A presentation epiphany

When designing your presentation, create some extra slides anticipating some of the questions that the audience will post at the end. It will certainly impress the heck all of them if, besides answering the question well, you have a graph or other evidence to support your point. And you can still use the Q&A time to present that extra idea you are so fond of, but hat to strike from the main presentation because of time constraints.

Preparing your laptop for a presentation

If you are using your own laptop to connect to a datashow projector for a public presentation, make sure that whatever the audience sees is up to your usual standards.
The best scenario is, of course, to set everything up in advance. When the audience gets in, the cover slide is already up.
If you have set up on the spot, get the slide up on your pc and only then hook it up to the projector.
In any case, it is important to check what is showing on your desktop. What background or wallpaper are you using? What icons are on your desktop? What other files are stored in the same folder where your presentation is saved?
I've seen the weirdest stuff around. Uggly colours, tasteless wallpapers, bad pictures of loved ones, weird filenames, set of presentation files aimed at a competitor in the same folder, cute love cards from girlfriends, icons to embarassing games or websites.
A good solution might be to set up a complete new user or identity for presentations only and have a clean desktop with a meaningful background and the presentation files conveniently placed on the desktop. Simple, but certainly effective.
Another thought is to selectively make information visible clearly intentionally or seemingly unintentionally. It might be the company's logo and slogan, it might be a hint to that talent recruiter that you have been approached by others or simply a gag to break the ice in the beginning or having a good laugh in the end.

Deloitte and Royal Bank of Scotland at WBS

Royal Bank of Scotland Building, Deansgate
Originally uploaded by lexhall

Yesterday we had two company presentations overlapping.
I chose first to go to the Deloitte presentation in the Teaching Centre. The director of strategy spoke about, hm, strategy. They promoted the event as something like "what you will not learn at university about strategy". Well, not really. Nothing new about strategy in this presentation. Mind you, it was a good and interesting presentation, but really nothing new. But it served to show that actually our marketing course is very much about general strategy and to confirm that what we are seeing at the MBA is what people are using outside.
Then I was able to participate in the networking part of the MBA RBS event. And this was really cool. The people from the bank were very accessible and keen to talk to us, MBAs. They really want to employ some of us in the near future and I had a good personal impression of the people working there. So much so that I feel inclined to take a better look at corporate banking.

Marketing success stories

Today we had 4 group presentations for the Market Analysis course. Each group got one company to analyse and explain to the class why it had found the company to be an example of a marketing success story and which criteria the group used to get to its conclusion.

My group was first and, I must admit, the best. The guys did a great job in researching, analysing and presenting the material. Sascha's slide looked great and the story we told was compelling. Of course, we chose the most fun subject: Sony vs. Wii. Really interesting case, I can only advise you to take a look at Nintendo's President's series of internal interviews, quite rich.

The other groups also did a great job. The BAA group with the noisy jet sounds and the great consumer type incenations were really memmorable.

The Boeing group packaged the presentation in a virtual flight with stewardess (oh, flight attendant, sorry), captain and first officer. Of course, in my humble oppinion, they couldn't have chosen a prettier flight attendant.

By the fourth group I must admit I was already really tired. They talked about Samsung, and now I will take a look at their mobile handsets. I am looking for a new one, and Sony Ericsson seems to have what I want. But the presentation convinced me to give Samsung a chance. What I also liked was that they were critical enough to cast some doubts on the sustainability of the current strategy.
All in all it was an interesting morning, eventhough it extended far too much into hour already reduced lunch hour. I believe the teacher was too optimistic by reserving only 25 minutes per group.

Morgan Stanley presentation and networking

Today we had the best company presentation so far in the MBA course. The folks from Morgan Stanley drove up from London to talk to us about working for their company.

They started with a very impressive video where several employees from all over the world talked about why they liked to work for MS. I personally liked the way the video was built and the images laid out on the screen. And people where quite convincing there too.

Then Stuart Guest, VP of private wealth management, presented some basic facts about the company and opened the session for questions, which were many. He had with him other 5 people from the office London, 3 of them quite recent hire (1 month, 3 months and 1 year). Everybody seemed very happy to be working for MS (and I wouldn't have expected otherwise).

All in all a well rounded presentation, which made the time go by quickly. Some extracts from the session:

• Russian and Chinese languages are in high demand, even though MS has a dedicated language programme with over 10 languages.
• "It is genuinely a nice place to work. ... I even find time to run a marathon." Stuart Guest
• First time I heard the phrase: "to export a CEO".
• They offered us best in class clients. That's an interesting offer.
• "Clients like dealing with interesting people." Yes, quite obvious, but I had never heard it put so clearly.
• Employees own 25% of the shares.
• ROI expected: 20%
  
• "There is a collaborative effort in Europe, in the US this is a bit different." C.

After the presentation we had some snacks at the lounge and, for the first time, I did really "network" a bit. The fact that MS was represented by 6 people made getting involved in a conversation with one of them easier.
And everybody, both from Morgan Stanley and from WBS, made a good impression, looking smart in suits.