How Executives Wish You Would Present To Them
Imagine your child broke their arm. You rush to the emergency room. After an hour a doctor emerges - but they’re not wearing scrubs. They’re wearing a fancy suit. And instead of rushing your child into the operating room, they open a laptop with a canned 73-slide PowerPoint deck entitled, “Broken Arms And How To Fix Them.” The doctor ignores your child, screaming and wincing in pain, and once the presentation is over 45 minutes later asks, “any questions?” Yeah, I have a question: “Why haven’t you fixed my kid’s arm!?”
Getting help when you’re leading a company can be like taking your child to a dysfunctional emergency room. All around you systems are breaking. Sales are stagnant, investors are restless, layoffs are imminent, your job isn't safe, and you haven’t slept well in a while. And yet every day is an endless stream of analysis paralysis PowerPoint decks. It’s exhausting for everyone. Unfortunately, much of the advice about how to pitch to your CEO is from consultants and observers who have never had to live with the consequences of their advice. Their "expertise" is often part of the problem.
So, I wrote this article as a countermeasure. I spoke to some executives who've had a huge impact on my career from Nike, BNY Mellon, and Amazon about what presentations do and don’t work. Here's what they said:
Make sure you’ve heard what’s hard. Don’t share your solution until you’ve hit on the key problem statements that are keeping everyone up at night. No one will trust you until they are confident that you’ve heard what is hard for them. This can be a single slide which says, “What I’ve heard so far” with three or four quotes that capture what’s scaring the people in the room. Do not move on unless everyone in the room is aligned that the statements you’ve captured are accurate. If your business is one of the problems, then own it. They won’t trust you to fix it until you practice extreme accountability for its underperformance.
Pitch outcomes not ideas - No one with power risks anything when they say no to an idea, which is why you should never pitch one. A deck with a hypothetical solution, with hypothetical growth is an un-hypothetically bad idea. You need to show that you’ve built something, tested it with real people, and believe it might be the answer everyone’s been waiting for. The executive who still says no risks drawing a backlash from other executives who have been waiting for a credible solution. So, don’t present until you’ve gotten a result worth expanding. Very important: an outcome should not be confused with metrics. An outcome is proof that you’ve built something that is solving an important problem for other people.
The forces at play - what are the forces at play internally and externally that may serve as accelerators or detractors? This is where you graduate from outcomes to data. A single slide with a 2x2 grid with internal and external factors on one axis, and accelerators and detractors on the other is, in my view good enough. Make sure you feature the right datapoints and that the numbers are accurate.
Reasons not to do this - What are the riskiest assumptions about your product or project? What are your biggest dependencies? How hard will it be scale the outcomes you’ve already seen? Where are you the least confident and will need the most help? Be aggressively candid about why this might be a horrible investment. You want to be so truthful about the risk of failure that everyone who follows you will seem like they are over-confident. Executives want to know that you are clear-headed about how hard this is.
“I don’t want to change your mind” - If you’ve actually created a real outcome to a real problem and they’re still resistant, ask, “What would need to be true for you to support this?” If they can’t answer that question then the phrase “I don’t want to change your mind” is incredibly powerful here. It respectfully conveys that they’re entitled to manage (or mismanage) the company in whatever way they want. It forces them to pause and think about the opportunity cost of reverting to business as usual.
This advice is not for everyone - The playbook offered here is what we’ve seen work. But it’s not for everyone. It will not work if you don’t have someone very senior who loves you, trusts you, and will fight for you. Lastly, it’s good to be respectfully challenging - but it’s bad to be defensive or obnoxious. Make sure you tread that fine line carefully. Everyone in the room should want to sit down for lunch with you afterwards.
Thanks to Greg Merrill, CECILIA AMBROS, and Siddhartha Bala for their input. Sid, Greg, and Cecilia are members of the invite-only peer-to-peer mentorship network Punks & Pinstripes.
