The Data Density Debate

Edward Tufte argues that a good chart will have high "data density" - a large number of data points on the page. Neville Hunt shows a good example of this. The debate around Tufte's point - and more generally around his hostility to PowerPoint (for encouraging lower data density, among other things) is summarized nicely by Tad Simons, editor-in-chief of Presentations magazine, in his article "Does PowerPoint make you stupid?"
One of the things I'm trying to do in this blog is apply the principles of marketing to presentation design. The great advertising expert David Ogilvy, in his classic Ogilvy on Advertising, seems to favor data density. Scan through his book and you will note a tremendous amount of text and other detail in the many examples of his work.

On page 84, Ogilvy wrote: "Short copy or long? All my experience says that for a great many products, long copy sells more than short. ... I believe, without any research to support me [but we value Ogilvy's judgment so we don't mind this], that advertisements with long copy convey the impression that you have something important to say, whether people read the copy or not."

This is a good argument for data density in presentations also: whether people absorb all the detail or not, they are left with the impression that there is depth to your work.

Checklist for Making Persuasive Presentations

Prof. Scott Armstrong at Wharton, one of my favorite people in the marketing academy, has developed a checklist for making oral presentations. It is based on all the latest empirical research, and in only three pages it lists 41 important points that you should include for an effective presentation. It is very practical and I recommend it highly. It can be found at Prof. Armstrong's homepage (scroll to the bottom of the page, click on Educational Materials, then on Management Reports, then on Checklist for Making Oral Presentations).

The P&G 1-page memo

When I started my marketing career at Procter & Gamble almost 20 years ago, the 1-page memo discipline was in full force. Every communication had to fit on one page, and follow a fixed format. It was - and remains - a very powerful discipline. I have used it ever since then.

Here it is, with some of my own embellishments. Each 1-page memo contains five parts.
1. The Idea. What are you proposing? This is typically one sentence.
2. Background. What conditions have arisen that led you to this recommendation? Only include information that everyone agrees upon in the Background - this is the basis for discussion, so it needs to be non-debatable.
3. How it Works. The details. In addition to How, also What, Who, When, Where.
4. Key Benefits. This is the "Why?" There are usually three benefits: the recommended action is on strategy, already proven (e.g. in test market or in another business unit), and will be profitable. You can think of these three in terms of the old Total Quality mantra of "doing right things right." The first (on strategy) means you're doing the right thing. The second and third mean you're doing things the right way, because you're being effective (proven to work) and efficient (profitable).
5. Next Steps. Who has to do what and by when for this to happen?

The Procter and Gamble salesforce used to use something called the Persuasive Selling Format (PSF) in their sales pitches. PSF also had five steps. At some point it occurred to me that the two mapped to each other, which is why the P&G 1-page memo format is so effective for making recommendations: it is a document structure that is designed to sell.

Most famous PowerPoint presentations of all time

I have started to compile a collection of famous Powerpoint presentations. Here are the first few. Peter Norvig's Gettysburg Address is my vote for the most famous. But Tom Farmer and Shane Atchison's hysterically funny Yours Is a Very Bad Hotel should at least be a runner up. More sobering is the tile assessment of the Shuttle Columbia (the presentation slide made famous by Tufte's analysis is page 6). Another famous presentation should be Karl Rove's The Strategic Landscape, about the then upcoming 2002 elections, from a CD-ROM that was supposedly found on a street corner near the White House (Rove's presentation starts on page 11).
What else should we add to this list?

Resources for the Five Dimensions

In my previous post, I mentioned the hypothesis that an Extreme Presentation should address five dimensions: Logic, Rhetoric, Graphics, Politics and Metrics. Here are some useful resources.
For Logic, I like Linda Long's new book The Power of Logic in Problem Solving and Communication. Linda, also a McKinsey alum, has been teaching problem solving and communication for several years, and the book summarizes the content from her most popular program. Another excellent resource is Barbara Minto's classic The Minto Pyramid Principle, which McKinsey has been using for years.
For Rhetoric, there are a slew of books, but to my mind, Chris Booker's newly published, 728-page, The Seven Basic Plots, should be at the top of the list. Lori Silverman's new book, Stories Trainers Tell, is a useful resource.
For Graphics, the undisputed authority is of course Edward Tufte, who is a genius when it comes to the visual display of information. In addition, Malcolm Craig's Thinking Visually is a great resource on diagramming.
I'm still looking for good material on Politics. For Metrics, see the first 2-1/2 chapters of Gene Zelazny's excellent book Say It With Presentations.

Please feel free to suggest additional resources for any of these dimensions.

The Five Dimensions of Extreme Presentation

A central hypothesis at the heart of this research is that the Extreme Presentation must address five dimensions. These are Logic, Rhetoric, Graphics, Politics and Metrics. The problem with most approaches to presentation design, as I see it, is that they tend to focus on only one or two of these dimensions. So the current focus on using storytelling to improve presentations, for example, while a welcome and powerful idea, is misleading unless it is thoroughly integrated into the other dimensions.

Logic is about making sure that the problem is correctly defined and rigorously solved. Absolutely necessary, but not sufficient;
Rhetoric is the storytelling dimension: your audience usually contains human beings, not machines, so they need to receive your information in ways that are appealing to humans;
Graphics is the visual dimension;
Politics is the recognition that "power and politics are part of life in organizations everywhere" (Charles Handy, Inside Organizations, p. 115) and therefore that the best recommendations in the world will go nowhere unless their implications for all relevant stakeholders are thought through and syndicated in advance as far as possible; and
Metrics is the objective of the presentation and how you will measure its success.

My Credentials

Who am I, and why am I interested in Extreme Presentation?

I have been designing and giving presentations, and teaching and coaching others to do so, for almost 20 years now. My background is in marketing, and marketing is in large part about persuading others to think or do something. I find it useful to apply the theory and techniques of marketing to improve presentation design.

I started my career with Procter & Gamble, and the intensive, on-the-job training I received there on their famous 1-page memo approach to communications (and the 10 or 11 rewrites that typically involved), was my earliest education in effective business communication. Powerpoint had not been invented yet. (In a subsequent post I intend to summarize the key elements of the 1-page memo, which I believe are still very useful).

I later joined the firm of McKinsey and Company as a consultant. McKinsey's approach to problem-solving and presentation is held by many to be the "gold standard" in this area. I became a regular faculty member at McKinsey's Introductory Training Program, or ITP, that all new consultants attended after about one year in the Firm, where I taught McKinsey's problem-solving technique.

Subsequently I helped start up both the Marketing Leadership Council (as its first Managing Director) and the Market Research Executive Board (as an external consultant). These are for-profit "think tanks" focused on improving best practices for heads of marketing and market research respectively. Both have become very successful, with members from several hundred companies, mostly from the Fortune 500.

Along the way, I received a Ph.D. in marketing and ethics from the Darden business school, and ethical persuasion has become a great interest of mine. I am currently a professor of marketing at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC.

As I mentioned in a previous post, it was listening to many heads of market research express serious and ongoing concerns about the challenges with improving presentation skills that gave me the idea to launch this initiative.

What this is - and isn't - about

This site - Extreme Presentation - is focused on presentations that face some kind of persuasion challenge: to persuade an audience to change their minds about something, to do something, or to stop doing something else. It is not focused on presentations that are merely designed to inform. It is particularly oriented towards presentations that seek to persuade their audiences of recommendations that are complex and/or controversial. Persuasion of complex or controversial recommendations is the most difficult task for presentation that I know of, and therefore I intend to concentrate on this toughest challenge.

The site is focused on the design of such presentations. It is not focused on delivery of the presentation, i.e. actually presenting the material, because I believe that there are already many excellent resources for this.

The Purpose of this Blog

I have set up this site to serve as a log of a research effort on presentation design that I am undertaking, and as a forum for discussing the issues and findings from this research. Over the past three years, I have been working with heads of market research from hundreds of leading firms around the world, members of the Market Research Executive Board. During this time, one of the more common complaints I have heard from them is how difficult it is to get their staff to learn how to improve their presentation skills. This blog, and the research effort that underlies it, are dedicated to helping overcome that challenge.