epr int from May/June 2004

CONSULTING
M

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More than 10% of the senior classes
at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale

sent resumes`` last year to a
two-location, 53-member* firm.

How KPL does it.
Crown Jewel:

Katzenbach Partners LLC
founding partners Marc
Feigen, Niko Canner, &Jon Katzenbach establish
a firm for the new century.

*Number of consultants: 53
Total employees: 81

www.consultingmag.com
eprinted and posted with permission from Consulting Magazine, May/June © 2004 Kennedy Information, Inc.

Expires 8/2/05

•Use a quConsultingOnCareers

The Undeclared War

Against“PowerPoints,”

•A

(or)

How Dodging Bullets

Became a Favorite Pastime

for the Profession

By Eric Krell• Deliver an Inspir• Relate an example of teameprinted and posted with permission from Consulting Magazine, May/June © 2004 Kennedy Information, Inc.

uotation
ConsultingOnCareers• Tell a personal story• Ask: In What Ways Can We …?

Address the Sales Challenge• Note areas of growth• Read a testimo
After Resources Connection’s
Chris Hagler has broken the icewith a roomful of prospects,• Identify Skills

she pulls out her PowerPoint presentation and announces that
she will read through each slide, bullet point by bullet point.
The executives freeze — before it dawns on them that she’s
kidding. “I always get a laugh,” says Hagler, the firm’s
national managing director of strategic services.
Such is the challenge consultants confront at a time when
Microsoft’s presentation software — a crucial component of aconsulting firm’s communications with clients and prospects —is a magnet for parody, sharp criticism, and habitual misuse.
Consultants who defuse the causes of PowerPoint backlash
stand a better chance of successfully transmitting their ideas,
analyses, advice, and sales pitches.
Satirical presentations such as the “Gettysburg PowerPoint
Presentation” (bullet point: “What makes nation unique”;
sub-bullet points: “conceived in liberty” and “men are equal”)
and “Yours Is a Very Bad Hotel” generate heavy Web traffic.
The world’s top information design expert, Edward Tufte,derides the tool as a “prankish conspiracy against substance andthought.” Musician and visual artist David Byrne suggests that

• Assess therational Opening

work

eprinted and posted with permission from Consulting Magazine, May/June © 2004 Kennedy Information, Inc.

• Have
impromptu• Identify the need or opportunity
reportson
success• Conduct a Creative Thinking Session
the software’s sinister auto content wizard tool transforms
free-thinking individuals into “pod people.” And critical
articles with headlines like “PowerPoint Is Evil,” “DoesPowerPoint Make Us Stupid?”, and “Absolute PowerPoint
Corrupts” are appearing with greater frequency.
PowerPoint has managed to withstand the parody andcensure. The software first appeared in 1984 when a former
Berkeley Ph.D. student and a software developer unveiled a
prototype called “Presenter” at a small firm in Silicon
Valley. Microsoft snapped up their company three years
later, and PowerPoint’s first Windows and DOS versions
appeared in 1988.
The application now sits on the desktops of 400 million
Microsoft Office customers, far too many of whom continue
to assault audiences with garish color schemes, grainy logos,
baffling charts, and cheesy clip art. Count consultants among
the application’s chief power users — and regular abusers.

The “Currency” of
Client Communications
Jon Faucette, the manager of Sibson Consulting’s desktop
media (DTM) department, recently attended a conference on
board governance. A presenter’s slide shows featured a pieceof animated clip art on almost every other slide, says Faucette,
who can recall little else about the presentation. His focus andthe rest of the audience’s attention were glued to the clip artthat gyrated incessantly on the large screen in front of them.
In too many PowerPoint presentations, the medium is themessage. When that message is weak, it poses serious risks to
consulting firms that place sizable bets on the success of theircommunications with clients and prospects.
Faucette regularly scrutinizes the PowerPoint presentations
contained on the take-away CDs from the conferences atwhich Sibson consultants regularly present to strengthen thefirm’s brand and thought leadership. “The vast majority of thepresentations are just awful,” he notes. “There is a huge
opportunity to differentiate yourself and your firm by doing agood slide presentation.”
Sibson’s DTM staff aims to do just that with the “scores” ofslides they churn out daily. Each slide, Faucette emphasizes,
reflects and communicates his firm’s brand.
PowerPoint presentations also mark the key component ofMercer Management Consulting’s communication withclients. Each progress report and intermediate result in a client
project is documented in presentation form, and all project
meetings are supported by slides, notes Karen Mazur, aMunich-based production manager with Mercer Management

Consulting. “Slide presentations are particularly suitable to theconcise presentation of complex arguments,” says Mazur, whoemphasizes that the presentations must be visually sophisticatedto succeed.
Bain and Company’s Stephen Marquart describes
PowerPoint as his firm’s “primary currency” when communicating with clients. That importance motivated the firm tohire Marquart, formerly the COO of pioneering businesspresentation firm Communispond, as the company’s directorof client communications five years ago. Other large firms,
including Mercer and Sibson, operate similar graphics shops
staffed by design and communications experts.
“The kind of analysis our firm conducts is very, very
powerful,” Marquart notes, “but it also must be very clearlyand passionately presented. My job is to make sure that thecomplex analyses our partners present reach clients in a waythat is easy for them to understand, but to do so without dumbing
down the analysis.”
Bain presenters who use PowerPoint, and most do, tend touse the application’s electronic slide-show functionality.
Resources Connection presenters, on the other hand, rarely
present slides electronically. Instead, they use the software’s
format to organize their thoughts and then print out and leavebehind the documents. Still, Hagler emphasizes that thesoftware is well used and well liked at her firm, as long as it“helps guide a meeting without becoming the meeting.”
But presentations overshadow presenters and trenchantanalyses when consultants fail to resist the tug of the software’s
potent capabilities and obliging interface. Sibson Consulting
principal Peter LeBlanc uses PowerPoint in each of the 15 or
so presentations he performs at international conferenceseach year. One of his main objectives when developing or
massaging his slides, he says, is to resist the software’s
powerful functionality.
“I once met with an HR vice president, a client, who walked
over to his bookshelf, pulled out a bound version of a
PowerPoint presentation, and said to me, ‘Do not bring back apresentation that looks like this,” LeBlanc recalls. “The report
was produced by one of our competitors. My client said, ‘I paid
for this, probably too much. I’ve never read it. It’s too dense.’”Stop Making Slides
Tufte, who has achieved Drucker-esque status in the designcommunity, makes the same point in his 28-page essay, “The
Cognitive Style of PowerPoint” (Graphics Press, 2003). He
dismisses hefty PowerPoint reports as “physically thick andintellectually thin.”

eprinted and posted with permission from Consulting Magazine, May/June © 2004 Kennedy Information, Inc.

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A presenter’s slide show featured apiece of animated clip art on almost

every other slide.
— Sibson’s Jon Faucette

Much of Tufte’s strongly supported, well-written criticism
has a sharp edge. He denounces the tool’s “poverty of content,”“obnoxious transitions,” and “relentless sequentiality.” Hedepicts tacky graphical examples of PowerPoint “Phluff,”
warns against “witless” PowerPoint pitches, and takes issue
with the tool’s “attitude of commercialism that turns everything
into a sales pitch.”
Byrne uses the phrase “planet of salesmen” to describes thebiases and tendencies of the software in his PowerPoint artwork,
which is animated and set to music. “Microsoft would like us
to think — as would almost all software vendors — that theirproduct is merely a neutral tool,” Byrne writes in the notes that
accompany his slide show. He writes that PowerPoint users
who rely on the auto content wizard are “subtly indoctrinatedinto a manner of being and behaving, assuming and acting, thatgrows on you as you use the program.”
Microsoft does not respond directly to these barbs, choosing
instead to point out through a spokesperson that plenty ofPowerPoint assistance and other resources are available on thecompany’s Office Online service. While that bridge to a sales
pitch might reinforce Byrne’s point, his creative, entertainingly
trippy, and slightly self-deprecating application of PowerPoint
also calls into question whether it is the tool that is responsible
for sucking the life out of a conference room, as he and Tufte
suggest, or the presenter.
Because PowerPoint is the weapon of choice for the vast
majority of consultants who conduct presentations, criticism
of the software, particularly when it comes from an authority
like Tufte, is worth considering. Marquart, for example,
describes Tufte as an “intellectual guru” and echoes many of
Tufte’s points. But he also believes that the design expert
sometimes glosses over the “furious pace with which one often
has to generate slides in the business climate.” PowerPoint isbuilt for speed, which is a mighty valuable capability when thetool is in the right hands.

The remedies Tufte suggests for PowerPoint’s inherent ills
— replacing most slide shows with well-written, carefully
designed reports, for starters, or a worldwide product recall forthe program — might sound extreme to an audience thatcounts on PowerPoint so heavily to communicate with clientsand land new business. Yet, consultants who tune-in to Tufte’s
message will find highly useful PowerPoint insight nested, if
not exactly bullet-pointed, in his essays and books.
For example, he explains that the software is much more
geared to meet presenters’ needs than to improve the audience’s
experience. Tufte reports that people read at a rate of 300 to
1,000 printed words per minute, so even a text-rich slide
containing 40 words can be absorbed in roughly eight seconds.
“People can quickly look over tables with hundreds of numbers
in, say, financial or sports pages in newspapers,” Tufte writes.
That information does not translate to a convenient wordper-slide rule, but it should encourage presenters to be more
respectful of their viewers’ ability to absorb data.
Tufte also explains that the “deeply hierarchical, nested,highly structured, relentlessly sequential, one-short-line-at-atime” framework of PowerPoint influences the presenter’s
style. A much better guide for presenters to follow, he asserts,
is good teaching, which emphasizes explanation, reasoning,questioning, content, and evidence.
Consultants themselves acknowledge PowerPoint’s inherent
or potential flaws to varying degrees. Those who admit thatthey use the tool in a reluctant, careful manner sound a bit like
middle managers who are all too familiar with the ring of truthin Dilbert cartoons.
Other consultants say that they have never encountered
PowerPoint backlash. “I do not think that there really is anegative perception of PowerPoint,” says Mazur. “Ourconsultants can still arrest our clients’ attention when making
a well-thought-out argument and underpinning it with a number
of well-prepared slides.”eprinted and posted with permission from Consulting Magazine, May/June © 2004 Kennedy Information, Inc.

ConsultingOnCareers

That said, Mazur also points out that PowerPoint is far fromperfect. The tool encourages users to create unstructured listsof bullets, which “are easiest to make, but carry very little
relationship information,” she explains.
Even the most reluctant users recognize that PowerPoint,
like the office cubicle, is likely here to stay. They also agreewith Mazur on the importance of well-crafted presentations.
The largest firms have graphics shops and design experts attheir disposal to assist with the design process. Smaller firms
must rely more on their individual consultants’ PowerPoint
proficiency and presentation decision-making skills.

Shop Sense
The design groups at Bain, Sibson, and Mercer create PowerPoint
presentations based on their internal clients’ specifications,provide design and communications training, and developPowerPoint templates so that consultants can create their own
presentations while adhering to their firm’s visual standards.
Sibson Consulting maintains five slide templates thatreinforce its brand while remaining “flexible enough to allow
for a great deal of tailoring to a particular client or theme,”says Faucette. “Ideally, the consultant should focus on content
and then work with someone with a design sense to enhance
the presentation.”
He has made that collaboration as efficient as possible byequipping his design specialists, who are “as flexible andmobile as our consultants,” with souped-up laptops andhigh-speed Internet access. Sibson consultants can e-mail arequest for slide-show help, and a DTM specialist will respond“within minutes” to anywhere in the country.
At Mercer Management Consulting, consultants sketch
visual representations of their findings, which often include
Excel data, and then fax them to the production staff. The
designers create PowerPoint slides from the notes and thensend the slides back to consultants, who make changes.
“Over the lifetime of a slide,” Mazur explains, “the slide
content often changes to incorporate new findings. Theremay be several such correction cycles before we arrive at
the final version.”
Mazur, Faucette, and Marquart dissuade their consulting
partners from relying on PowerPoint’s auto content wizard,
even in a pinch. Bain has developed its own PowerPoint
slide-creation tool, which is customized to address thecomplexity of its consultants’ analyses. The client communications group also provides classroom and Web-based
training. Sessions and modules include lessons on audience
analysis, how to use the slide-creation tool, how to use
color, how to visualize an insight, presentation structure,and other topics.

Tips and Tools
Consultants who do not have the benefit of calling on in-house
designers turn to outside experts or put on their own design
hats. There is a growing collection of tips and tools designed
to make that process less risky.
If Tufte’s criticism is too deep, Faucette recommends

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•Set
team
goals
• Have an inspirational close
Design Sense (www.designsense-cd.com), which hedescribes as one of the few instructional offerings thatapproaches PowerPoint from a design perspective.
Andres Echenique, vice president, interactive services,with MRA Interactive Group, develops PowerPoint slides
and other presentation and Web media for clients. He saysthat one of the most common PowerPoint pitfalls not only
drains the effectiveness of a presentation but can also havelarger implications. Too many PowerPoint users, he says,
ignore the standards that govern the visual presentation of
the firm’s identity and brand. They use the wrong colors,
for example, or incorporate fuzzy versions of their company’slogo in their slides.
“That’s awful,” he says, “but not because you’ve committeda heinous art crime. Clients and prospects don’t walk away
saying, ‘That was an awful presentation because the brown on
the slides didn’t match the brown of the firm’s brochure.’ But
those errors do raise subtle questions about your commitment
to detail. If you don’t care enough to get your logo right, how
are you going to care enough about whatever you’re proposing
to do with or for me?”On a more tactical level, Echenique encourages brevity andthe use of professional designers, while cautioning presentersagainst reading from slides or using clip art. Illustrations —particularly those that represent a process or a collection offunctions — are often ideal substitutes for a series of four orfive text slides.
Echenique suggests that consultants who enliven theirslides with animation, an increasingly common technologicaladvancement in presentations, do so with care. The context for
the animated illustration should be clearly established, andaudiences should be tipped off before the animation launches.
After the animation makes a point, presenters should move on.
“Don’t compete with the animation,” Echenique warns. “Getthe attention back to your message.”
Other advancements seek to improve the efficiency of theslide-making process. Berlin-based think-cell has produced
an interface that automates the creation of graphics, charts,and tables. The interface seamlessly integrates into
PowerPoint applications and appears as a toolbar. The tooland company were created by two computer scientists, one ofwhom is a former McKinsey intern who very quickly recognized both the value and the limitations PowerPoint presents
for consultants. McKinsey and Mercer are customers, andseveral other firms are piloting the tool, which will soon beenhanced so that Excel data can be directly poured into

PowerPoint charts.
“To fill in the gaps left by PowerPoint, in particular in thedomain of charts, think-cell software is very helpful,” says
Mazur. She says that think-cell supports commonly usedgraphics that PowerPoint does not support, relieves her teamfrom many manual editing tasks, and helps to enforce corporate
design standards.

Be Like Bill Bain
Sometimes, the best PowerPoint advice is to leave thelaptop closed.
Marquart counsels partners and managers to take note of
their surroundings when presenting at client sites. Study theclient’s office and conference rooms to see what communications
tools seem to be in play.
“If you’re in a client conference room equipped with flip
charts or a white board, you might want to draw your messages
right in front of the client, even if you have a schematic readyto go in your PowerPoint presentation,” he advises. “Youmight say to your audience, ‘Let me see if I’ve got what you’retalking about,’ and draw that out. That can be very effective.”
It worked very well for the firm’s founder in the prePowerPoint era. “Bill Bain would often sit down with ablank piece of paper in front of him and a CEO across thetable and start to draw,” says Marquart. “He would say,‘Tell me if this is sort of what you’re facing,’ as he graphically
depicted that challenge.”
Different audiences have different presentation expectations.
Hagler finds that manufacturing-industry audiences tend tobristle if her PowerPoint presentations contain anything
beyond bullets. United Kingdom–based clients, Marquart
reports, seem to appreciate it when PowerPoint presentations
are accompanied by well-written two-page documents. He
also observes more resistance to PowerPoint among thenonprofit audiences that the firm’s nonprofit arm,
BridgeSpan Group, presents to. “If they haven’t lived in theanalytical intensity of the business world,” he explains,“when people look at a PowerPoint presentation, it can bea little off-putting.”
Those observations and related adjustments depend entirelyon the presenter. “The person is critical in the presentation,”
Marquart adds, “— not just the slide.”
Until a slide can walk into the room and present itself, then, it
will remain up to consultants to determine whether their message
can outshine the industry’s medium of choice. C

eprinted and posted with permission from Consulting Magazine, May/June © 2004 Kennedy Information, Inc.
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