My partner and I were primarily targeting finance at that time.

I didn't always present 100% of the "big and dense" slide decks; we could get people into a dialogue early on that would give us an idea of what to show next, a bit like a "choose your own adventure" book.

(Overall our approach was super effective at getting people to talk about their business, my partner got me to read https://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Question-Based-Selling-Powerf... We were always finding out about stuff we weren't supposed to know like the desktop virtualization program at a famously secretive hedge fund, the closely guarded data cleanup pipeline for a real estate data vendor, the time a four letter defense contractor was grasping at straws on a project for a three letter agency, ...)

Here's an example of a slide deck I would present to a general audience, in this case a local startup accelerator

https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/chatbots-in-2017-ithaca...

which is not as information dense as one of my sales slides but when I give talks like that they always want me back. (Funny that one felt obsolete by the end of 2017 but I packed in enough neural network stuff that it seems a little prescient now... Like that time I gave a talk at the first thorium energy conference about the computational physics program that would lead to a reactor that was mostly standard stuff out of intro level textbooks but useful and correct if you want to down that path. I took the schedule of reactor development when the project was abandoned in the 1970s and shifted it up to the present. The crowd reacted viscerally that it would take that long to which my answer is "you've got to get started now"; I wound up with a test reactor circa 2025 and sure enough they are building one in China.)

Your statement of “dryly concede that the only thing McKinsey is good at is making powerpoints.” closely corresponds to my statement of “trick the audience into thinking they had a point”

You can both be right. Like LLMs, McKinsey offers a combination of competence and bullshit. It hires bright, young, and freshly educated people who can go at problems with energy and a toolbox of the latest tools. Yet, putting a young person in a role like that is an hierarchy-disrupting tactic which can be seen best in the Church of Scientology where they find the youngest staff member they can find to be an "ethics officer".

A primary social hierarchy (Scientology, a corporation, Mao-era China) might feel threatened by various secondary and informal hierarchies (people who practice "the tech" on their own and make changes, workers who have the knowledge of how to do the company's task in their heads but not written down, sysadmins who keep a file of anyone who could possibly help them solve problems in their organization or with their vendors, fox cults, ...)

An accusation that is frequently leveled at McKinsey is that management brings them on to "launder" things they want to do, what I can say is that your slide decks are not just seen by the systems thinkers who are running the show but they are also seen by the people that the people who are running the show want to persuade.