, if you have too much information on the slide, it becomes counterproductive. So we never want to hit that point where the audience just disregards what we put on the page. So when this happens, then what we need to do instead is to split it up into two pages, either that or strip out the details and put them in something like this in the appendix. So the point is, when you have information that you want the audience to absorb, don't overload it. Show just what is enough for that one given page. Anything that's excessive inflammation, either move into the appendix or move it to a following slide. And now we have a simplified version of the slide. So as you can see, a lot of the detail has been stripped off. But we're still retaining the core message, which is, hey, we've got a 10-year roadmap is kinda stacked up from one month out all the way up to ten years out. So more than five years out, we're still looking at the key actions for each part of the roadmap. And we're still looking at our priority in terms of impact, high, medium, low. So you can see the key messages are still here. The only thing that's changed is number one, the visuals are much simpler because we have less words to care about and to kind of squeeze onto the page. Number two, we're cleaning up that, Hey, we know that maybe we want to have more details for a deep dive discussion. We do have those details. They're just not on this page. So you can see the appendix if we would need to fly, um, take a detour and talk about this in more detail. So that's what we'd like to do when we have too much information. Instead of cramming it into one page, we show that we have it somewhere. And then we use the page itself as a skeleton framework to introduce the ideas and introduce the discussion. So again, think about the purpose of a presentation is not to make the person feel overwhelmed or think about everything that they have to consider is to basically get them comfortable with what you're trying to present and convey to them. So what's the best way of doing that is to keep things manageable, bite-sized. So at the end of the day, I would say less is more. If you're always if you are ever concerned about not having enough information, then you can always have it just not in the main body. You can move it to the appendix or you can split it up across multiple sites as long as you call it out this, there are no one's going to adopt that. You haven't done the work. So yeah, that's the takeaway for this lesson is small. 11. How to minimize questions about your analysis: Alright, we've come to the end of this section on slight writing for data analysis. So let's go back and revisit the first page that we saw in this section, which was the two charts which just appeared randomly on the page with no explanation or commentary whatsoever. Now let's have a think about the key questions that we would ask ourselves. How will we improve this patient? Because for me, looking at this, it doesn't really tell me anything. It gives me more questions and answers. So I have six questions that I came up with. Hopefully you had the same, if not more. But let's go through each of them. So number one, I think the charts themselves are not really well labeled. So looking at this doesn't give me much information at all. So instead of just showing the trends, when we show chats, we always want numbers somewhere. We need to know the magnitudes in order to know how important a problem is. If they're showing market size, showing a market is growing is not enough. We need to know the absolute size as well. So missing y-axis labels on the charts. So that's number one. Number two. Depending on what the message is, maybe we wanted to say, hey, the market is large and growing. Then in this case we need two sets of numbers, right? Number one is magnitudes, the size of the market, which was the first. And number two is magnitude of the growth. So growth rates. So in this case, we're also missing some columns in terms of Al-Qaeda compounded annual growth rate. And how we think that stacks up against our expectations. That isn't a hike agar is a locator. So that's number two. Number three, when we have acronyms on the page, we always want to make sure that our audience knows what those acronyms stand for. So in this case, ATV could be all-terrain vehicle, could be average transaction value. No one knows. You have to clarify. The only exception I would say to this is if you're dealing with a very familiar topic for the audience and everyone knows, everyone in the room knows what exactly ATP is. Then in this case, you don't have to explain it. Because doing that will make you look a little bit more amateurish. Take it with a pinch of salt. But most of the time, if it's something that you think someone in the room might not understand, that, it's worth calling out the acronym what it stands for, either in the chart title itself or in the footnotes. Number four. So here is where footnotes can also be very helpful because we say, hey, we have average transaction value is these are the ATVs and is based on a representative site. So that's not really telling us much, right? Like, hey, Could it be based on the site and North Carolina? Could it be based on five sites in London? So have you never know? So every time you have some sort of methodology that's specific to the way they obtain this data, this chart, then you need to call it out, especially if it's something that's debatable are contentious. And where this goes is usually in the footnotes. So you always need to give your footnotes and sauces in order to be credible. The fifth one. So how many online searches that we actually get in 2017 And what was the ATV and 2021? Because if you look closely at the charts, the yes, don't match up. So we have 2018 to 2021 for the online search is probably the person sharing this. We want to say, Hey, we got more online search hits and that's kind of a manifesting in highest band at our sites. So they should add up online searches 2018 to 2021 ATV, we only have it from 2017 to 2020. So think about the consistency of your data, especially if you're trying to share data that has some sort of causal relationship, right? It makes sure that the time period stack up and that when you look at it, is faultless and no one's going to question you. So in this case, I would rather say we have missing data for 20172021. So let's just take a comparison of 2019 to 2020, for example. Or we could make some approximations, are some proxy numbers to fill in the gaps for where the ears have no numbers. And then call it out in the footnotes and say this is and estimates that amount based on X, Y, Z methodology. So the point is, whatever is on the page should be entirely clear and unquestionable. And anything else that's like potentially debatable, potentially contentious. You need to have the documentation and the methodology nodes behind that and have those available in the footnotes. That's the takeaway for number five. Number six. So we're also missing the commentary. So in terms of the data, Let's assume everything is there and clear. That still doesn't tell us the key takeaway of this slide. So unless you're gonna be like super charismatic and talking about how online search hits results in a TV growth. The audience is not going to remember after you finish the presentation if it's not on the slide. So always have the most important points being called out somewhere on the slides. And in this case, is probably worth having it as a commentary on the right-hand side because that's the key point of the page. And not just on the right-hand side. If it's that important, you should be calling it in the title as well. So again, think about the key insights while you are even showing this data. And make sure that the Y is always front and center in the page somewhere. 12. How does slide design help you : Now let's talk about the aesthetics of the PowerPoint presentation. We've talked about how to structure the overall presentation deck. We've talked about slight rating, which is structuring information within a page. And now let's move on to the cosmetic stuff, which is the visuals. So we're going to talk a little bit about visual best practices in this section. The first thing to say about designing PowerPoint slides is that we should never underestimate how important it is for our slides to look good and flawless. It's so important that the big consulting companies usually have in-house PowerPoint specialists. They call them differently in different places. But at BCG, we have art sample night. I think it's Visual Studio, so something. But as a team that at the start of each client engagement, we share with them how the client's lights internally look like. So what they do for their internal presentations and our in-house team than designs specific slides with the same color, the same design elements, but kind of like jacked it up to make it look even more beautiful. And this then becomes a template for any client-facing presentations. It's hugely important. And the reason for that is because when the client sees a page that looks beautiful, deck that's like perfectly formatted and perfectly consistent internally. Then it lends an element, an element of trust as well. This suggests that, hey, this person cares about their work. They have high standards because I can see it visually. So maybe it flows through to the analysis and the insights as well. Finally, it builds an element of trust. So very interestingly, if you're presenting to someone, maybe in a different organization from you, is always helpful to look at how they do their presentations, beings through their brand logos, the color palette, even if they have light investor presentations and kind of see like what they think a nice PowerPoint looks like. And you can mimic the style in order to build trust with them. Because then when they look at your presentation, you're not like an outsider. Or at least you look like you've done your research and you know a little bit about what the company has a bar. This is a really neat trick that consultants always use. And if you're presenting to someone not from your organization, you can use that as well. Even if you're doing an assessment, take home assessment and presenting to a company that you're applying to for a job interview. That's also something that really helps you stand out from the crowd, which is care about the design. Put right into it. And try your best to tie, are designed to something that the company finds familiar. 13. How to experiment with different slide designs: Now on this page, I want to show you how you can make a slight look slightly more interesting than your typical slide. So a typical slightest what we saw in the previous section, you all data on the left-hand side, takeaways on the right-hand side and then sources at the bottom. So sometimes depending on what content you're presenting, there are opportunities to switch things up. So this is one such example where instead of showing some data first and then when you think about it, we actually want to present things in a different sequence. On this page, the sequence that we're following is, hey, let's talk about some suggestions that we have on the left-hand side. These are our key program initiatives that we recommend to the client. Then let's talk about the expected impact, expected profit and loss uplift, increase profitability for the client. And this will be our projections on the right-hand side. So the sequence is slightly different. We start with some initiatives on the left, then some data on the right. So that's the first way that we can switch things up, which is playing around with what's on the left-hand side and what's on the right-hand side. Stepping back a little bit from this. In general, the way that we can think about slides is as sections within a Canvas. So the most obvious way to split it is left-hand side and right-hand side. Here in this case, you can see with following the same principles, just populating them with slightly different contents. Now if you want to switch things up, there are different ways to do it right? You can squish the left-hand side, make it 1 third, squish the right-hand side, make it 1 third. So it kind of like moving the dividing line in-between the two parts back and forth, depending on how much data you have on each side of the page. That's one way to make it a bit different. The other way to make it a bit different is to squish, is to separate the slide horizontally. So this doesn't always work. It depends on what you're trying to show. But in this case maybe you could have something like different icons at the top of the page. And then one long arrow to take the audience down to the key takeaways at the bottom of the page that splitting it from top to bottom instead of left to right. So this whole thing falls under 1, which is play around with the ratio of the slides and what type of content you put in each section within the slide. The other thing that I'm going to call out on this page is the use of icons. This is very popular as a way to bring your slides to life. We want to use icons whenever there are interesting or important things that we ought to call up. This shouldn't be like any sort of contents. This should be like key ideas or things that recur again and again, are things that you want the audience to remember. In this case, we've called out the four key program initiatives using the four icons. Icons are pretty easy to find. You just have to search for them on Google Images and then do some processing to kinda like make them consistently formatted in the same color, et cetera. So the idea is to bring imagery into the points where you think are worth more attention. That's icons. Then the last thing that I want to call out is the highlights. So what I mean by highlights is when you have a chart and sometimes you want to call attention to certain parts of the chart, then you might box up something like what we have here, like a red dotted box. You might kind of put like a, like a comma, which is basically you label that part of the chart and give a slight commentary on like, hey, look at this. The gap is 26 per cent and driven by blah, blah, blah. So these are call-outs and these are, these are things that we can include into a datatype in order to draw the audience's attention to one specific part of the chart. 14. How to use creative visuals: Now this is an example of a slide that's a little bit more out there and buy all of that. I mean, stylistically is very different from anything that we've seen so far, right? Like the themes or dark colors. It's very minimalist. There's not much text, and there are very few ideas on the page. So use these slides judiciously. They're not always appropriate for depending on the type of presentation that you're running. But they can be very impactful and very powerful, especially as a way to let the audience members can take a break, take a mental break. So usually in consulting, these slides are not used that frequently. There are two situations in which you would tend to use slides like these. Number one is when you're dealing with qualitative concepts and you're selling a big picture idea. And this is all before like the stitch off diving into the detail is kind of like getting people excited and thinking about something from a high level hypothetical perspective. So that's number one, high level qualitative idea sharing. Number two, we can also use the slides as section breakers. So for example, if I'm running a presentation where number one, I'm going to talk about housing, housing prices. Number two, I'm going to talk about consumer sentiment. Number three, I'm going to talk about economic policy. So I have these three sections. I can break those sections up with a page that looks like this at the start of each section. So I have three of these slight space throughout the presentation. And on each of those slides, I can basically give like a super high level overview and a summary of what that section is going to be about. So that's another way to use some slides like these, which are very information light, but visually very impactful. And the other thing I'm going to call out about these slides is, heaven, look at the rule of three if you haven't heard about it before. So whenever you're presenting information, you'd like to structure it in a way that's grouped into three. So here we have number one, slight as concise number two, slides memorable. Number three, sliders designed intuitively, the intention behind the rule of three is to have something for the audience to rally around. If you have to. Sometimes it makes you feel a little bit unprepared or under prepared. And you're kind of wondering like, what's the point of this slide is showing so that all content, if you have more than three, like four or five or six. Again, at reaching the point when the audience basically starts to zoning out because it's too much light. It doesn't mean anything if there are so many important pieces you have to choose something to highlight. So try to go for the rule of three wherever possible. And this extensive, this subtle, slight, but also definitely extends to any kind of idea sharing as well, even further slides. Finally, I'll show you one more example of a slide that's a little bit more out there in terms of the formatting. In BCG, we really liked slides like these which look a little bit funky. They're kind of out of the box in terms of what you expect a presentation to look like. But again, the caveat is, use these judiciously because you can't be presenting serious data using stuff like this, because it just wouldn't show the richness of the insights that you want to present. So these are usually slides that we use for, again, idea selling, socializing, high level ideas and concepts to the audience. So usually we like these for qualitative sharing. But what I want to call out as well as the visual concepts that are being employed in this slide. So number one, again, icons. We've talked about that before. Here I would say we have six icons on the page. That's probably about as many as you want on one given pH. Otherwise they start meaning less and less the more you can apply span them. So that's number one, icons. Number two. Another way to make the slight interesting is to use different shapes. So fear in this case, we've got a circle. To be honest, the circle here doesn't mean too much, but there are instances where they might mean more, right? So for example, if you are building a market sizing slide, maybe you're working from top down. You could show a funnel shaped inverted pyramid. If you're doing a bottom up, maybe you could do like a pyramid the other way, round shapes can sometimes be quite interesting ways to convey ideas and main things jump to life a bit more. Then the third thing that you can do for making a slightly more interesting is basically less, is more. So in this case, this slide has very little information. There's a lot of blank space. We should never be afraid of blank space because no one is going to criticize blank space. No one is going to say that they cannot understand blank space. Whitespace is a way for people to relax and to know what exactly to focus their eyes on. And we can use them judiciously in order to bring their attention to somewhere where we really need that like kind of like focus and energy on. So again, having a presentation doesn't mean that you're cramming information into every single slide. Has a think also about when the audience might start getting, my son, getting bored or tired and work in lightest lights. Things that break up the flow into the presentation as well so that your audience gets a freak. 15. How to talk through a slide top down: Now we've talked about how a PowerPoint presentation should look in terms of the structure, the slides, and the aesthetics. Now let's talk about how you should sound. So in terms of view voicing over the presentation, this is also a very important part of lending the points correctly and making the right impression. We're going to talk about that and how to step through the analysis in this section. Now one thing that you might hear consultants going on and on about is this idea of top-down speaking. What is top-down speaking? It's basically a way of communicating ideas to people that starts with the most general and high level of detail. So not super granular, not super detail. We start high level. We introduce the various topics that are relevant in this discussion. And then we start diving into detail on each of those topics. So the purpose of this is imagine if you are someone listening to, you speak about this topic for the very first time, you want to know what's installed for you. You want to know the mapping of the things that we're going to talk about. And after you get this mapping, then you can slowly follow along as we dive into the detail. The opposite of this is if you go straight into the detail with a client who's like super fresh to this information, then they're gonna get worried. They're not going to know, hey, is this level of detail like going to be one hour long, or is this level of detail the right amount of insight that I need to know? Or is it too much? They're not going to know how to calibrate their response to you. They're not going to know if they should be challenging you, are just like sitting back and zoning out until you're done and then they challenge you. So that's the point of speaking. Top-down is to give the audience and lay of the land before you actually take them along on that journey. I've got a slide here, which is your standard left-hand side, right-hand side, and footnotes page. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna give a negative example of talking through this light IV diving straight into the detail. And then I'm going to give what I think is a better example of bringing the audience alone. So let's start with the negative example. Okay, I'm going to talk about the global electric vehicle market. And we have the data from 2020 to 2027. We can see that the market actually grew from about 200 billion in 2020. It grew by about 21 per cent for the next four years to 2023. And then afterwards the growth actually accelerated from 2024 to 2027. The key goal was actually almost 30 per cent. So what this leads me to believe is actually that the growth is accelerating and it's an interesting market opportunity. So that's the end of the negative example, which if you haven't heard of top-down speaking, it might seem like a totally fine thing to do, but it's not actually the best way of approaching a slide. I'm gonna do the top-down version of this. Now. We're looking at investment reasons for the global EV market. And there are three reasons that I'm going to call it out. So number one is about the market size. Number two is the growth profile that we see accelerating. And number three is actually the key risks that we've seen in the past that actually is lifting off now. On the first part on global market size, what we see is in 2020 in the global market was already 200 billion. And currently the market is closer to 2.5, like four hundred, five hundred billion. And what we think going forward is actually that by 2027, the market will be even six x of two days, so close to 1.2 trillion. That's the first reason. The second reason is related to the first reason which is about the growth. So if we look at the K goes for the past three years versus the cake forecast for the next three years. It's actually a very big difference. So we saw that the ego was already quite high at 21 per cent over the last three years. And over the next three years is going to get even higher, is going to increase to 30%. And this leads us to the third reason, which is actually the risk profile of the industry. So the third reason is the risk profile. And we saw that actually the Omega before was artificially dampened by COVID risks, which disrupted the supply chain. So that was like the 21 per cent here that we saw in the last three years. But going forward, the risk of that is actually lifting off. So that is enabling our higher growth. And we also think that there are sudden he enablers to the lower risk than that will allow us to dr, even more operational efficiencies have even more predictable cash flows, etc. So that's basically the third reason is all about the risk profile and implications for growth, but also operations. That's the end of the second example. So you can see the difference is basically the second example. We talked about everything that we care about first and then we dive into the detail. So that's the first key difference. The second key difference is also, you're just, you're not just reading off the numbers on the slide. You are giving your running commentary. We call this the voice-over. So in addition to the three takeaways on the right-hand side, That's like the baseline takeaway that the client should have. But in addition to that, you should also give you additional insights and your additional perspectives so that you're adding value on top of what the client can read for themselves on the slide. So that's the other thing. Make sure that you're not just reading off the site because after a few slides, I guarantee you, they will stop listening to you and don't just read the slides themselves. So in order to have the trust and the attention, you always have to be thinking, what else can I be bringing to the table when I'm talking through the slides? So that's the other thing that I wanted to call out here. 16. How to use speaker's notes: Finally, I want to talk about preparing for how your talk. So I think this is a very personal issue, like different people deal with this in different ways. For me, I was not a very good present. And naturally, there are still many things that I want to work on. But one thing that I struggled with was kind of knowing what to say and remembering to say it all, especially in a high-stakes situations. So the way that I got started, at least was I used the speaker's notes, which you might have heard off. But it's basically like this little box at the bottom of the slide. If you drag it up, you can see there's an area to write in your notes. So on each slide, what I used to do was then to say, okay, for this slide, I'm gonna learn these three points and I'm going to talk about them in a little bit more detail. And if I need to, then here are some of the key numbers that I can cite are some of the key takeaways that I want to share. That's the way that you can use because nodes, what I will say you should not do, you should never write out exactly what forward, what you want to stay and then put it on the speaker's notes and then read from there. Because it will be very obvious if you're just reading off a script and it will not generate the level of engagement or interests from the audience if you're just reading off a script. So that's why I would say regarding speaker's notes, some people use them, some people don't use them at all and they're just like free styling the hallway. And so different people have different styles, but makes sure that no matter what style you choose, by way of preparation you choose. It helps you gain some structure to know what points to the end. And it helps you to stay engaged and genuine in terms of the way that you're speaking. And over time, I will say, the more you present, the more comfortable you get with kind of like going freestyle. And also the more familiar you are with the topic, the more comfortable you'll be talking about it without relying on notes as well. So then your notes would just be a way to guide your memory or jog your memory. So it takes practice and it takes subject matter and knowledge as well. But I think there's no way around this. The best way to improve for speaking in presentations is really just to do a ton of them. And the best way for that to happen is basically to raise up your hand, find opportunities to lead those presentations, especially in low stakes environments, and then practice from that end. If you seek feedback from presentation, audience members or even like a manager's afterwards, then that would be a really helpful way to proceed and get even better. 17. Summary of best practices: So that's it in terms of all the key points that I wanted to share with you. Hopefully it was helpful, but in terms of bringing everything together, I wanted to also show it all in one place where you can just take a screenshot. I'm kinda like keep those notes for yourselves and then practice them as you run your own presentations in the future. So that's nothing much in this section is just one slide on the summary of everything, the storyline of this course. So summary of everything that we've covered. And that's basically it for your own reference. You can pause there and take a screenshot.