Why are many consultants obsessed with the size of their presentations?I recently moved from industry to consulting. In the past I was taught to keep presentations short with simple slides containing one message on each. Yet I feel under pressure now to produce 300 page decks crammed with facts. What is it all about?

There is a general theme in consultancy that everything has to be done in PowerPoint, even if longer reports (IMHO) would be far better done in a different package.From personal experience, I can only suggest part of it is inertia (lots of reports are based on using other reports as templates, and those older reports are all in PPoint, so it's easiest to do the new report in PPoint). Another part is that older consultants have forgotten or never knew how to use the features in Word and other programmes that allow them to produce good-looking documents (In PPoint it may seem easier to throw in colourful graphics).End of the day, 9/10 decks will never be presented and even fewer will actually be read by the client.

A very wise Winston Churchill is reknown for having stated: "I am going to give a long speech as I have not had time to write a short one."When it comes to presentations, less is definitely more.

Clients pay thousands of pounds an hour. They like to have big piles of slides to show that they got something for their money, even when the consultant's summary points are simply to confirm what they already know/reiterate a decision that they have already made.

what does IMHO mean?

IMHO = In My Humble Opinion

Must be a typo - surely MCs don't ever use IMHO, just IMO?