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First let’s look at how you can use the pyramid principles in personal interactions with executives to discuss your ideas prior to the final presentation. In the video below we will see how one person tried to convince management for two years using the traditional academic/journey approach and failed, while someone else convinced them in five minutes using the top down pyramid principle argument. See how the two styles impacted the success of the interaction.
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.
Because this style of presentation is so different from the ones you have given or viewed in the past, you might find it difficult to believe that executives and decision-makers really prefer this style of pyramid presentation. Consultants learned that top managers did not like the type of presentations that the people in their own company gave, so they utilized this pyramid principle as a way to make millions of dollars by simply changing how the information was delivered.
Let’s look at some examples of executive presentations. First let’s look at a presentation that was created using the historical academic or journey style and how it was received by an executive:
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.'"
Let’s see how Professor McCarty took the counsel of the Vice President to turn his bad presentation around and restructure it as a top-down, pyramid principle decision-oriented presentation.
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."
Because this style of presentation is so different from the ones that you have given or viewed in the past, you might find it difficult to believe that executives and decision makers really prefer this style of pyramid presentation. Consultants learned that top managers did not like the type of presentations that the people in their own company gave, so they utilized this pyramid principle as a way to make millions of dollars by simply changing how the information was delivered.
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Access it online or download it at https://ensign.edtechbooks.org/projectbasedinternship/examples_of_executive_decision_making_presentations.
