Presidents have five fingers (on one hand)

Among the most powerful lessons I learned as consultant to higher education presidents is that they only have five fingers.

Right now you're thinking that I probably should have known this already, but I assure you that this piece of intel is critical and not to be taken for granted.

I came upon this realization working with a extraordinarily distinguished president of a well known medical school. You see, we had some tough news to tell him and he wasn't necessarily the person who had advocated for our hire.

He was a striking individual. To begin with, he was British through and through (Welsh, specifically) -- with the demeanor of a London barrister. Second, he was the spitting image of George Washington. I kid you not. Intimidating to say the least.

But I digress.

We had some tough news to tell him about his school and it largely regarded the significant investment he had just made with another firm who, in our opinion, messed it all up. We thought we'd better discuss it with him in advance of it appearing in our report, so we arranged a telecon. The day before, my colleague and I began strategizing about how we would go about delivering the news.

Recognizing that presidents, as a general rule, have three things in common, we crafted a strategy that worked brilliantly with him and a half-dozen presidents since.

You see, all chief executives share the following, they...

1. Have limited time
2. Have about 300 other things to think about that day
3. Don't necessarily regard your work as the most important of the 300.

So, the technique at hand (pardon the pun) is to package the information so they can assign one issue to one finger. Now, I don't suppose they actually do this literally, but in terms of digesting information you just can't exceed five points. Regardless of how extraordinary your audit or analysis work may be, I have found that even the sharpest senior executives will stop listening after five items.

While most critical in a verbal briefing, I have found it wise to consider this unassailable fact when structuring report recommendations too.

Prescott Coleman, CIA, CISA