Skip to main content

Part I

PART I: The Purpose of the Presentation

A case presentation is not a report delivered through PowerPoint. It is the final stage of the case-solving process: the moment when your team's analysis, strategic choices, financial reasoning, and implementation plan must become understandable and persuasive to someone else. That distinction matters.

  • Teams often approach presentations by asking:asking, "What should we put on our slides?"
  • Strong teams begin with a different question: What do the judges need to understand and believe?

Those questions lead to very different presentations. The first encourages teams to collect information. The second forces them to make choices. 

A case presentation operates under severe constraints. You have limited time. The judges have limited attention. Your team may have completed hours—or even days—of analysis, but you may have only ten or fifteen minutes to communicate what matters. You cannot present everything. Nor should you try.

Your responsibility is to identify the ideas, evidence, and insights that matter most and organise them into an argument the judges can understand, evaluate, and ultimately believe. That is the purpose of the presentation.

Part I introduces two principles that will guide everything else in this manual:

  1. You are not building slides. You are building an argument.

  2. The real constraint is not time. It is attention.

Understand those principles before you open PowerPoint.

Chapter 1: You Are Not Building Slides. You Are Building an Argument.

One of the biggest mistakes case teams make is starting their presentation by opening PowerPoint. The case analysis finishes, someone creates a blank deck, and the team begins asking:

  • What should go on Slide 1?

  • Who is building the financial slide?

  • Who has the SWOT?

  • Where should we put the implementation?

  • How many slides do we need?

The team has started building slides before deciding what those slides need to accomplish. That reverses the process. A strong presentation starts with the message, not the slides. Before deciding what goes into PowerPoint, your team should know the argument it wants to make. At its simplest, that argument needs to answer four questions:

  • What is happening? What is the situation facing the organisation? This establishes context and demonstrates that your team understands the case.
  • Why does it matter? What is the real problem, opportunity, tension, or strategic implication? This moves beyond describing what is happening toward explaining its significance.
  • What should the organisation do? What decision are you recommending? The audience should never have to guess what you want the organisation to do.
  • Why should the judges believe you? What analysis, evidence, financial reasoning, implementation logic, and risk assessment demonstrate that your recommendation is credible?

This is where analysis becomes persuasion. Together, these questions create the backbone of the presentation:

WHAT → SO WHAT → NOW WHAT → WHY BELIEVE US?

Everything in the presentation should contribute to answering one of those questions.

The Presentation Equation

A strong case presentation combines five elements:

  • STRATEGY + STORY + EVIDENCE + VISUAL COMMUNICATION + DELIVERY = PERSUASION

Each performs a different role.

Element The Question It Answers
Strategy Are we recommending the right thing?
Story Can the judges follow our thinking?
Evidence Why should they believe us?
Visual Communication Can they understand the important information quickly?
Delivery Can we communicate the message with clarity, confidence, and credibility?

None of these elements works particularly well in isolation. A great strategy poorly communicated may lose. A beautiful deck containing weak analysis may lose. Excellent analysis buried beneath twenty crowded slides may lose. A confident speaker without evidence may sound impressive but remain unconvincing. A team with all the right pieces can still struggle if those pieces do not form one coherent argument. Winning presentations bring them together.

The Presentation Is a Decision-Making Tool

This changes how you should think about the deck. The objective is not to prove how much work your team completed. The objective is not to demonstrate that you used every framework you know. The objective is certainly not to fit every interesting fact from the case onto a slide. Your presentation should help the audience make a decision. That means information earns its place because it contributes to the decision—not simply because your team spent time analysing it. Consider two teams.

  • Team A conducts twelve analyses and presents all twelve.
  • Team B conducts twelve analyses but determines that only four materially influence the recommendation. Those four become central to the presentation. Several others are available for Q&A, while the rest are removed.

Team B has not done less work. It has exercised more judgment. That distinction is fundamental to great case presentations.

Think Like the Audience

Teams naturally see the presentation from their own perspective. They remember:

  • the hours spent solving the case;

  • the debate over alternatives;

  • the spreadsheet that took forty minutes to fix;

  • the research they discovered;

  • the framework that generated an interesting insight.

The judges experienced none of that. They encounter your solution for the first time when you present it. That creates an important communication principle: The presentation should be designed around what the audience needs—not around the process the team used to get there.

  • Your analysis may have been messy.
  • Your presentation should not be.
  • Your team may have explored five possibilities before reaching the recommendation.

The judges do not necessarily need to experience all five. Your job is to transform a complicated problem-solving process into a clear decision-making journey.

The Discover Your Mad Skills Principle

Slides support the story. The slides are not the story.

This principle should influence almost every decision you make about the deck. The judges should be able to follow your argument by listening to your team. The slides should make that argument easier to understand by providing:

  • evidence;

  • numbers;

  • comparisons;

  • diagrams;

  • timelines;

  • visual relationships;

  • and key messages.

The speaker and the slide therefore perform different jobs.

  • The slide shows.
  • The speaker explains.

If the slide contains a chart showing customer churn increasing from 8% to 17%, the speaker does not need to read those numbers aloud. The speaker should explain what they mean: Customer churn has more than doubled, but the more important insight is where that churn is occurring: our highest-value customers are leaving fastest.

  • The visual provides evidence.
  • The speaker provides meaning.

Together, they create understanding.

The Competing Attention Problem

There is another reason not to overload slides. PeopleIt cannotis carefullyhard to read a complicated slide and carefully listen to you at the same time. When you display a paragraph-heavy slide and begin speaking, you effectively ask the judges to choose: Should I listen to you or read this? That is not the competition you do not want. Instead, your slides and speaking should complement one another. The audience should be able to glance at the slide, understand its major message, and return its attention to you.  This idea becomes especially important when we examine visual communication and slide design later in this manual.

The Argument Test

Before building the deck, try this exercise. Without PowerPoint, explain your team's entire recommendation in approximately 60 seconds. Answer:

  • What is happening?
  • Why does it matter?
  • What should the organisation do?
  • Why should we believe you?

If the team cannot explain the argument clearly without slides, adding slides probably will not solve the problem. The presentation needs clarity before it needs design.

The Bottom Line

Do not begin by asking, "What slides should we build?" Begin by asking: "What argument do we need to make?" Once the argument is clear, the slides become much easier to build.

Chapter 2: The Problem Isn't Time. It's Focus.

Case competitions create a powerful temptation: "We only have ten minutes. We need to get everything in." That is usually the wrong way to think about the problem. Your constraint is not simply time. Your constraint is attention.

A ten-minute presentation technically gives you 600 seconds. But that does not mean the audience can absorb 600 seconds of continuous information. During those ten minutes, the judges are simultaneously trying to:

  • listen to your speakers;

  • read your slides;

  • interpret charts;

  • remember numbers;

  • understand your analysis;

  • compare alternatives;

  • evaluate assumptions;

  • follow your logic;

  • assess implementation;

  • identify potential risks;

  • and decide whether they believe your recommendation.

Their attention is a scarce resource. Treat it that way.

The Attention Budget

Think of every presentation as having an attention budget.

  • Every new idea spends some of that budget.
  • Every chart spends some.
  • Every number spends some.
  • Every transition spends some.
  • Every complicated slide spends a lot.

Your goal is therefore not:not "How much information can we fit into the presentation?" It is: How much understanding can we create with the attention available?available to us? That is a fundamentally different objective. And it leads directly to one of the most important principles in case presentation: Less is more but only when you choose the right "less." Removing information indiscriminately does not create clarity. Prioritising the information that matters most does.

Strategy Is Deciding What Not to Do

Strategic thinking requires choices.

  • You cannot pursue every customer.
  • You cannot enter every market.
  • You cannot invest in every initiative.
  • You cannot communicate everything your team discovered.

The same discipline used to develop strategy should therefore be used to build the presentation.

  • Every slide creates a demand on the audience.
  • Every chart requires interpretation.
  • Every bullet requires reading.
  • Every new idea creates another thing the judges must remember.

Therefore: Every piece of information you include should earn its place.

If something does not help the judges understand:

  • the problem;

  • the insight;

  • the decision;

  • the recommendation;

  • the evidence;

  • the impact;

  • the implementation;

  • or the risk;

ask whether it belongs in the main presentation.

Must Know, Useful to Know, Nice to Know

One way to make this decision is to classify information into three categories.

  • MUST KNOW
    • The judges need this information to understand or believe the recommendation.
    • It belongs in the presentation.
  • USEFUL TO KNOW
    • The information strengthens the argument but is not essential to understanding it.
    • It may belong in the presentation, the appendix, or Q&A preparationpreparation, depending on the case and the time available.
  • NICE TO KNOW
    • The information is interesting but does not materially change the decision.
    • Leave it out.

This is often difficult for teams because they become emotionally attached to their analysis. Someone spent twenty minutes building the chart.

  • Someone found an interesting statistic.
  • Someone created a framework.

None of those is a reason to putinclude somethinganything intoin the presentation. Ask instead: Does the audience need this to make the decision?

The Three Destinations for Your Analysis

Not everything you analyse needs to disappear.  Your work generally has three possible destinations:

Destination Purpose
Main Presentation Information necessary to understand and believe the recommendation
Appendix / Q&A Preparation Supporting evidence that may become useful if challenged
Leave It Out Analysis that helped the team think but does not help the audience decide

The third category is important.  Some analysis exists to help you think, not to help the judges understand.  That analysis has already served its purpose. It does not need a slide.

The Attention Test

For every slide, ask: What is the ONE thing the judges need to take away from this slide?

  • Not three things.
  • Not five.
  • One.

If your team cannot answer that question in a single sentence, the slide probably needs work. For example:

  • Weak answer: This is our customer analysis. That describes the slide. It does not identify the takeaway.
  • Stronger answer: Our highest-value customers are leaving because the current experience no longer meets their expectations. Now the team knows exactly what the slide must communicate.

The charts, numbers, labels, title, and speaker commentary can all be designed around that message.

The Removal Test

There is another useful question: If we remove this slide, does our argument become weaker?

  • If the answer is yes, the slide probably matters.
  • If the answer is no, ask why it is there.

This does not mean every slide needs to directly prove the recommendation directly.recommendation. Some slides provide context, transition between ideas, establish urgency, or explain implementation. But every slide should have a job. If you cannot identify that job, reconsider the slide.

Don't Confuse Complexity With Sophistication

Teams sometimes worry that simplifying the presentation will make their solution appear less sophisticated. Usually, the opposite is true. 

  • Making something complicated is easy.
  • Making something complicated understandable requires mastery.

Executive communication depends on the ability to identify what matters, remove what does not, and communicate the remaining ideas clearly. The judges do not need to see every step of your thinking to recognise that sophisticated thinking occurred. They need to see the result of that thinking.

Give Q&A Something to Work With

There is another strategic benefit to not presenting everything. You do not need to answer every possible question before the judges ask it. Some secondary analysis can deliberately remain available for Q&A. If judges ask:  "Did you consider the impact on employees?" and your team has analysed that issue, you now have an opportunity to demonstrate depth beyond the presentation. The main presentation establishes the argument. Q&A allows the judges to explore it. Trying to anticipate and answer every possible question inside the presentation often creates the very information overload you are trying to avoid.

The 10-Minute Test

Imagine you suddenly lose two minutes from your presentation.

  • What would you remove?
  • Now imagine you lose another two.
  • What goes next?
  • Keep going until only the most essential elements remain.
  • What survives?

Those are probably the ideas at the heart of your presentation. This exercise forces the team to distinguish between what is interesting and what is essential.

The Bottom Line

  • The goal is not to fit more into the presentation.
  • The goal is to make what matters impossible to miss.

The strongest teams do not overwhelm judges with everything they know. They decide what matters. They make it clear. And they trust their analysis enough to leave the rest behind.

Part I: Practice Before Moving On

Before moving to Part II, your team should be able to answer four questions without opening PowerPoint:

  • What is the central argument of our presentation?
    • Complete: We believe __________ because __________, and therefore the organisation should __________.
  • What must the judges understand?
    • Identify the three most important ideas they need to remember after the presentation.
  • What must the judges believe?
    • Complete: For the judges to support our recommendation, they must believe that __________.
  • What can we leave out?
    • Identify at least three pieces of analysis that were useful during case solving but do not need to appear in the main presentation.

If the team can answer these questions clearly, it is ready to start thinking about the communication challenge.challenge; Ifif it cannot, don't open PowerPoint yet.


Back to top