Policy Presentation

In order to graduate with a business degree, the final class you have to take here is Business 470- a policy class. As the capstone project, a group presentation on a company including the company profile, financial position, and strategies is due at the end of the class. However, since I'm a slacker, I paid extra money to take this class at night with other lazy day students and a host of non-traditionals. Why? Instead of a fifty minute presentation, we give a twenty minute presentation, and instead of the presentation being 70% of your grade in the class, it is 20%. Seeing that I am a senior, my group sucked, and I have close to a 100% test average (80% of my final grade), I decided to basically blow of the presentation. Instead of preparing something, I made a couple of slides a few weeks ago and then pounded a couple of beers before I went up to night class to get it over with.

One group went ahead of us, and apparently, they put five times as much work into the project as my group did. So not only did we have to follow that, but substantial sections of our presentation were close to identical, as we had similar companies. Things were not looking good for our project.

When it was our turn to present, I figured that with five people in the group, I would only be responsible for around four minutes of presentation. I wasn't sure how long the other people planned on taking (I didn't really attend the meetings), so I was fairly suprised when I (the last presenter for our group) was called up 6.5 minutes into our presentation. So instead of talking for four minutes, I now have to go for at least 13.5. So I started rambling. I went through the slides I had prepared about company specific information as slowly as possible and glanced at the clock. I still had around ten minutes to fill. With no slides or prepared information to go on, I went back a few slides to a graph of the company stock price and just started talking about generic stock information. Without really tying any of this into our company, I discussed things such as return on equity vs. debt leverage, the importance of earnings growth to stock price, arbitrage, hedging, George Soros, and I paraphrased more than a couple pages from Warren Buffett's biography. I was still going strong when our twenty minutes was up, so I cut it off and concluded our presentation.

Our professor, who just destroyed the previous group's excellent presentation in the question and answer session, asked a couple of easy questions to my team members and then said, "My next few questions are on the financial part of the presentation." I thought he was just going to call me out for putting little to no work into the presentation and just bullshitting for ten minutes to take up time. However, he said this, "I want the remaining groups to pay attention here... the bar has been raised. Any groups left to present need to take note of how to do the financial side of the presentation, and get ready to match this next week..." and then he rambled on for a few minutes about how it was the greatest presentation he has ever seen in years of teaching the class, and asked me a few questions about stocks in general. He totally ignored the fact that our presentation had huge obvious flaws like not doing any work setting a price on the product we planned on releasing.

Later, at the bar across the street ($.75 drafts!) random people from the class kept coming up and telling me how interesting our presentation was, and then they bitched about how much extra work they were going to have to do to try to match it. It was awesome.