Executive Summary Task (60 minutes)

1. Choose a message and a target audience

2. Study the executive summary structure

3. Prepare a 90-second Executive Summary.

Bonus Material: Two videos on “Writing catchy headlines” and “Using contrasts when presenting”

1. Choosing Your Message

Think of an upcoming presentation, where you are to recommend something to solve a problem, or improve a proces.

1. What's the problem you are trying to solve?

2. What’s the consequence of not solving this problem? Find your audience’s pain points like losing money, wasting time, deadline delays, employees quitting ...

3. What's the end goal?

4. What’s your solution to this problem?

2. Study the Executive Summary Structure

The structure ensures you communicate:

• The necessity of your recommendation/message

• The concreteness of what it is about.

3. Prepare Your Executive Summary

When you prepare your executive summary, the order in which you present your information is different from the natural hierarchy of information that you would use in writing. Here’s the order in which you should prepare it:

1. Your Why Story

2. Your “Instead of A, let's do B”

3. Your Call-to-Action and Benefit

4. Your Title

Your WHY Story (20 minutes)

Watch the video below and write your WHY story.

Your “Instead of A, let's do B”

Explain what your solution means by formulating a contrast between the current approach and your new suggested approach in one sentence only.

For example:

Instead of doing this manually, we’ll automate it.

Instead of making decisions based on a narrow data set, we’ll have an extensive, more reliable dataset to support our decisions.

OPTIONAL: In the Bonus Material below is a video on Speaking in Contrasts and why it’s so effective.

Your Call-to-Action and Benefit

1. Break down your Solution Sentence in to the three actions it requires to deploy your solution.

2. Formulate the one major benefit they will get out of it.

Your Title (10-15 minutes)

Your title needs to grab your audience’s attention. Here’s a formula to do just that:

1. Include a verb. Without a verb, there’s no story

2. Try to include a number (The 2 reasons why…)

3. Or try to include language of imagery (navigation, world-class, sprint, shortcut, )

4. Or try to include powerful adjectives (golden, transforming, brand-new, )

Bonus Material