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Who doesn't feel some anxiety when faced with making a presentation to an audience of practitioners and executives? Presentations are often the most stressful part of a job in business or consulting. Yet anyone can learn to write and present better than they think. As with almost everything in business, there is a process. Based on interviews with practitioners and professors, this note will teach students to engage data, formulate a story, and use key tools to create powerful and compelling presentations. From descriptive statistics to regression to structural equation modeling to machine learning, quantitative analysis requires critical thinking and analytical rigor when it is being synthesized for presentation. Three main elements important to anyone preparing to build a presentation are (1) listening closely to clients, (2) understanding audiences, and (3) storyboarding. Thus an effective process includes asking clients the right questions, understanding how to tell stories, and being open to experimenting and learning to use technical tools efficiently.

This fictional case introduces students to interactive presentations through the situation of a US craft beer company that is developing a new beer product. The case discusses an organizational push to incorporate technology to help drive decision-making throughout. It opens with a product manager who is starting to design a new beer flavor and feeling pressure from his boss to embrace the CEO's desire for interactive presentations. Having relied on static presentations previously, the manager searches for guidance to get started. This case is taught at Darden in a first-year MBA elective business communications course, "Storytelling with Data." It could also be used in a module on producing interactive presentations. The material can be taught in tandem with an introductory lesson in Tableau, Power BI, or some other interactive presentation program.

Spreadsheet Supplement for Case UV8618

Anthony Palomba arrived in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2020 as a visiting scholar at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business (Darden). As a media-management and audience-analysis scholar, Palomba had previously assigned media- and entertainment-business-based cases to students to read. However, he had no idea how to exercise the case method in the classroom. In order to understand the case method, Palomba interviewed current Darden faculty members about best practices in pre-class planning, class discussion execution, and post-class or outside-class activities. In this note, Palomba organizes and summarizes what he discovered through these interviews, and reflects on his own case-study teaching experiences. Though he wrote this note for Darden faculty who are new to the case method, it is useful for any instructor taking on the case method for the first time. Moreover, it may serve as a refresher for veteran faculty members seeking inspiration or fresh perspectives.