20 months of B-school life has given me an exposure to an innumerable number of presentations, from peers, seniors, juniors, professors and companies. Company presentations i.e. 1 hour sessions (duration dependent on the verbosity of the presenter or the hyperactiveness of the students) show up 1-2 months prior to the placement processes. Here is how a standard B-school company presentation (ppt) proceeds:
Prologue: Students chattering outside the ppt room, while the presenters decide what to speak. A brief welcome to the company, and here we go.
Presenter (P): Thank you so much for your time..........(occasional fillers to get the audience to laugh/show interest/wake up)...........we have a ppt (file) for the presentation, but would prefer more of a discussion...........(you have the license to interrupt us and ask (stupid) questions).
NOTE: If P is an alumnus, he/she first duly mentions the same, and talks about the fact that he dozed off on the same benches as us, leading to applause.
(P resumes): We are a $xyz billion enterprise, and have a base in ____ countries. We have been steadily growing over the past few years (words like fortune 500 clients, market share along with bright colored pie charts etc).......our business model is blah blah........(high probability of words like customer/client focus, synergy, end-to-end solutions, implementation, business strategy coming in)...............
P will try to reduce the vagueness of the presentation by stating 3/4/5 (any more and it gets confusing and verbose) tenets on which it operates (which would mean words like management, quality, innovation, customer, organization etc in various permutations and combinations)
Having eulogized the virtues of the company, P now tries to ‘market’ the company to the students/prospective companies, which would involve jargon like career growth, flexibility of roles, work-life balance, challenging work, client-facing...note that the word “role” may be repeated up to a 100 times in a span of 15 minutes at this point.
NOTE: P will speak a lot more, and the talk will be 100 times less structured than this blog post, which is where the attempt at tenets comes in (refer to para above). The marketing of the company is interspersed with the rest of the ppt. However, the words most likely used still remain the same.
At irregular intervals during the talk, Hyper-Enthu Nutcases (HENs) will ask questions, which may range from perfectly relevant (salary, location, interview process) to the absolutely irrelevant (‘which product will you be launching in 2030?’, ‘Will you also conduct a case study competition next year?’). The questions flow in after the 25% duration mark, and mainly after the 75% mark, until about 90% of the ppt is done, by which point everyone would be having one eye on the door and another on the clock.
(P concludes): Any more questions? (2-3 times)...... a few prospective questions thrown in..........thank you for attending the presentation, we look forward to interviewing you/making the mistake of recruiting you/suffering the torture of working with you thereon.
NOTE: If any HEN asks a question during this phase, he/she will be subject to dangerous glares/chappal-on-the-butt treatment or plain simple ostracization, depending on the duration of the subsequent answer and also whether the student is a repeat offender.
EPILOGUE: A subset of the HENs will ask the same questions in a different manner, thereby initiating the process of ‘reverse-marketing’ i.e. marketing themselves to the company. Meanwhile, the others will walk out of the room, criticizing the verbosity of P and the hyperactivity of the HENs.
And so it goes.........
DISCLAIMER: This post is a light-hearted take for generating a few laughs. It does not point to any person/company in particular, and shouldn't be taken in the wrong sense by anyone.
