Presentation Skills 101 for the Big 3 (Correction: Not Very Big 3)

Can the Not Very Big 3 get anything right? Actually, they are getting quite a few things right – especially Ford – but it is taking far too long. But let’s not damn them with faint praise.

So there they are in Washington, making probably the most important sales pitch of their business lives and they blew it – Big Time. The best way to put this is that if any of their respective executive made a presentation of this quality to Rick Wagoner, Alan Mulally or Bob Nardelli, they would probably have kicked them out the door and told them never to return – and rightly so.

Their supplications were amateurish and ill-rehearsed. The executives of the Not Very Big 3 need to go back to basics about presentations. Here are a few tips for them

1) Know Your Audience
This is basic. Your message must be crafted so your audience can understand it, relate to it and buy into it. A few things our Detroit friends did not seem to appreciate. The audience was a group of publicity hungry politicians with a two-fold objective – a) Determine if a bailout was appropriate and, b) Look good to their constituents. I would not dream of suggesting which objective is more important to the wise inquisitors. Thus the Motor City men should have been aware that the politicians would throw cheap shots and be just as haughty and arrogant as they claimed the car men are.
Many would have taken extreme satisfaction in seeing Nardelli in particular being quizzed aggressively. The last time he had to endure something like this was when he was Home Depot Chairman. Famously at a company AGM, he was the only director to turn up, refused to answer questions from the floor, and closed questioning within 30 minutes. Despite the bad rap he got when ousted by Home Depot, taking $210m in payout, he did increase profitability, he did reduce costs. In other words, while he will never win a popularity contest, he probably is the right man for Chrysler. He just didn’t bother to take the time to know his audience at Capitol Hill or for that matter when he was at Home Depot.

2) Know Your Message
There is almost universal consensus that the Not Very Big 3 executives were not very convincing at the hearings. Part of the problem is that they failed to lay out what they are going to do, but even more say, they failed to identify clearly and repeatedly what they have done to date.
Ford in particular has a pretty good case to make. Product quality is improving, design is good and the company even made a small profit earlier this year. How many people are aware that Mulally made the following statement in his testimony? "Tomorrow at the Los Angeles Auto Show, we unveil two all-new hybrids, the Ford Fusion Hybrid and the Mercury Milan Hybrid. Both beat the Toyota Camry Hybrid in fuel efficiency by at least five miles per gallon. The conventional versions of these new vehicles also beat the Camry in fuel economy."
As for GM, how many people know that the 2009 Chevy Malibu is rated higher than the 2009 Toyota Camry on Overall Initial Quality and Overall Performance and Design by J.D. Power and Associates? This and other information on substantial improvement made by the automakers should have been clearly and loudly presented to Congress and repeated, repeated, repeated every time they had the microphone. The clear message should have been, “We are making real progress, we are cutting costs, we are improving quality – look at the data Mr. & Mrs. Politician and we will continue to do so. This is how we will continue to do it, when and where.”

3) Practice, Practice, Practice and when you are finished - Practice again.
These guys should have run their presentations by the best consultants who know the ways of Washington, been beaten up by them and then run their presentations again. Then they should have been beaten up by them again before they presented again. Instead, they went into the ring, like some fat flabby overweight boxer who thinks he knows it all. As they should probably know by now, those boxers tend to get beaten up.

As a Chicago based Irish keynote speaker, I really try to live the basic messages outlined above. I will not present to my best if I have not researched my audience, developed a clear cohesive message and practiced it numerous times. Hopefully, Wagoner, Mulally and Nardelli will get that message so that they can present their message in a persuasive manner.