"Executive 1 likes to see the data presented in formats A and B, Executive 2 likes to see it presented in formats C and D, and occasionally E, and Executive 3 will only look at it if you format it as F and cut/paste it to PowerPoint."
So you end up with 20 analysts who all have input, each manually re-formatting their own data in 6 different ways, making sure they all stay in sync. Then someone else collates it all together into 3 different exec-specific presentations, and double checks to make sure they tell approximately the same story. Welcome to life as an office drone!
I used to work as a corporate financial planning analyst and this hit way too close to home.
Then one executive who didn’t like the story would have one of his analysts pull the same data in a slightly different way and adjust it. The executive would then show it to the CFO and tell him that’s the real story. The CFO would turn to you and ask why his number is different than yours. Then you would spend hours with the analyst reconciling the data and building a waterfall chart to send to the CFO to explain the difference.
Then if you’re really unlucky the CFO says he wants to see the data both ways with a waterfall reconciliation every month.
"Executive 1 likes to see the data presented in formats A and B, Executive 2 likes to see it presented in formats C and D, and occasionally E, and Executive 3 will only look at it if you format it as F and cut/paste it to PowerPoint."
So you end up with 20 analysts who all have input, each manually re-formatting their own data in 6 different ways, making sure they all stay in sync. Then someone else collates it all together into 3 different exec-specific presentations, and double checks to make sure they tell approximately the same story. Welcome to life as an office drone!