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Sometimes I don't uphold the company mission 😱
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Hi team, thanks for joining lets grow together.
AWS vs Amazon PM roles?
Thanks Julius, very helpful
Additional Posts in Consulting
Rising Star
Question: what is an “Audit Senior”?
Rising Star
Who else is working Monday-Thursday this week?
People adding “leader” in their LinkedIn title 🤦♂️
Chief
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Looking for some book recommendations :)
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Whoever made the fyre fest pitch deck. Never seen a pile of utter shite look so beautiful
🚫🔥
I like McK and BCG. They’re not afraid to keep it simple.
Most beautiful I guess is any slide made by a serious graphics/visual department at any of the big firms.
Oh LEK too. Nothing like 3 simple, easy to understand graphs next to each other on a slide (no sarcasm)
And we have to make our own slides :)
Chief
No us. Only so much I can do with a yellow, black, dark grey, grey, light grey, white color scale.
A long time ago we used to have Tiger woods template. Every slide used to have a picture of him!
Gucci – though they're heavily overpriced.
Honestly, Gucci slides are hideous. I’d rather shed our money for a pair of Adidas slides. If you’re feeling adventurous and like a real baller, get some Visvim’s.
Deloitte Digital used to have a template that looked like a unicorn threw up on a newspaper in the jungle, and I still think about this at times 🌈 🦄
SC4 I haven’t seen it in awhile. I’m sure someone hid it lol
Chief
BCG when they go all out. FJORD also makes pretty slides, if you like decks that are 30 MB per page and don’t say much of anything.
College degree making slides for lifetime
Good question. For those interested in the choices, here are some examples: tinyurl.com/talkpts
Yea the bcg one is at least four years old. There is a new template since then
BCG hands down
Please post example!
While I like a lot of the new BCG colors and materials I have seen recently, I would have to hand it to Mckinsey. I honestly have created some ill slides that were influenced by my consumption of McKinsey materials over the years.
Haha, not within the firm. External Mck materials such as quarterly reports, industry research, survey results and perspective, and leave behind(s) at clients I work with that also use Mck for other topics/study.
Can I just say how great it is that we're having a discussion about good slides? I love this community
SAME. I was legitimately thinking this is one of the best conversations I’ve read on here in months.
100% not us
PwC if you prefer 20,000 words per slide.
As a typophile I can say Ey interstate is great
A step up from KPMG’s awful type
I just want givie a shout out to two awesome fonts: EY Interstate and IBM Plex sans
So, we’re huge, and while many people make crappy slides, our folks in more creative roles (e.g, those in data viz) make some pretty slick stuff.
How would one get better at slide design? Granted official templates help out but I know some people can whip up some pretty slick slides and I am not one of them. Thought I was til I started consulting and was VERY quickly humbled. I did make some of the nicer slides in the Army, but that ain’t sayin’ much...
Don’t use shapes outlines. Just don’t do it.
Thought I would follow up previous post with a longer response since this is an important topic that many consultants do not understand. Over 10+ years in strategy consulting and 20+ years as an operating exec, I learned a few things that may be helpful:
1) Separate aesthetics of a slide from content. Too much of this thread has been about colors, fonts, layouts, etc. While important, clients simply don't care. They don't hire and spend millions because a firm chose GillSans for their charts. Too many firms (mostly small shops & digital groups) focus on aesthetics over content. After the 2nd slide clients get that you have good style and want to get to content. Some of the worst culprits I've seen include Sapient, Digitas, Razorfish, Fjord (Accenture Digital), and small shops like Fahrenheit212 & Mach49.
2) Conversely, too much content without a coherent story that directly addresses client needs is also a turnoff. Clients don't care about your proprietary frameworks, unique IP, special methodologies, cutting edge thought leadership, etc. They don't want to see 10 case studies. They want to simply see how you will solve their problems and not go through 50 pages of slides showing how smart you think you are. Biggest culprit I have seen is Arthur D Little (yes after 100+ years they are still around). I know they have smart people but 50 slides with 5 point font showing obscure mathematical analysis gives clients headaches. PA Consulting falls in that category. OK... we get it, you hire eggheads with PhDs.
3) Irrespective of whether you fall in bucket 1 or 2 above, the one thing clients don't tolerate is lack of attention to detail. Spelling errors, grammatical mistakes, mislabeled charts, etc. If you can't show exceptional attention to detail when you are trying to win work, why should clients trust you with important work that will impact livelihood of employees? I've seen amazing decks from top firms thrown away due to spelling errors in appendix. EVERY company I worked for cared more about attention to detail than aesthetics or sometimes even the content. This is where the B4 struggle. All B4 (including my firm) seem to be very weak in this area. Boggles my mind that firms who do so much work in audit and tax can be so sloppy in advisory.
4) Most importantly... clients don't care about the slides. Every firm thinks their decks are special but reality is they are all the same. I've worked at many companies that would remove logos/names and print out decks in black and white to see can spot which firm made which deck. It's virtually impossible. Everyone uses the same frameworks, best practices, methodologies, and has nearly identical "thought leadership". A mentor once told me "Nobody buys decks, they buy people. Build credibility & trust don't build decks." He sold (and still sells) tens of millions in projects simply with a well written memo while other firms submit 100 page decks.
Hope this helps.
D1 - You are 100% correct... in theory. In reality clients don't care about a firm's unique identity, brand, or voice. They care about results and what the firm will do for them. They care about the numbers on the page more than what the page looks like.
Of course if a firm is pitching brand strategy work or designing a consumer website, what you described becomes more important. However, I'm a strategy person who was referring to strategy projects... especially ones that are done for C-suite execs.
In recent years I have seen many senior execs adopt Bezos philosophy of banning all PPT in favor of memos consisting of just words and number without any formatting. It allows for best ideas and best work to shine without the polish of good design.
I'm not advocating for sterile documents but simply pointing out that the effort of great design when the target audience is C-suite may not yield the desired reward.
Mckinsey because they're good at everything
KPMG innovation lab is an art form. Could look at those slides everyday.
I like this person.
I'd have to say McKinsey - they made vertical/horizontal logic mainstream. Not to mention Mintos Pyramid. They're the fathers/mothers of commercial decks
I would say they are deck writing fundamentals. They're basic for sure but you'd be surprised at how bad some people are at deck writing. The Federal decks at Booz Allen serve their purpose on getting the message across to Federal Clients but they're still pretty horrendous in relation to the decks Booz & co used to make. Take a look at some of the decks entry level consultants make in the Consulting Boot camp training - they're trash. It's because they took a 4 day class and made it 2 and removed the teachings on how to properly structure a deck. It works at Booz because our client base is different but in the commercial world I don't think our decks cut it. However, at the end of the day I'm a senior consultant and your a director so in relation I really don't know shit haha. But to me the fundamentals matter - focus on the story, develop the vertical/horizontal logic, then all the art and stuff comes last.