Storylines before slides

My job was to turn $15B+ of assets into something a leadership team could decide on in twenty minutes.

The instinct is to open with methodology. Leadership does not buy methodology; they buy the consequence. So we built the storyline first: what changed, why it changed, what we would do differently, what it costs to wait.

Efficiency improved about 50% — mostly because we stopped building decks that answered questions nobody had asked.

The habit I keep: write the recommendation before the analysis. If I cannot, the analysis is not finished.