Two to Three Slides Only Please

Last week, we were asked by one of the directors to prepare options on how to move forward with our current project given some assumptions. The team provided an Excel file format, complete with all the details and important notes and all. After that, we had to meet with the director for review. It was ok, except that, his next requirement was for us to prepare an executive summary that will be presented to the executives (in our organization, these are the people directly reporting to the CEO). Not a jargon to me since I’ve heard it before from my boss and I even helped her prepare one (in Word doc format, around 10-15 pages). But the director’s different so I had to make sure and so I asked what his idea is of an executive summary. His answer? A presentation deck with 2-3 slides that contains all the essentials. Ok, in short, we need to summarize the contents of our Excel file in 2-3 Powerpoint presentation slides. Whew. So ok, we tried and so the gist went to the first 3 slides. The added slides are short explanations of the 3 main slides. Hooray to us! Hehe.

It was a challenging activity but this somehow gave me a glimpse of how it is to work with executives. They are not into the nitty-gritty details most of the time. In one glance (in this case, 1 slide of our presentation deck), they should be able to understand what we want to tell them.  And since all your ideas are in just a few slides, make sure you know the nitty-gritty details by heart so as not to faint during presentation LOL.

My next question…boss, who’s presenting? :D We’ll know that by next week perhaps.