We're all human, appearance matters, you can either take advantage of this or get out-competed.
We're all human, appearance matters, you can either take advantage of this or get out-competed.
Yeah ok that just plain isn't true. I worked at Goldman Sachs in FIG investment banking, and now at McKinsey and Co in New York as a consultant. While we do have a graphics department that we can call on to help spruce things up, as well as workers in India to help with tasks such as following simple instructions to translate spreadsheets into charts, 95% of the work is done by the bankers/consultants themselves (i.e., me).
In fact, the reason I left Goldman is because as an analyst 80% of your time is spent line editing charts, checking footnotes, and making sure everything is aligned. We even used MS Word with built in macros because Power Point wasn't precise enough. When you're working 110 hrs/week, that's not fun. McKinsey is better but not much different - which is why I'm moving back to SF in 4 weeks to be an entrepreneur.
Same goes for the "I'll hand you over to my colleague" statement. Often times an Engagement Manager who is well versed in the overall project presents for continuity sake (so the audience doesn't get confused by 5 people all chiming in), and questions are directed to the analyst in charge of the section.
In other shocking news, bankers don't do their own PowerPoint slides either...
There are people employed full time to do just that.
You mean associates and analysts? They at least fall under the category of "junior banker" and are on the right track to become deal closing bankers someday. Plus, the senior bankers make revision requests, so the junior bankers are like a high level programming language turning the comments. I don't think there is anything wrong with that.Again, there's nothing wrong with this. But once you know that this is how the game is played, you won't be wowed by the presentation anymore. And then you'll pay more attention to the content. And then, in supreme irony, they might as well have gone for the basic slides... But most people, most of the time, will conflate the presentation with the content.
Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, BZW all had a 'graphics department' in the mid-90s and I worked briefly for all of them. Good job for them, too - you wouldn't believe the crap that some merchant bankers would want to give to clients.
(In fact, several of the banks had specific instructions to us about not permitting egregiously-misleading graphs get into the wild. X^2 graph axes, truncated axes designed to make a 1% price change look more significant... I remember seeing a couple of all of them every week.)
US securities laws in particular made getting in and out of the room a very complex affair. Depending on which banker's doc you were working on right now, you had to discuss things outside of the door at one end or the other of our office, but they weren't permitted to enter the room and their door passes wouldn't open our door. The little corner of Lehman's in London we were in was over ten minutes of card-waving away from the front entrance.
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