What Is The Golden Slide?
Once upon a time, there was a joint meeting of the Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau and the Better Business Bureau. There were 800 stakeholders in the audience and I was a featured presenter. My assignment was to present a full report on the results of a huge tourism study our research team had just completed.
We had traveled to a dozen cities conducting hundreds of face-to-face interviews with business and vacation travelers, travel agents, meeting travel planners, and more. We investigated attitudes, behaviors, and experiences. We showed hundreds of images to probe more deeply into travelers perceptions of destinations across the US, collecting feedback that will provide the fact base for the development of overarching strategies and advertising themes.
We followed this exploratory work with several thousand nationally-representative surveys, adding insights to our growing investigation into travelers’ wants, needs, and expectations. From start to finish, this eye-opening project took eight months and cost more than a million dollars. Big decisions rested on what we had learned from the research and the study team’s fact-based recommendations that emerged from our investigation.
The event organizers had asked me to prepare a 30-minute presentation
My talk was the last one before lunch. As is so often the case, the event started late and only gathered momentum slowly. When the first speaker finally concluded, the floor manager told me my time had been cut to 20 minutes. As the second speaker was wrapping up, the floor manager was fraying at the edges because the event was running even farther behind. He apologized when he said I now had only 10 minutes to present my report.
As he brushed by me on his way to the dais, he whispered that I had only five minutes
After he took three of my five minutes introducing me, I was left with 2 minutes to talk about 8 months and 1 million dollars of work that would form the Convention & Visitors Bureau. It was an odd formula for distributing knowledge to members of a large organization: 8 months + $1,000,000 = 2 minutes of knowledge transfer.
My Boy Scout training to Be Prepared paid off here
Wise senior colleagues had taught me years earlier to always prepare several versions, and I had three ready: a full presentation, a streamlined presentation, and The Golden Slide. It’s the presentation version of The Elevator Speech – a brief, clear, big-picture message that boils the study down to One Big Finding. On it, I had summarized in less than a dozen words the big issue and the solution.
I showed my Golden Slide and spoke for only two minutes
The audience broke for lunch, and the steady buzz from session attendees was how the easy-to-understand message perfectly summed up South Florida’s situation in a nutshell. The team had produced a solution that made it easy for competitors to stop the infighting, see themselves as a part of something larger, and take advantage of a solution that greatly benefited all stakeholders.
