of a business slide presentation is.

And after thinking about it for a bit,

it was very clear to me that Action titles

are actually the most important elements.

So, if by now you're not really sure

what an action title is or how to come up

with a very, very strong action title...

Welcome to another video here on my channel Firm Learning.

My name is Heinrich, I'm a former McKinsey consultant

and on my channel I talk a lot about topics

such as career success and also consulting skills.

And surely as a consultant,

one thing that you really need to do well

is to create slide presentations in PowerPoint

or any of these other programs.

So in today's video,

I want to sharpen your understanding

why action titles are so important

and also give you some very, very tangible tips,

including an exercise to help you

come up with the best possible action titles

that you can write for your slides.

Let's start by looking into why action titles

are so important.

And the key point you have to understand

is that your presentations should have a storyline.

And it is the action titles that bring this story to life.

The main idea is that if you read your titles

of your presentation from start to end,

so every single slide, just read the titles.

The key idea is that by just doing that,

you will be able to understand all the key messages

of the presentation just by reading these action titles.

So, why is this even necessary?

Why is this important?

Well try to put yourself into the shoes

of a C-level manager, you are a CEO,

CFO, any other business unit head,

any other senior guy in an organization.

Likely, especially these large blue-chip companies

that often these consulting firms work for,

these C-level people, every single day, every single week,

they will get several big documents,

50 pages, hundred pages, or even more,

of other projects that are going on.

Project updates, progress reports, deliverables like that.

This is far too much to read.

People like this cannot just read

every single slide of documents like that.

So, what they will expect you to deliver

is a document where they can just skim through,

just read the action titles,

and just by reading the action titles,

be able to understand all the key messages.

And this is the so-called horizontal logic,

the storyline of the presentation.

This needs to come to life via the action titles.

And then the idea is, of course,

that if they read something in the action title

that is really interesting,

where they want to learn more about,

then they stop and then they read the page,

they read the full slide.

This then is the vertical logic.

And here, of course,

you already understand one key thing,

when writing strong action titles,

and this is that, of course, an action title

should summarize the contents of a slide

in a clear and concise way.

So, this is the intuition,

but now you might ask yourself,

what exactly is an action title?

So, I try to put down here in definition,

this is coming from myself, so no fancy source,

just my best way of putting it in writing.

And I would define an action title

by being a header of a slide presentation

that summarizes the content of the slide,

by formulating a complete sentence.

So, if you wanted something like here the header,

also here on top of this slide, saying,

"Action titles help to create a clear storyline

within the presentation."

This would be the action title of that slide.

This is what you want to try to achieve.

But what do you write in such a title?

What are the contents supposed to be?

And here I think the best test that you can do,

is the test of the so-called "So what?"

The question of the "So what?"

And I once created a full video,

just about the concept of asking this question "So what?"

I will link it somewhere above here,

if you're interested to learn more about this

you're free to check it out.

But in a nutshell, the "So what?" is a question,

that you as a project lead might ask to an associate,

or consultant who prepared the slide,

or maybe a partner asks to you,

and this person looks at your slide

and asks him or herself the question, "So what?"

Right? So, so what, why is this relevant?

What is the implication of what I see here?

Because maybe the information on the slide is interesting.

It's data. It's nice.

But what does this mean for the problem at hand,

for the thing that I need to solve?

So in putting together the document,

you should ask yourself,

what is the "so what?" of the slide,

if we really struggle to come up with the "so what?"

then this often is a sign that this slide

maybe isn't that important, right?

If it does not have a clear "so what?"

maybe it's something that rather belongs in the appendix,

but maybe not in the main deck,

or maybe take it out completely.

But once you know the "so what?" make sure the "so what?"

is clearly stated in the action title

and then of course, when you're presenting the slide,

then the "so what?" is also what you should be communicating

in your presentation.

Now let's look into a couple of best practices

that you should apply whenever you write an action title.

And here we'll always have an example

and then an insight that I want to draw out from that.

Here the first example is,

"managing risk is important for this project success."

And here, my answer is try to avoid statements like that.

Try to avoid writing general truths

that are pretty much always correct.

So of course, managing risks is pretty much always important

for this project success, right?

So for almost every project that will be relevant.

So try to avoid writing things that are obvious,

really draw out more insightful things than that.

Next, something like, "all divisions have found

to not be following best practices."

What's often dangerous, is to write action titles

with really hard absolute statements.

Always, never, in every case,

this is like this, or like that.

So these are very hard statements often are traps

because there are often some weird edge cases.

Maybe there is this, like very little division somewhere,

who does something that you were not aware of.

Just my personal learning that often,

and especially for presented,

maybe there was like one board member

sitting in the audience will tell you,

'no, but this is not correct, this is wrong.'

Because you know, it's just enough

to have one example that contradicts this

and then pretty much you're there

and need to admit that, yes, your message was wrong.

What you put on the slide was wrong.

It's not the case that this is true for all divisions.

Next one,

"Company has potential to significantly improve profit."

So here my learning from that is,

try to whenever possible, to quantify the action titles

include numbers in the action titles.

So if you make a slide about profit of a company,

usually you should always be able to also put a number.

So what is the profit improvement potential?

What is the potential for the profit

that you see in the company?

Next one, "When conducting data analysis and interviews,

we learned a lot about the business."

So this would be an action title,

which very much focuses on the process.

So what you did, you analyzed data,

conducted interviews, you learned a lot.

This is often not so relevant.

People don't really care to who you talk to,

what analysis you conducted.

What people are interested in are the results.

This is one of the key fundamental principles

of top down communication.

Again, I don't want to go too deep into this in this video,

but I will link another video that I did

about top down communication above here, check it out.

Really one of the most fundamental concepts

for communication as a consultant,

but also in general, in any professional environment.

Last example here,

"Results indicate significant potential

to look into further improvement measures for the business,

with the goal to increase profits by 50%

until end of this financial year for the company."

So, frankly, I don't even know what exactly this means.

The point that I wanted to make here is,

write action titles in a concise way.

Don't use more words than necessary.

Yes, usually there will be a full sentence,

but don't just write for the sake of writing.

The rule is that usually in the title,

you should not have more than two lines of title.

So two lines are fine, but not write more than two.

Now let's put your action title writing abilities to test.

You see here a standard slide,

it's from a mock-up presentation, of course,

not any actual line engagement.

But what you see here is a slide

where the action title is missing.

And I want you to come up with an action title

and now to help a little bit out,

here I would just like briefly explain what you see here.

So here you see a sizing of a growth potential,

every potential for this company,

that could choose to enter these markets.

So the North America market or the Asia Pacific market,

and then you see different numbers, you see the market size,

you see how much of the market is covered by competitors,

the current market share, and other considerations like this

and in the end, also an EBIT potential

that the company could receive from entering these markets.

Now, I would encourage you to maybe even pause the video

for a moment and think about for yourself,

what would be a strong action title for such a slide.

If you want, even write it down.

So let's look at a couple examples

of what you could have written.

So the first is "Derived potentials for an expansion."

And again, feel free to always pause

and think about this for yourself.

Whether you consider

that this is a strong action title or not.

Because indeed, I would argue,

this is not even an action title,

this does not even meet the definition of an action title.

This is a title in the style

that I know many people like to do it,

but it's just not what I would recommend you to do.

And this is, for instance, if you have a page

that describes the risks of a certain strategy,

then just writing risks in the title, right?

So it's a title, but it's not an action title

in the sense that it doesn't summarize

the key message of a slide in a full sentence.

Next one, "Expansion to new geographies

creates a positive EBIT potential"

EBIT, by the way, for the uninitiated,