One of the challenges I've faced with teaching the skills in Think Like A Strategy Consultant is that the best way to learn them is by getting intensive feedback from others either learning these skills or who are good at applying them in their work. Many of the students taking the course are doing so independently. My average student is in a big company or consulting firm and is frustrated with their organization's lack of support and training. Despite that, they want to get better at these skills. Luckily, now, with AI, you can get instant feedback on your work, for less than $20 a month. I've been using it and have been really impressed with the latest models. Check out this example. Here's a slide I found from a recent McKinsey report: It's a solid slide. But can we do better? I pasted the image into ChatGPT and included the following prompt of principles from my course (steal this!): assume you are a very experienced strategy consultant, give feedback on the following slide. you want to make slides that are clear, compelling, and persuasive. you want to incorporate simple principles like having a title that communicates the "so what?" content that matches and backs up the title, charts that are simple and pass the "ten-second test" of being able to be understood by a large number of people, and overall slide content that is clear and not confusing. please give specific feedback and also offer suggestions on updated information or language to include: It gave some pretty awesome suggestions (here is the full response) and here are two that were pretty good: Feedback on the Title
Feedback on Supporting Quote
These tools are getting better fast. For the most motivated people, they are so helpful. Will they be able to instantly remake the slides in the future by themselves? Perhaps. But in the short term? It's the best time to learn on your own. Let me know if you try this. I'd love to feature a before and after slide from someone who gives this a shot. |
Freelancer, creator & writer
I started StrategyU to teach knowledge workers the tools, frameworks, mindsets, and approaches that I learned in strategy consulting. When I started this, I thought that my audience would be people in big companies stuck inside strategy, finance, or analytics groups that didn’t have access to training. This was one of the segments that have found value in my work but a second segment that surprised me has been small and medium-sized consulting firms ranging from 5 people to 200. Over the last...
If you asked me what my favorite type of fruit was, I could tell you in two ways. Way #1: “Well, I like fruits with seeds. Sometimes they’re sweet; sometimes they’re sour. They have green leaves on the top. They’re pretty small, too.” You might respond, “you mean a strawberry?” Then I’d say yes, and you’d know my answer. Or, I could tell you another way: Way #2: “It’s a strawberry.” This is the simple way to explain top-down communication. From the listener’s perspective, it is much easier to...
"Strategy" is a word that attracts a lot of excitement in the business world. People who work on strategy get paid more and senior executives like to use the word a lot to talk about their decisions. In consulting, I worked with many companies helping them to develop strategies. Although these were often focused on different levels of the business and different topics, all of the "strategies" were similar. They each included: A synthesis of all of the relevant information about a company...