Welcome back everybody. This is a big week in the course. So it's time to pull everything together and make a pricing recommendation for Phillips. So as you get started on this final assignment you need to ask yourself, which market should they serve? B to C? B to B? Or maybe both? And how should they price their products? >> And you know what, Ron? You can have the best recommendation in the world, but if you're not able to communicate it it's not going anywhere. So, What I would do in this case, I would create a tight little slide presentation, just a handful of pages that really lay out my thought process and my rational recommendation. >> Well, you know, Thomas, I have a feeling that your slide decks are better than my slide decks, and maybe this is a place where the learners need to hear from you on how you put the stuff together. >> I have written a few. So let me show you, I would approach you. So, first and foremost, you want to be as concise as possible. And what this means is, you don't want to start with too many pages to begin with, so i'm writing out here six pages. And I usually like to start with something like context and problem statement. Because when you talk to Senior Executives they have a lot on their plate. And they don't even might not remember why you seen them and do you achieve. So page that concisely lays out what you solving for is always a good start. And in fact to make it as comparable in this sphere to you or learners, we will give you this page so that you're all solving for the same thing. The next thing is usually a good executive summary and this page, you want to have so that in case someone just has very little time or he's reading the materials by himself, so you want him to get the gist of it. So there is a lot of skill in writing a very good summary. Then you probably want to talk a little bit about your approach and describe what you did and why. I would keep this, in this case, to one page. Then you might have a few pages about the analysis, With your key findings. And what these findings tell you, so, the implications of them. And maybe in this case you need two pages or may be even three, but always be very choosy on what you keep here and what you put in the appendix. Then you have finally the recommendation, where you take the findings from the analysis together and come to a conclusion. You usually end on something like a next steps where you describe what else needs to happen. And then, usually, you create more pages than you really use in the main deck. So you always have some sort of an appendix where you put in the tools you don't need. >> Now can I ask you a question on that, because this is something I struggle with when I'm putting together decks. >> And that is you've got the analysis and the recommendation. How do you make a decision on what goes here and what ends up being proverbial overkill and should end up in the appendix? >> It's a great question. You always have this nice to know, but you really have to ask yourself what does your audience have to understand in order to be on board with your recommendation? >> Okay >> One other question. >> Sure. >> And that is, do you literally put the title of your slices as executive summary or recommendations, or are you substituting some kind of content language there? >> So, we usually we like to have some sort of an extra title, which tees out the key fact of your message. So while you probably keep the executive summary and you have the approach of something like this is what we did, or this is what I did, you want to have here something to the effect of, LED light bulbs provides huge economic value for consumers as well as businesses. That was one of the findings we had, I think. >> Now if you do this, if you craft your tiles really well, you will actually be able to basically write your executive summary at the end of it by just taking the key messages from each slide title. >> Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. Well this is great. I mean, this helps me and I've no doubt it helps to learner too. So well this is what you're going to be doing, right? So by the end of the week you're going to submit a completed slide deck. And this going to go through a peer review and we urge you to take this review seriously. It's going to help your own learning, and it's going to help the learning of your peers, who are also in the course as well. >> At BCG we do this a lot. Laying out the story, really pressure testing each other's thought process, going into the numbers, checking the assumptions, making sure that the recommendation makes sense, and that we start off with the right hypothesis. Ultimately this leads to better outcome. But you need to have a constructive mindset. >> It sound like a very dynamic process back and forth. >> It is a lot of fun so we really hope you dig into it and examine your peers' work. Look at their data and look at their logic and see what kind of hints and clues you can give them to make their recommendation better. >> Yeah, and then when you get your own peers reviews back, what you want to do is look at those reviews and ask yourself, did they tell me anything that could make my own analysis tighter, can make my own analysis better, to help your recommendation? >> Ron, I think it's time to get started. >> All right have fun digging into the case and crystallizing your understanding of what's going on here.
