We’ve been giving out a bunch of advice on how to present information to C-level executives; the overriding points we’ve been hammering are:

• Know your audience and give them summarized, not simplified, information.


• Do not be afraid to make educated guesses when explaining trends, as overall meaning is more important to the C-level executive than pinpoint accuracy.


• Give CIOs and CEOs actionable items when you report – don’t just give them the information without telling them what they can do with that information.

Recently, AskSlashdot fielded a question about how to talk to executives, and in the comments, there’s some good advice and some bad advice on how to do so.

Good Idea - Smooth Wombat:

How about asking them what they want to see? Prepare a short document listing what information you can provide them and in what format, and ask them what they want to see?

Bad Idea – Hognoxious:

Stick a few Trekkish terms in there - quasitron throughput and such - and see if anyone bites. They won’t.

Good Idea – Penguinisto:

Have a very good handle on what you have, and can and cannot be done. Also, never, EVER promise anything up-front without studying the problem.

Bad Idea – Duradin:

The upshot is once you get that report all nice and automated they'll ask you for the exact same report three months later having entirely forgotten its existence. Don't tell them they've been getting that report daily/weekly already for the last three months. They don't like that for some reason. Re-title it, move some columns around, maybe add a new bit of information and then call it good.

Good Idea – Jschen:

Numbers and stats are nice and all, but beyond the headline numbers, your job is to give an executive summary. Here is what I've been doing: “These things are working well. These are improvements that I am targeting or hope to target. Here are the unique challenges and risks that we face and how I plan to deal with them.”

Bad Idea – Yttrstein:

It's always heartwarming to see a Sysadmin ascend to the point where they begin to slowly realize that justification for their salary is going to have to involve some lying.

And finally, I’m not sure if this is a REALLY bad idea, or a REALLY good one from “140Mandak262Jamuna.” I also wonder if this has already been tried…

Collect the amount of water pumped reported by each sensor as a trace between 9:30 AM and 4PM on the days the market is open. Find the correlation between this trace and the S&P500 index with a two minute time lag. See which sensor has a correlation coefficient more than 0.05. Use that info to come up with a trading strategy to buy and sell the exchange traded fund IVV. Propose a project find the leading indicator sensor for more securities like QQQQ, Diamond, XLF, XLU, XLV, XLP and the stock ANSS. …. Build an empire under you. Watch the cash flow of the company. Just before it goes bust, put all this experience in a resume and get a job in the ultra high speed trading division of Morgan Stanley.