In this video, I'm going to explain exactly how top consulting firms
like McKinsey, Bain, and BCG use the pyramid principle to create
clear and insightful slides.
I'll review slides from each firm and show you how the pyramid principle is
reflected and why it makes the slide more effective, all that and more coming up.
Hi, everyone.
Paul here with the analyst academy, where we teach people how to create high
quality consulting style presentations, to learn more about the courses we
provide for teams or individual learners, visit us at theanalystacademy.com.
I'm going to review three different slides today.
And each one is going to be more complicated than the last.
I'll start with a pretty straightforward slide from BCG, then move on to a slightly
more complicated slide from McKinsey, then and even more complicated slide from Bain.
The slides themselves are not difficult to understand, but how
they've applied the pyramid principle is what might not be so clear.
And of course these slides are from publicly available sources,
so we'll make sure to include a link to them in the description.
Before we get into the slides, I want to give a quick recap of
what the pyramid principle is.
Put simply the pyramid principle is really just a structured way of communicating
your ideas, where you start with your main point, then work your way through
the supporting details of that main point.
And it's represented pretty well with a pyramid because you start
right here at the top of the pyramid and then move down to the bottom
with more supporting details.
So let's take a look at a quick example.
Let's say I'm trying to communicate the idea that LeBron
James is my favorite player.
So I'm going to start with that main point by saying that right at the beginning,
whether I'm doing this in an email or it's face to face communication or
in a presentation, and then I'm going to give you my three key arguments
for why he's my favorite player.
And then for each of those, I can provide supporting details.
I can tell you that he has a career average of 27 points per game, and
he's the third highest all-time scorer.
And that's going to support the idea here that he scores a lot of points, which is
just one of my key arguments to show you that LeBron James is my favorite player.
And this works well in a variety of settings, whether that's email,
face-to-face communication, or in your PowerPoint presentations -- at
a deck level, but also at an individual slide level.
And the individual slide level is what we're going to focus on today.
So the first of these examples that we're going to talk about is BCG.
This slide is a great example of the pyramid principle, because it's
really well structured and clear.
The title of the slide says Melbourne seen as a cultural and creative city.
Now that's the main point that they're trying to communicate to me.
And they've split that main point up into two key arguments as
represented here on the left "Melbourne perceived by Australians as the
country's leading cultural city."
And this one on the right "international travelers also perceive Melbourne
as a creative city," and then you can take it one level deeper.
So notice how for each of these, you have four supporting points.
You can see this clearly represented when we put it next to the pyramid.
The main point is the title right here, these key arguments are
represented in the subtitle and these all make up the supporting points.
So the supporting points support the subtitle, the subtitle supports
the title, and it's all very clear.
I don't wonder at all, how they reach their conclusions.
And the other benefit here is it's easy for me to process
the information on this slide.
With data, heavy slides, you can get a lot of information thrown at you all at once.
And if you're sitting in a live presentation, it can be hard to understand
all the data, listen to what the speaker is saying and think of a response.
So they've organized the information in a way that makes it as clear as possible.
They want you to look here first, so you understand the overarching
idea, then go into the details.
That way, you have the right context to read through their key arguments
and you can dive into the data.
And reading through it this way makes it clear, simple, and easy to understand.
The next slide from McKinsey is also fairly straightforward.
It's from a deck about high growth emerging economies, which they
refer to as outperforming economies.
And this slide shows three areas that have propelled the growth
for these emerging economies.
So if we read the title, it says "a pro growth agenda of productivity,
income, and demand propelled the outperforming economies."
And then there's some data on this slide and this nice visual in the middle.
So it's pretty easy to spot the different layers in the pyramid.
So obviously just like in our last slide, the main point is going to
be represented by the title here.
This is what they want you to understand and take away from the side.
And then the key argument is also pretty clear.
You've got productivity, income and demand shown here in the title and those
match up with these different sections, productivity, demand, and income.
And then of course, for each of those different key arguments,
you've got supporting points.
So this was organized in a little bit different way visually than
our BCG slide, but the structure is definitely still there.
And this again, just goes to show you how consulting firms use the pyramid
principle to organize their ideas so that you can process the information
quickly and you understand how they reached each of their conclusions.
It's simple, it's effective and it's very clear.
Then, lastly, we have a slide from Bain and this one is slightly more
complicated than the first two.
We actually did a full breakdown of this slide, so if you're interested in
going a few levels deeper and exploring some of the other elements of the
slide, make sure you check it out.
So this slide is all about the luxury goods market in China.
And what they're trying to show is that it's growing.
But then not only that, they're trying to highlight where the growth is coming from.
The title says "greater than 60% of growth in 2011, continued to come
from new customers, however, share from existing customers improved."
And when we look at this slide in terms of the pyramid principle, this is obviously
our main point, but one of the things that's tricky about this slide is that
the key arguments are not so clear.
In our BCG slide they were organized neatly into the left
and right sections of the slide.
And in the McKinsey slide, they were clearly bolded with
bullet points underneath.
But in this example, they aren't really in the main body of the slide.
If you look at the title, it's talking about growth coming from new
customers and from existing customers.
So comparing this next to our pyramid, the main point is shown here in the
title, but the key arguments are actually going to be that growth is coming
from new customers, that's our first key argument, and existing customers,
which is our second key argument, even though that's not represented in the
body of the slide with subtitles or bolded text or something like that.
But if you look at the body of the slide, you can start to see
supporting points that fall into one of these two categories.
Let's take a look at the waterfall chart, for example.
the waterfall chart is basically just showing where the growth
came from from 2009 to 2010.
And then from 2010 to the estimated number in 2009.
So the growth of the new customers is in red, which falls into our first key
argument and then growth from existing customers is in this dark gray color,
which falls into our second key argument.
Then onto the right side of the slide, we have bullet points that provide
support for the first key argument, these two right here about new customers.
And then we have bullet points that provide support
for the second key argument.
These two right here.
Every element of the slide has a purpose and that purpose is to in
some way support the main message.
So just like the other slides, it makes this slide, even though it's
organized a little bit differently, easy to follow, and it makes it easy
to understand how they reached each of their conclusions, which in a consulting
or executive environment is critical.
That's going to do it for today's video.
I hope you found it helpful.
If you're interested in teaching your team, how to create impactful high quality
presentations, or if you're interested in learning for yourself, make sure
you visit us@theanalystacademy.com.
Thanks again for watching.
Take care.