[LonePalm]

That's why it's so easy to speak for an hour and so damn hard to speak for five minutes.

When you only have five minutes you almost have to make every syllable count.

I was the Intel briefer for the Coast Guard Atlantic Fleet Commander for a worldwide JCS exercise. I stood up at 0800 (Intel goes first in the briefing chain) and did a 5 minute Intel brief +/- 30 seconds. And sat down. (See First Rule of Admirals)

I was in the office a 0500 to prepare for that brief. I only had to check the message lists and the watch log to get my data. The rest was deciding what order to present things.

I usually had 1-3 backup slides for every briefing slide and NEVER more than 6 briefing slides.

"No one ever won a war by doing PowerPoint slides for their country. They won it by making the other poor dumb son-of-a-bitch do PowerPoint slides for their country."

SpyNavy

Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)

[Bob Ireland]

. . .

[Porkchop]

***I usually had 1-3 backup slides for every briefing slide and NEVER more than 6 briefing slides.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

(Including the all-important one...) 😉



🐷

ps: Thank you for the WT updates, LP!

[Porkchop]

🐷

[OldWarBaby]

-—Reminding me of a class I was giving to a room full of Navy types, yard birds, sailors, officers, etc. about the changes we were making to a ship system. One of the changes involved a piece of gear that required a specially designed operator tool that would fit nothing else. I referred to it as “sailor proof” and a Commander got snippy about my reference. So I went into more detail and he never bothered me again.

Turned out nobody wanted a short explanation when it came to operating a ship they were going to bet their skins on——deep. Taking on the job of “explainer” turned out to be sort of a license to steal. Not many could or would do it and they just left me alone.

[meyer]

From my short time as a trainer, I found that trying to be too concise often leaves an audience with little understanding of the subject matter at hand.

On the other hand, going on and on tends to bore them. Thus the art of teaching - really teaching - with interaction from the class and much discussion is often called for. Especially when your audience are a bunch of transmission system operations personnel that all have a bit of an ego (comes with the territory) and are mostly above average in intelligence.

If Patton were around today, in the world of powerpoint...

Honestly, as a student, I used to prefer, much prefer hard copy of the material. That is, until they started dumbing down the tests and doing them “as a group” so that everyone got an A. That started about 2 or 3 years ago, and it’s decidedly a bad idea if you want a top notch team. Kind of like a football coach and trainer skipping all the hard, complicated plays so that everyone can play.

[meyer]

Also, thanks for keeping us up to date on the world of Chy-nah! I know that some of it is an educated estimate of what’s going on, but when all the evidence you see indicates something, that something is probably true.

[BBB333]

“”No one ever won a war by doing PowerPoint slides for their country. They won it by making the other poor dumb son-of-a-bitch do PowerPoint slides for their country.””

---

General Patton-Point?