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Not interested in your Power Point excuses
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I can see yesterday’s email hurt. Well, yes. I’ll say it again. You will never do well in life with a PowerPoint. Not long ago, I was involved in a process where the abuse of PowerPoint should have been investigated by the Drug Enforcement Agency. Beautiful. Gorgeous. Sublime charts. Flourishes everywhere. Not a single letter was out of perfect alignment with the rest of its little letter friends. Like one of those choirs that goes on The X Factor, or any of the other crap they show on television. The golden ratio was used in every chart, with the scales carefully adjusted to suit each set of figures… A masterpiece. DaVinci will drop his trousers. Perhaps because I am slightly sarcastic. Or perhaps because good jamón ibérico de bellota de Monesterio (acorn-fed Iberian ham) is difficult to find around here in New Zealand… I started asking questions… How much time had these teams spent filling in these slides. Making them beautiful. And checking them, not once, but 20 times… So that everything looked perfect? Are we making people focus on what actually creates value? Wouldn’t those endless hours be better spent doing something more productive? Resolving commercial disagreements, perhaps? And because I have a natural aversion to throwing money away, every line sounded to me like: Ka-ching. Ka-ching. Ka-ching. The sound of the cash register. Also known as consultant fees. I’ll say it again. Kill PowerPoint. Create value. Not PowerPoints. Use this information at your own risk… And please do not write to me again saying that your case is different, and that your boss, your Board or your client would tell you to get lost if you stopped producing those beautiful little doodles. If you want to grow and make progress in life, I have a few no-PowerPoints for you below. ​THE ROOM: 15 Great Lessons of a Successful PPP Project​ ​THE ROOM: The 15 Top Lessons of a PPP Project Nightmare​ ​THE ROOM: How to Break Into PPPs (Without the Bullshit)​ ​The ROOM: The ONLY way of doing a proper procurement process​ ​THE ROOM: Back-to-Back PPP Gap Analysis Explained​ ​THE ROOM: The Top 10 Errors That Kill Your PPP Deal​ ​THE ROOM: How to Deal with Frustrating Lenders' Approvals in PPPs.​ ​THE ROOM: THE ROOM: Minimum size for a PPP Project​ ​THE ROOM: Buildings in PPP - Discussions with an African colleague​ ​THE ROOM: Key Challenges and Solutions in PPP Highway Projects - 5 Clauses You Should Improve​ Or… of course, you can have them all… and many other interesting lessons in The Room. ​The Room​ PD 1: If you liked this email, don't keep it in secret and forward it to a friend. They will thank you enormously one day. PD 2: If somebody has sent you this email and you want to receive emails like this yourself, visit vicentevalencia.com PD 3: If you want unsubscribe, click the link below. |
Vicente Valencia
Weekly insights on how to perform when it matters | High-stakes decisions. Real situations. No BS. | 👇JOIN +2k readers 👇
When I was a CEO, I loved it. I would prepare a presentation. Just enough to keep the Board informed, but not too much. You wanted to avoid uncomfortable questions. Then, during the meeting, depending on how things were going, I would go deeper… or not. Always keeping one eye on the clock. Meeting over. Board satisfied. Great lunch. Then back to work to do something productive. I loved the routine. And, above all, I loved knowing that I was essential. Because that PowerPoint was always...
Look. Saying “Now is not the right time” can be perfectly reasonable. Sometimes… Although not many times. When I hear it from clients, I wonder… What exactly are you waiting for? A dispute? A claim? To have given away rights costing millions “by accident”? I don’t know… Not my personal money, so no comment. But… Of course… At one moment they come asking for help. I know that they’ll come. With some contracts, with some projects, I even have a calendar bid on when the bomb will explode…...
Look. The phrase “It’s only a letter” can be the most dangerous in PPP language. Sometimes, it genuinely is only a letter. An update. A clarification. Something routine. But sometimes, that letter gives away a position worth millions. Or… It accepts a risk nobody intended to accept. Or… It creates a precedent that will be quoted back to you two years later by someone charging $900 an hour. Or it says something perfectly reasonable… In precisely the wrong way. The problem is that you normally...