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Pieces of hate
General musings usually appear in magazines and newspapers, and on websites, around the end of the year. But some habits can't wait that long for condemnation. They don't deserve to be lightly tossed aside, as the New Yorker critic Dorothy Parker once wrote of a book she was reviewing. They deserve to be hurled with great force.
Here are four things that corporate executives and consultancy professionals of any discipline could usefully hurl from themselves. Personal research across 20 years and more than 200 organisations suggests that all of them can be relied on to offend clients, or staff, or both. Certainly they all offend me.
1. Let them read it
Some presenters even those whose job it is to sell their firm to clients still have the gall to read out to an audience what's on the slide they've just put up on a screen, usually in a semi-darkened room.
I've yet to find anyone in any audience who likes this death-by-Powerpoint habit. But presenters seem to adopt it anyway, simply because everyone else does. So it feels like the safe option, even though the only thing it guarantees is low impact (especially since humans are biologically conditioned to go to sleep in the dark).
To start with, the habit implies insultingly that the audience either can't read or can't be relied upon to pay attention.
Second, most of us read at least three times faster than we talk. So the habit guarantees that by the time the presenter has finished with the slide, the audience fed up with waiting for him are bored, daydreaming, or starting to take bets on the frequency of the speaker's more embarrassing mannerisms.
Better, far better, to use a slide as the visual aid it's supposed to be. That means, so far as you can, observing three rules.
Put pictures on it, not words and never your notes (though there's no reason not to make notes to go with it).
Second, keep it simple; allow on the slide no more than you'd put on a T-shirt.
And when the slide's up, shut up and let the audience read it for themselves.
2. Models, schmodels
Good models by which I mean graphic representations of some aspect of business, not the catwalk variety are marvellously crisp ways to capture a set of intellectual insights or reveal an unnoticed pattern.
But the rest merely transfer vague words into vague boxes connected with arrows, or create needless complexity, or dress up banality. They illuminate little or nothing. They devalue the currency. And I suspect that all the consultancy professions including financial advisers, engineers, marketers, accountants and lawyers do more damage than they notice to their credibility with the business world by not weeding out second-rate models more ruthlessly before exposing them in print or on screen.
A poor model can usually be spotted by asking the question: Who does it help?
You can take it for granted that the model is designed to help the person who dreamed it up. After all, a perennial worry of all advisers is how to turn ideas into products and a model looks like something they can sell more than once.
But if the model doesn't make some topic immediately clearer, or if its labels use long or abstract words, or if it comes attached to a chunky explanatory caption, it's unlikely to be of value to anyone else. Least of all to clients.
3. The not test
Surveys of business leaders invariably show that, in their view, most business reports are far too long. One easy way to trim them is to remove all statements of the obvious. There are more than you might think.
Next time you look at a report, try applying the "not test" an old editor's trick I learnt when I put books together for a living. Insert a negative into any sentence, and read the new version out loud. If the result is absurd, the original statement is so banal it didn't need making at all.
Take the statement which turns up in a million marketing puffs: "We're committed to excellence." Negate it: "We're not committed to excellence" or "We aim for mediocrity." Ludicrous, of course. So the original statement is a waste of ink.
Corporate mission statements subjected to this test can evaporate altogether. Which may explain why they attract so little reverence.
4. Show, don't tell
Beauty parades the series of rival presentations commonly used by buyers as the final selection process in a competitive tender are commonly used by sellers to rehearse lists of entirely unsubstantiated claims about the firm doing the pitching. Let's ban the words "considerable... major... significant... substantial... leading..." from all slides, scripts and proposals. They're mere puffery, invariably discounted. They seek to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
Instead, it works better to demonstrate not merely assert the qualities your potential client is after. If timing is important, make sure you finish your presentation on time (and by all means let the target know why you're doing so). Or if a seamless service matters, try spreading your people among the client representatives and letting the presentation flow smoothly from one to the other around the table.
On the other hand, there's no need to go as traumatically far as one Sandhurst instructor lecturing on the value of surprise in an attack.
To introduce his topic, he carefully set up a penny banger on the bench at the front of the class and ambled away across the room, talking the while. Then he turned, produced a large box of matches from his pocket and began to walk purposefully back to the bench. At that moment, a fellow-instructor set off an enormous thunderflash at the back of the room.
"Gentlemen," smiled the instructor when the cadets had climbed back into their skins, "there are three sorts of surprise you can use in an attack: deceptions of place, of scale or of time. You have just experienced all of them."
