THE McKINSEY WAY

Presenting Your Ideas 121
I was on a Board in which the CEO didn’t keep us sufficiently
involved and informed. Over a period of a year, I
talked to him off-line a grand total of once; other directors
had the same experience. He needed to build alliances with
Board members to implement his vision for the company. He
needed to call Board members and say, “Here’s where I want
to take the company. I’d like to have your support for this
or that.” He should have understood who the power brokers
were and made sure they were informed. You don’t call a
Board meeting out of the blue on Thursday to figure out
whether or not you’re going to buy a company on Sunday.
The Board’s response was, “We went through that two
months ago and said we didn’t want to do it then. Now
you’re calling an emergency meeting and giving us four days’
notice?” Not a very smart thing to do without first building
support. We subsequently parted ways.
You can avoid a similar fate by prewiring whenever and wherever
you can.
Tailor your presentation to your audience. Tailoring means
adapting your presentation to your audience, whoever it may
include. Even if your audience comes from your own organization,
the people in it may not share your background or knowledge of
the subject matter. They may respond better to some styles of presentation
than others: formal versus informal, large presentations
versus intimate discussions, text-based versus audiovisual, just to
name a few. Some people want to go into the minutiae, while others
just want to hear your top-line arguments. If your presentation
is to succeed, you need to know your audience, its preferences, and
its background. Dean Dorman of Silver Oak Partners sums up our
alumni’s wisdom on tailoring:
“McKinsey-izing” your presentations, using lots of consulting
jargon—in most organizations, that gets you nowhere.