The Energy Executive Presentation Playbook

Presentations to Executives can be frustrating - often-times the presenters feel misunderstood and fail to obtain the support or mandates they seek, despite thorough preparation. And the same presentations often have worked with senior managers - why don't Executives "get it"? And similarly, Executives get frustrated as well - they want to support and approve, but feel that they don't receive the information they need. What is going wrong?

The key to success is understanding how Executives differ from senior managers. The wider span of control, accountability for areas outside of the Executive's own core expertise, and the big impact of executive decisions combine into a different set of requirements from those of senior managers, who usually are in charge of areas that they know well. And in addition, executives typically live in a high-paced, stressful working environment that requires constant domain changes.

To get what you need from Executives, you need to meet them where they are. Luckily, there is a recipe for clear, concise and focused messaging addressing this requirement. In this course, we will work through this recipe in a similarly concise format. Less is more - all you need is an understanding of the "typical" Executive mindset, and some simple rules and tactics to match your presentation style to that mindset.

It's not rocket science, but success requires deliberate focus - and this concise course provides a simple yet proven-to-be-effective approach.

This course includes examples from the energy industry. The Energy industry has a particularly high diversity of high-impact topics presented to senior decision makers, driven by financial size and technical complexity of many of these topics. Coupled with a wide range of educational backgrounds of the executive audience, this necessitates a particularly focused approach to presentations. Technical experts, from geoscientists to drilling engineers to chemists to electrical engineers, need to be particularly focused on making complex content understandable.

Of course most of these points are not unique to the energy industry - manufacturing, pharma, software and other industries have similar complexities. The course is thus equally applicable to participants from other sectors: software engineers, marketing managers, data center developers, etc.