Roger McCarty: So this presentation style is different than anything else that you've probably done in the past, so it takes a little work to get to understand it. There was a lady named Barbara Minto, who developed the pyramid principle, is what she called it. Others call it the Minto method. Barbara Minto was the lead professional at McKinsey Consulting, the largest strategy consulting company in the world, and she developed a standardized process of creating commercial-style presentations. She taught this to all the people at McKinsey and she realized that executives liked this process so much that she could make a lot of money by teaching this to all the other consulting companies. So she made her own company and has taught that and wrote a book called The Minto Pyramid Principle.

Now, in this, she says you start a presentation by reminding them what the presentations are about. So, if you look at the slide, you can see that you're going to cover things like the situation, the task, what it was that you were asked to do. Remind them of the purpose of the project. Then, following the inductive approach, you immediately go to the answer. What is the answer and what supports what inferences are there that support that. And then provide information that supports all of the inferences, the conclusions, that drive the recommendation. As you can see, on the right side of the slide she has the deductive approach which basically follows the journey style of having findings, conclusions, and recommendations that drive to the answer. She does not recommend using the deductive approach in her book and emphasizes the importance of using the inductive or the pyramid top-down approach presentation for executives.

Roger McCarty, the speaker, is standing in front of a plain gray background speaking. There is no other visual information in the video.

Roger McCarty: Now let me just give you a quick example, so that you can get an idea of how this works.

In one role that I had as a director of new business development, I was told to take the job. The first thing they said is, "You've got to shut down this one big project we have. 50 people are working on this hydrocarbon residues project in East Germany, and it's a disaster. We don't want to do it. It's a bad deal, and we can't get this research guy to stop driving this project."

Now, he was a very high-level scientist, in fact, the highest level scientist in the company, and he would not give up on this idea. He kept pushing, and they said, "Your job is to get him to stop. That's your first thing you have to do. Then you can go find other businesses and do other things, but you first have to stop him."

So, I flew over to Switzerland and East Germany, met with the different people involved in the project, and tried to learn what I can do to shut it down. About two weeks later, I came back to the vice-president who had given me this assignment and said, "I've got good news and bad news."

"The bad news is I can't shut this project down. The good news is I don't want to. This is a fabulous project. Let me explain why." In about five minutes, using the top-down commercial approach, I explained why we had to do this project.

After 5 minutes, the vice-president said, "Oh man, I made a hundred million dollar mistake because the German government was going to give us a hundred million dollars to build that plant." I said, "Well, I've got some more good news."

"The German government will still give us 80 million." He says, "Yeah, but I have to go tell the CEO that I lost us 20 million dollars because I turned this project down." He said, "But it's worth it. What you've described to me tells me it's worth it to take the 20 million dollar hit in front of the CEO because I agree, a fabulous project, we have to do it."

Now, this researcher had been working for this scientist had been working for two years. He had, for two years, tried to sell this idea and couldn't sell it. In five minutes, I convinced the vice-president to admit to the CEO he made a twenty million dollar mistake.

Is that because I'm better-looking? Is it because I'm smarter? Is it because I dance better? Now, I only was able to do this because I spoke the language of management. I knew how to communicate to them in a way that they liked to gather information and synthesize it. 

The researcher was telling the journey story. He wanted to tell every amazing thing he had done to make this happen, which just made them more scared of the project.

Roger McCarty, the speaker, is standing in front of a plain gray background speaking. There is no other visual information in the video.

Roger McCarty: "So I took this project forward, and we had to go build the plant, which was gonna be a hundred million dollar plant. The German government said after the plant was up and running, they'd give us a reimbursement for 80 million of that. But I still had to get the hundred million dollars from the Board of Directors.

I was asked to come and present to the Board of Directors. I had never done that before. I was still relatively mid-career, and I was kind of scared to make this presentation to the Board of Directors. And because I was afraid, I made a stupid decision.

The vice-president who asked me to present couldn't meet with me until the night before the presentation. Both of us had busy schedules. So about seven o'clock the night before the presentation, I met and showed him my slides that I was gonna present to the Board of Directors, asking for the hundred million dollars.

Here's what I did. This little presentation just shows you the kind of logic path that I used in the presentation. So I said, 'We've got this great hydrocarbon resident opportunity that will make us a lot of money. Because we're gonna take a raw material that we're currently burning and then we're going to take...' I began to just go through step by step.

I talked about all the things we're gonna be doing with the raw materials. I said, 'But we've never done any of this kind of thing before, so we need technology on how to work with hydrocarbon resins. But there's a company in Japan. Now, remember, this plant's in East Germany. Well, there's a company in Japan called Nippon Steel who has technology on how to work with these hydrocarbon resins, and they've agreed to sign a license with us.

Now, the problem is that we'll make kind of a yellowish, ugly-looking resin. But we want to sell this into applications that use clear and transparent adhesives. And so there's another company called Erik Kawa who can make... who can turn the yellow stuff into the clear stuff. And they've agreed to sign a license. Another manufacturing technology that we would have to use.

But because this product will now be water white, we're going to be able to sell it for two thousand dollars a ton instead of 1000 dollars a ton. It's a more specialty product with less competitors. This is going to be an amazing kind of thing that we can take out to the marketplace.

We need... but we need some application technology. We've never done any of this, and we haven't sold into these applications. But Erik Kawa used to sell in Europe before they ran out of product because they maxed out their capacity, and they fell back into just selling in Japan. But they still have all their customer base and application base for Europe. And they would sign an agreement with us to provide the technology, and they would also sign agreements to help us work with their past customer base to be able to sell this stuff with... through another joint venture.

Now, all of these kind of joint ventures and... and licenses and everything will cause us to sign 12 different licenses and joint ventures. But we're gonna make a lot of money, and we're going to make this thing work. And man, we gotta do it!

Well, I really didn't make it through the whole presentation to this vice president. He threw his hands up in the air and said, 'What in the heck are you doing? Stop! If you present this presentation to the board, they will throw you out on your ear. Or they will just score you for hours, asking you terrible sets of questions that you'll never be able to answer and never satisfy them. They will hate this presentation, and you'll never get the money.'"

Roger McCarty, the speaker, is standing in front of a plain gray background speaking. There is no other visual information in the video.

Roger McCarty: "Well, so what am I supposed to do?" he said.

"Do you have a strategy for your new business development business that you run?"

"I said, 'Well, you know I do. You know you're my boss, and I've presented to you my strategy.'"

"He said, 'Well, so what's the key elements?'"

"I said, 'Well, it has to have a base of a low cost to serve. It has to have a differentiation that protects you from competitive pressures. And it has to have some of the 12 different factors that we believe will drive a business to success with sustainable competitive advantages, etc.'"

"He says, 'Well, does this project match your strategy?'"

"'Oh,' I said, 'Matt, this project matches my strategy in spades.'"

"He said, 'Just tell him that.'"

"He said, 'Go home.' Wow."

"A sleepless night. 10 o'clock the next morning, I'm in front of the board of directors with my new 7-slide presentation."

"In this presentation, all I said was, 'Hydrocarbon resins is an opportunity to match an opportunity that matches Dow's strategy.'"

"'It does this by creating a low cost to serve because of the low-cost raw materials and the supported capital cost by the government.'"

"'It will be a specialty product that doesn't have to compete with the other commodities.'"

"'We will have one of the best brand names known in the world with an own customer base who's used to buying that product.'"

"'And we will have some of the best application technology of any company in the world.'"

"'We can't lose with this idea.'"

"Then I had four slides, each one that supported the four points that describe the details behind why those things were true."

"And then I had one slide that said, 'Here's how much money we'll make based on us spending a hundred million dollars on this plant.' And it was really good money."

"And then I said the last slide, 'And here's how much money we'll make if we credit the 80 million dollars from the German government so that they can build more jobs in East Germany.' Now here's how much money we'll make. And it was spectacular."

"I presented all of that in about 10 or 12 minutes."

"The chairman of the board and others asked two or three or four questions about it."

"And then the chairman of the board said, 'You can come back as often as you like to bring us a presentation as good as this.'"

"And they gave me the hundred million dollars and sent me on my way."

"Fifteen minutes max. When you present the information in the way that they're used to receiving it, managers can make solid and important decisions."

"When you drown them in data, when you tell them your vacation story, when you give them a travel log, they get bogged down in all the data and they can't see the answer."

"So, as you learn to present what I call speaking in management ease, when you learn to communicate in a language that they understand, you can present compelling arguments in a concise way that helps them facilitate the decision and makes you somebody that they want to watch."

"Good luck in your final presentations."

Roger McCarty: Top-down executive decision-oriented presentations are different than any other kind of presentation you have seen. They are not designed to only convey information but are designed to facilitate decision-making. The purpose of the presentation is to give an executive the information they need in the context they prefer to make a decision. Consultants use this style of presentation because they have learned what executives prefer. This style of presentation is often called the Minto method because it was popularized by Barbara Minto, who was the lead presentation designer at McKinsey Consulting, the largest strategy consulting company in the world. 

[Picture of Barbara Minto appears on screen.]

The presentation gets right to the point and tells you the answer and why it is right. So let's look at the outline of a top-down pyramid principle presentation. 

[Diagram of a top-down pyramid principle presentation appears on screen. Each type of slide is highlighted as it is discussed.]

A good presentation starts with an introduction, which may include people's bios and an agenda. The next slide presents the original problem statement. An optional next slide shows a background and/or approach to show how we address the problem statement. So with that limited prelude, we present the recommendation slide. Underneath your recommendation appears your conclusions on that lead slide. But how do you know that my conclusions are true? So we take the conclusion bullet and make it the lead topic point on a slide with bullets of information that support the conclusion. But how do we know that my information is correct? So we take each information bullet and make them the top key topic point on their own information slides. In the body of the information slide, we need to show the facts, tables, bar charts, and other graphics to show that the information is true. 

The same will be true for conclusions two and three. Once you've presented all of the conclusions and the supporting information slides, you repeat the recommendation slide as a summary. In essence, your first recommendation slide was telling them what you're going to tell them, the conclusion and information slides tell them, and the second recommendation slide tells them what you told them. You close with the slide indicating the next steps to either implement the recommendation or what they should do after the recommendation. It is important to have a robust appendix that has the slides that would address any questions they may ask during the presentation.

But what if you're not making any recommendations? If you completed a project that was primarily events or activities, what are you going to show on your final presentation? The most important thing in an activity-oriented presentation is to define the impact made by the team and the value created by the activities or events. 

[Diagram of an activity-oriented presentation appears on screen. Each type of slide is highlighted as it is discussed.]

The key changes you will make to the standard presentation in an activity or event-oriented presentation include: replace recommendations with value and impact added, replace conclusions with activities or deliverables of your project. For information, you show the activities and the event schedules that you did to create the deliverables that added value. The info slides can give details about each of the activities and guides, or any information needed to support the impact and value improvement indicated. The intro slide can give details about each of the activities, and users’ guides or any information needed to support the impact and value improvement indicated. Then you remind them of the value you added by repeating the lead value slide.

Now what is on these information slides that we've discussed? Let's zoom into an information slide. 

[An information slide fills the screen. Each section of the slide is highlighted as it is discussed.]

At the top of the slide, there is an agenda or orientation to tell you where you are in the presentation. There will be a key point at the top of the slide, which is the purpose and point of the slide. Then the body of the slide will have text, graphics, or charts to support the statement that is the key point on the top of the slide. 

[A cartoon animation of a meeting with a presenter at a whiteboard appears on the screen. The items the speaker discusses appear on the whiteboard.]

Some of you may want to understand why there is so much text or graphics on the slides. This is because three to five times more people will view these slides than attended the actual presentation. This is true both of decision presentations and impact presentations. Decision-oriented presentations are shown to the people above the peers of those who attended and the people below them that work for them. If you use slides that are entertainment slides, it will not help those who are not at the presentation. All of the meat needs to be on the slides. 

Entertainment or teaching slides are intended to support the speaker, but in a business decision presentation, the speaker supports the slides. If there is anything that is in the verbal overlay given by the speaker of the presentation that is not on the slide, then there are three to five times more people who will never know what was said because they were not there. So every key point must be on the slide, that makes them text and graphic-heavy presentations.

Top executives seldom read all of the slides. They specifically review the top bullet points of the slide and only dig deeper if they don't agree or have questions about your statement. So remember the key points: The executives will read a 45-minute presentation in about five minutes, everything that is in the top point must be redundantly displayed in the slide. If the main statement on the slide is not totally supported by the contents of the slide, then it cannot be stated. Slides need to have headings or agenda points on the top or side of the slide so people will know where they are in the presentation. Slides also need to have a key point at the top of every slide.

In summary, pyramid principle top-down business decision presentations will look different than any presentation you have worked with in the past. This is because executives gather and process data differently than other people and leaders. And if you want to communicate effectively with them, you need to learn their language and how they want you to present to them.