More Stories About Presentations!

The roles played by luck, style, and creative misdirection

Photo by Keva Epale on Unsplash

The Story (actually, three stories)

Prelude: RoboCop, Revisited

I hope you will forgive me for returning, for a second time, to the great 1987 dystopian science fiction thriller and dark comedy movie RoboCop for another great scene that gets at the heart of today’s subject. RoboCop was set in a near-future, ungovernable, and crime-ridden Detroit, and among other things, it does a brilliant job of satirizing the corporate world, specifically, a big, soulless corporation that makes military-grade policing hardware. Our scene takes place in the boardroom on the 151^st floor of Omni Consumer Products (OCP) Tower. This is a big and important meeting, and all the company brass are sitting around the table with junior executives lining the walls. After rolling through a slick media presentation, Senior President Dick Jones, who hopes to impress the Chief Executive or “The Old Man” with his big project, directs everyone’s attention to the boardroom’s huge double doors, which swing open to reveal the Enforcement Droid, series 209. ED-209 is “a robotic, seven-foot, headless hunchback with arms that end in canon muzzles, a self-sufficient urban law enforcement robot.” The Robot steps forward, surrounded by a handful of technicians huddled over a test cart. Jones asks one of the junior executives, Mr. Kinney, to step forward and act as an arrest subject. Kinney is given a chrome-plated .357 magnum revolver and asked to “use the gun in a threatening manner.” He waves the gun at the ED-209, which immediately turns, points its guns towards Kinney, and says,

“Please put down your weapon. You have twenty seconds to comply. Your civil rights are currently in effect. You now have fifteen seconds to comply.”

Jones jokingly says, “I think you better do what he says, Mr. Kinney,” who then drops the gun, which thumps lightly on the deep pile carpeting. But ED-209 continues,

“If you cannot find an attorney one will be appointed for you.”

Now the techs are surrounding the cart in a panic when ED-209 says,

“You have five seconds to comply,” and finally, “I am now authorized to use necessary physical force.”

As Kinney starts to run, the ED-209 tracks him, firing an extended burst that catapults him across the room and onto the white model of the future Delta City—the old man’s vision for Detroit—where Kinney’s blood now runs in the tiny streets. But the best is yet to come. As executives scream and people call for paramedics, there is this exchange:

Old Man: Dick, I’m very disappointed.

Jones (cleaning blood off his suit): “I’m sure it’s only a glitch…a temporary setback.”

Old Man: You call this a glitch?! We’re scheduled to begin construction in six months. This “temporary setback” could cost us 50 million dollars in interest payments alone!”¹

We’ve all been through epic fails and other memorable experiences in big, important meetings—maybe not quite as extreme as the malfunctioning of ED-209, in RoboCop, but what the heck, here are three more examples, each offering different lessons.

Story 1: Second Place

Our firm was one of two finalists in a competition for a big corporate office building in New Jersey for a well-known Wall Street firm. It was a multi-stage process that was costly and time-consuming, but the client team leader assured us repeatedly that this was not going to be “the typical beauty contest,” because they really wanted to get to know the people who would be doing the work, so they could hire the team with which they had the best chemistry. More importantly, he told us that his team —the people we met with over and over again—were authorized to make the final decision. We worked hard to develop those relationships and, after three preliminary meetings and presentations, we had learned through a back channel that we were in first place. And then the big day of the final presentation arrived, and the client team decided to invite the CEO, who accepted and flew in from Wall Street on a helicopter. We lost and could not find out why. But a friend of mine was working as the owner’s representative for the client and was present for both interviews, and years later, after some arm-twisting and a martini, he told me what happened. My firm went first, and we had a polished slideshow, a fancy, very expensive model, and a well-rehearsed presentation that came off without a hitch. The other team had a more modest presentation — drawings mounted on foamcore boards, placed on easels arranged in an overlapping arc. When they started their presentation, the lead designer, who was standing at one end of the arc of boards, stepped forward to speak and accidentally bumped the corner of the end board with his shoulder. The board slowly fell forward, tipping the next board, and like dominoes, all seven boards fell to the floor. The designer and his team members calmly put all the boards back on their easels and then gave their presentation. After both presentations, the CEO asked the client team, “Who do you guys want to hire?” At this moment, according to my friend, they all went mute and deferred back to the CEO, who said, “Well, if they are both capable and you guys don’t have a preference, I’d hire the fellow who knocked all the boards over. If he can stay that cool, I think he can work with us.” So it turned out to be a beauty contest after all, and it cost us over $200,000 to come in second place.

Story 2: “We really liked that guy!”

This is a story within a story. I worked for a big firm that did big projects. For that firm, winning the big, $300 million multi-building campus project for a Fortune 100 corporation or the US government meant a big stream of income from fees, as well as keeping 80-100 of their 600 employees busy for five or ten years. The interviews for those projects were a high-stakes event, and the firm would spend a lot of time and money preparing. One part of that preparation was a Ph.D. psychologist and consultant whom the firm often hired to help develop the strategy and tactics for the interview, because when a lot is on the line, details matter. For example, if five finalists are being interviewed and you are going first, you say one set of things, the big obvious points. If you are last, you know that all those big points have been made in the previous interviews, and you will look like a fool if you repeat them, so you must cleverly talk about more subtle and sophisticated issues that the previous four didn’t already hit on. If you are second, third, or fourth, it is harder to differentiate yourself, because, as the old saying goes, “you remember your first and your last, but you forget all those in between,” so there are strategies for those slots too. This consultant would help the firm with everything from advising on assembling the team and developing the materials and talking points to joining in rehearsals, offering suggestions, and coaching individual presenters. But once a year, they also hired him to come in and run a three-day training session on presentation skills for 20 or so people who sometimes went out to do those interviews. It was a long time ago, and I still remember it as the best and most important training I have ever received, but instead of telling you all about it, I’ll pass along just one anecdote the old white-haired Ph.D. psychologist shared with us. In his academic day job, he studied how style and presentation skills affected the outcomes of high-stakes interviews, so he once convinced another client to substitute a professional actor for one of their team members on a big, important interview. It was a secondary role—lighting designer—on a big team of five or six, so the client was willing to go along with the experiment. The actor took the place of the firm’s real lead lighting designer, who wrote the script and whose resume was included in the proposal. Well, they won the project, in no small part because the client team loved the actor, who swept them all off their feet. When the firm’s leader called his new client to explain the actor's part in the story and reassure him that the real lighting designer was more than capable, the client said,

“That’s fine, just make sure you bring that other fellow (the actor) to all the meetings.”

Story 3: Step on it!

In the fall semester of my third year of architecture school, I was in a design studio with a professor who had spent some time designing high-rise office towers while working at a big firm, so that’s what he assigned for us. The semester-long project would be a 40-story tower in downtown San Francisco. The upper floors would be offices, with a restaurant or nightclub on top, but the program for the lower eight floors—the base—was a mix of commercial retail, a theater, and public spaces around an atrium. This professor had long lists of requirements for each of the major reviews during the semester including many sheets of large drawings (which, back then, we drew by hand) as well as two models: one “massing model” of the whole tower at a smaller scale, showing the whole building—base, middle and top—set into a context model, and a second large-scale model of the base so that you could look inside and see all the public spaces. As the end of the semester drew near, we were once again assigned a long list of required drawings for the final jury…and two more models to build.

Studio class was 2-6 PM, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and during that time we would all work on our projects while the professor made his way from desk to desk, giving each of us a fifteen or thirty-minute-long “desk crit,” offering guidance and criticism on our projects. When class ended at six, most of us would go to the dining hall for dinner and then come back and hunker down for a long night of design work. In the days before the big reviews, many of us would “pull all-nighters,” sometimes several in a row. Too many all-nighters, and you start to see snakes and other things that aren’t there. But not the guy who sat at the desk next to mine. He seemed to be a little different from most of us, because at 5:45 he would clean his desk, lock his trunk, and leave for the night. Come to think of it, he didn’t really hang out with most of us. We understood that he had a girlfriend, and maybe did a little work on a drawing board at home, but generally speaking, he seemed to work less and to have a more normal life that didn’t revolve around our little cult of design. Some of us pitied him and his lack of passion for design, and wondered how he would ever succeed as an architect when he wasn’t putting in the same hours as the rest of us.

Well, the morning of the big final review arrived, and most of us were sleep-deprived drooling idiots, having spent multiple nights awake carefully inking drawings and building models. So when he walked in, looking well-rested and refreshed, and started piling all of his drawings and models on his desk, I noticed that his large-scale model of the base was from his previous presentation the month before and didn’t match his latest design at all. We were friendly, so when I asked him what he was going to do, he said,

“Don’t worry, I have it all figured out.”

We all went into the crit room, tacked our big drawings to the Homasote walls, set our models on the floor in front of our drawings, and the review began. When my neighbor’s turn to present came, he shambled slowly to the front of the room, suddenly appearing to be as exhausted and sleep-deprived as the rest of us. He faced the three professors sitting in chairs in front and took his time fumbling with some notes, and then began to describe his project in a babbling, inchoate monologue. And then he turned to point at his drawings and, at the same time, lifted his left foot and brought it down on that outdated model. It exploded, as little dowels and bits of balsa wood and cardboard sprang from the flattened mess beneath his foot. He paused, acting stunned, and murmured slowly,

“Oh no….”

Immediately, the professor jumped up and said,

“Oh geez, sorry, but don’t worry, we’ll still give you full credit for having a model!”

He received a very friendly and sympathetic review from the professors while the rest of us were overwhelmed by alternating feelings of murderous rage, awe, and admiration.

The Theory

I went long on the stories, so I’m going to go short on the theory. I do, however, want to leave you with a couple of thoughts to help you frame these stories, so I asked ChatGPT a series of increasingly refined questions starting with, “What are the top ten things that go wrong with the architect selection process?” The answers, while general, all corresponded closely with my own personal experience, but three of those answers stood out as most relevant to our three stories:

1. Collaboration and culture are undervalued.

2. The wrong people control the selection process.

3. Presentations reward performance, not delivery.

All three of these failures are relevant to the story about coming in second place in the competition. In fact, the whole process was supposed to be about collaboration until the CEO flew in and, in response to his mute executive team, made the decision with little background. You can hardly blame him—his own staff abdicated, so despite knowing little about the whole process—and as someone who makes lots of decisions—he made what was probably a relatively easy decision for him that day. The third lesson explains what happened in the story about the actor who, as a secondary player in a six-person team, used his acting skills and personal style to charm the whole committee. And finally, in a perverse way, this third lesson also applies to the story about my college classmate who stepped on his model and, like the designer knocking all of his boards to the ground, continued with a cool-headed performance that led to sympathetic treatment, whether or not it was warranted.²

The Lesson

In addition to the three general lessons offered by ChatGPT, I’ll add some nuance. Interviews and presentations are fluid and dynamic things, where, after the content and resumes, many other variables, such as interview order, room arrangement, clothing, time of day, how well somebody slept the night before, and the weather outside, can lead to subjective judgment over objective, clear-headed thinking. The second-place competition story shows how everything changes when the CEO is in the room, and also that if you leave it up to the person least involved, they will pick based on limited information and a simple gut reaction, in this case, the guy who didn’t get flustered after knocking all the drawings to the floor. The CEO could have just as easily flipped a coin. (More generally, I am opposed to the use of high-stakes competitions to select design teams, but that is a subject for another time. ) The lesson from the story about the actor/lighting designer is that you should never underestimate the power of charisma and chemistry to influence people—and a selection panel—for good or ill. Sitting on the owner’s side, I’ve been charmed in interviews by people who, after being hired, proved terrible to work with (note: always call references), and I have come to deeply value and admire people who were unimpressive in the initial interview. And finally, the lesson from my college classmate stepping on his model is that sometimes distraction, misdirection, artifice, fakery, and “shock and awe” can actually work to your advantage—as long as you are not found out. A couple of other general lessons are that personal style, confidence, and presentation skills matter, and can matter more than actual knowledge and competence. In other words, sometimes it really does become just a big beauty contest where people who are good at selling have a distinct advantage. But the last and perhaps most important lesson—in business and in life—is that sometimes it just comes down to luck, good or bad.

“All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure.”
— Mark Twain

“Dead or alive, you’re coming with me!”

—RoboCop

1. Neumeier, Edward, and Michael Miner, RoboCop: The Future of Law Enforcement, Script, Fourth Draft, 10 June 1986.

2. My thanks to ChatGPT.