Getting Drunk in First Class
The Abbreviated Guide to PowerPoint
Consultants are truly in love with their own bullshit, but there’s only one thing they love more: spewing all of this bullshit into a PowerPoint presentation, also known as a “Deck”, to share with their blind-sided clients. Given the common belief that a deck’s value is proportional to its size, the euphemism was almost certainly invented by male consultants. The two words’ proximity in spelling is the Freudian slip of consultantese.
Like any chubby 5 year old Ritalin-addicted kid with a short temper, executives and managing directors love big text, colorful pictures, 2×2’s, and big playful balls, also known as Harvey Balls. Throw all of these into one big deck and you’ve got a board room full of old men with Viagra-free raging hard-ons. If a consultant doesn’t deliver their message with these elements, execs or partners will throw shit fit temper-tantrums until you calm ‘em down with a humidor full of Montecristos, a bottle of Glenlivet, and a round of golf.
It might surprise some people to know that cranking out PowerPoint is a multi-billion dollar industry that consultants have invented and practically perfected. We’re here today to let you in on some of the secret sauce.
Construction of a Masterpiece
The process of creating a knock-’em’-dead deck is a tedious art of bullshitting, managing expectations (read: deception), and if it cannot be avoided, the occasional inclusion of a fact here and there. It goes something like this:
Everybody gets in a room and tries to determine the audience. Sitting around for hours, they strategize how to spoon feed some lofty process and implementation plans to whomever they’re presenting to so that they can sell ‘em more bullshit down the road. This is sometimes referred to as a “Visioning Session.” This fools the client but we all know it boils down to “Sales Opportunities.”
Once it’s determined who will be consuming this steaming, heaping pile of shit, a small army of analysts land on the ground to setup meetings with the clients to kick off “Information Gathering” sessions. During this part of the process consultants “listen” to the clients who have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about. Usually the client only knows a tiny piece about a much bigger problem that is trying to be solved (like inching the stock price up a quarter of a point).
At the end of an information gathering session a gigantic mound of shit nuggets have to be pieced together into some coherent (or at least nifty) message that a retarded baboon can understand. This is when the initial draft deck is created.
The manager pores through the slides and marks it up with so much red ink that it looks like some form of Ethiopian genocide took place. Usually the red ink indicates that many long nights and going back and forth with the client is in sight. The occasional lack of red ink is the sign of a miracle consultant or, more usually, the sign that a project is about to be derailed worse than a maglev train at 150 MPH when the power cuts out.
The senior consultant of the team starts to freak out internally (but often externally too) about the changes, works the team all night, and prepares for another review session with the manager. The manager once again marks up the presentation, says it’s crap, and causes another round of freaking out. What most consultants don’t know is that this process is endless! If you want to make your life easier, don’t do shit until 3 hours before the deck actually needs to be presented to the client. The fact is, the manager or partner will never like the slides for some reason or another, but when its 2 to 3 hours before a client presentation, they’ll “make do” with whatever you’ve got. Remember those procrastination skills you neatly tucked away when you started at the firm 4 years ago? Yea, they’re actually useful. Go pour yourself a glass of Louis XIII and take a load off.
Presentation of the deck is sometimes “rolled-up” into an executive review deck. This means that your $400,000, month-long strategy project that results in 1 slide and 80 pages of appendices that will be summed up to the executive in 30 seconds and a dozen minced words. If you’re lucky some of your findings will be included in a Dilbert comic that the consultancy put together so the executive can understand the “complex” message that they need to outsource their sales call center in Kansas City to Mumbai.
Now let us dive more some of the details of what makes for great, bullshit-filled, fact-twisting, “tell me what I already know” presentations.
The Consultants’ War Chest
Harvey Balls - Apparently Harvey Poppel from Booz Allen Hamilton invented these Harvey Balls while he watched his balls bounce off the ass of an analyst in the 1980’s the day before he had to convince the British Government what city they should locate their containership ports in. Rumor has it his it when Harvey woke up the next morning, his bruised black and white balls were spread out over a PowerPoint print-out and in a Eureka moment, Harvey balls were born.
Chevrons - In consulting, chevrons are abused like a drunken dad beating his red-headed step child. If there is any kind of sequence whatsoever to a message that is being communicated by consultants, you can bet your ass that a chevron will be there to save the fuckin’ day. I’m not sure what it is about Chevrons that execs find somehow comforting. I think they like how the pieces fit together; it reminds them of a jumbo 6-piece Disney jigsaw puzzle. The Pareto Principle, bastardized as the “80-20 rule” - Originally noted by Vilfredo Pareto who observed that 80% of consulting income in Italy came from the most hopeless 20% of the client population. In modern consulting, if the vaguest notion of cause-and-effect can be inferred, you can be assured there is an associate mining an “80-20” relationship out of it in StratBridge.
Wordsmithing - It all started way back in the iron age with “blacksmithing”. Blacksmiths would forge giant chunks of iron into useful tools, swords, and crazy goth sex toys. Today we’re in the information age. Like blacksmiths used to do with iron, consultants sit around in conference rooms absorbing all of the clients’ incoherent ramblings like a thirsty sponge, and forge these ramblings into pretty PowerPoint slides. In the information age, iron has been replaced with words: today we “wordsmith.”
“Flesh that out” - When consultants don’t know what to say, we hide the fact that we don’t know what we’re talking about by producing confusing but pretty charts. God forbid that a key point can be summed up in just a few words - hell no, an idea like that isn’t even worth the paper it’s printed on. Take the same easy idea, break it out into five bullet points, two charts, and six appendix slides and you’ve got a fine piece of craftsmanship that rivals the Gargoyles at Notre Dame in Paris. Fucking sculpt it, that’s it.
“Tighten up that language” - Ah yes, there’s nothing like hearing the words, “We need to tighten up the language in that slide,” spew out of your senior manager’s mouth or his red pen. This means the bullshit got way too deep at some point during the PowerPoint construction and it needs to be reduced into a simpler form. Often times a manager will have a team “flesh out” an idea, move most of it into the appendices, and then “tighten up the language” in an effort to bill out some more time to the client. For example, a well-intentioned analyst (aren’t they all?) with a limited lifespan at the firm once wrote, “We categorized your portfolio by function and stratified investments by risk class.” After tightening, the sentence read clearly and simply as, “Buckets.” Concise, effective, brilliant.
“Manage your white space” - Managing white space is another classic way of covering up the fact that consultants don’t know what they hell they’re talking about. Every thought worth thinking takes exactly 350 words in 12-22 point font on a slide. These words must be distributed spatially as to minimize the appearance of excessive blank regions. A blank region is apparently the sign of a blank mind.
So there you have it! Now you have what it takes to compete against the pros. Looks like the secret is out. We should start seeing a bunch of new consulting firms spring up out of nowhere, and maybe a few crazy PowerPoint sex toys.
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