Day 4 Matereality Marathon

Sausage making: diagrams, themes, and an urge to talk to cows

A rudimentary diagram informing the Danone assessment. Video recap is here or read all about it below.

Hello again! Here’s a look at Day #4 of the Matereality Marathon (launched here), exploring global food company Danone through the lens of Matereality.

In today’s recap I take us into the kitchen where the sausages are made — decisions around what goes where to make the information useful. We also take a quick tour through non-human stakeholder engagement, in which I notice Danone’s leadership seriously needs to talk to cows.

Here’s the video version of what is written below — probably easier to watch than read as a lot of this is explaining what’s on the screen.

The deck is only good if it’s useful

One of the things that happens with mainstream materiality, or frankly any consulting where the deck is “the deliverable,” is there’s this expectation of a big, “Ta-da!”

But they’re just slides. And they need to be truly useful.

I don’t have a lock on making perfect slides , but what I thought I’d do is go into sausage making mode and show you how I plan to bring it to a (hopefully useful!) close.

I’ll go slide by slide and show you some sausage making habits in case it’s useful for you, and in case you’ve got advice for me for how to make better sausages. I’ll also lift up some of what I’ve learned on the assessment itself as I’ve been really in the kitchen today on this one.

Wherever I’ve got a pink flag that’s a signal to me that there’s something to change before the deck is final. They’re easy to spot even as I quickly scroll through.

Here was an interesting place where I had to wonder about the placement of CEO commentary in investor earnings calls. Now, in previous assessments (i.e. Google and TD Bank) I also included CEO messaging from earnings calls. But it was much later in the deck — it was more like an afterthought…