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Posted on 06/03/2023 4:51:50 PM PDT by DoodleBob
Former Defense Secretary General James Mattis famously said, "PowerPoint makes us stupid." Like many among today's top military brass, he sees our culture's addiction to PowerPoint as a threat to the efficiency and effectiveness of our armed forces.
Similarly, many CEOs have banned PowerPoint from their meetings, including Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Twitter's Jack Dorsey, LinkedIn's Jeff Weiner, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, and the late Steve Jobs. Smart leaders hate PowerPoint because business presentations straitjacket meetings into a slow-moving linear direction. This discourages conversation and discussion, turning the other attendees into passive chair potatoes. PowerPoint--when used as designed--reduces attention, understanding, and, worst of all, retention.
PowerPoint presentations are even worse when presenters try to make their boring presentation interesting by adding bells and whistles, cheesy stock photos, cheap animations, and various multimedia gee-gaws. The insulting assumption is that your co-workers are like toddlers whose attention can be captured only by a dangling flashy objects.
It's time to follow suit of the generals and billionaire CEOs and get out of the PowerPoint trap. But how? PowerPoint has become so ingrained into our day-to-day business activities that it seems impossible to function without it.
In fact, before 1990, nobody used PowerPoint and business presentations were consequently rare to non-existent. As a result, meetings were shorter and more to the point, with more discussion and better decisions,
How did companies get along without PowerPoint? They used three different meeting tools built around the types of business meetings: 1) decision/discussions, 2) training sessions, and 3) public addresses,
Here are the techniques that work better than PowerPoint for each meeting type.
(Excerpt) Read more at inc.com ...
“...in fact, before 1990, nobody used PowerPoint and business presentations were consequently rare to non-existent.”
No, we had overhead projectors and transparent sides to show graphs and stuff.
Perfessers used no shortage of same back in the day.
I think rock shows in the 60s used same for psychedelic displays.
.
I’m currently in an environment where PowerPoint presentations are extremely rare.
And our meetings wander aimlessly, with no agenda, no sense of what specific point is being discussed, or anything concrete that needs to be decided.
Sometimes the problem is the corporate culture and the people in the room, rather than the tool(s) they choose to use, or not use.
Whiteboards were always my thing.
Training people on system status and design works better, I find, when the big picture “grows” as its being explained.
A messy collection of lines and boxes and stylised pictures just can’t be comprehended at a glance, no matter the artistry of the presenter.
“ How did companies get along without PowerPoint?”
I remember well. Overhead projectors with typed transparencies and/or slides.
PowerPoint wasn’t a problem in executive meetings I attended. They were brief and introductory. Then the real meeting started run by the officers themselves.
Death by PowerPoint was more of a lower level management thing.
You always have the option of taking control. The prepared man has great advantages in getting his way vs the unprepared. If there is no structure or agenda, make one. If the leaders are weak, become the leader.
Pass out a paper with agenda items, see what happens.
This can upset people, sometimes, but they will at least be forced to respond.
Unless you actually have something visual to present, don’t. Really PowerPoint is what happens when a bunch of nerds who really don’t like attention suddenly get told to start public speaking. They figure out a way to speak with the lights off and everybody looking at a screen instead of them.
Oh, I’ve done that very successfully at quite a few jobs. It is sound advice.
In my current situation, my boss would fire me very quickly. He’s very keen on the idea that He makes every decision and I am paid to support him and never get uppity. He likes pointless meandering meetings because then he gets no assignments.
Interesting. The problem is that it is difficult to express invisible ideas without visible tools. Summerians (3000 BC) used scratches in rocks to make their ideas visible. Gutenberg (1400) used ink that never fades miraculously, and Xeros (1974) used Wysiwyg to make ideas visible. Power Point is good for history of decorative arts, such as the history of chairs. I had a professor at Berkeley who told me to always avoid meetings.
Idiot, before 1990 or whenever PowerPoint came into use, we used transparencies on an overhead projector. 3M replaced by Microsoft is all.
Don McMillan uses Powerpoint in his act.
https://www.youtube.com/@donmcmillancomedy
Life After Death by Powerpoint
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbSPPFYxx3o
Now, you can chase links all over the Internet and see the same incomplete fragments as many times as you click.
No PowerPoint takes away the visual modality of learning and understanding. Now that you improved your odds of getting everyone onboard, with PowerPoint, you can now target based on learning modality. So I can tailor my presentation to those that learn kinesthetically. “I feel you dog” as an example. The other modality, auditory is people listening.
So depending if my audience learns via auditory, visual or kinesthetic modalities (my perception), I build my presentation on who will get the most out of it. That’s what PowerPoint was designed for. That’s how you create presentations that get the point across.
On a lighter note, that’s how the left get their useful idiots. Same concept.
PowerPoint is very good for preparing a presentation.
And very bad for presenting it.
- if you MUST use ppt, there should be as few slides as possible, ideally very spartan with text but relying on solid graphs or visuals that have a high degree of information content.
-YOU, the speaker, are the king (or queen if you're a woman) of content. YOU must come prepared, with fact and figures memorized and deleted breed closely, clearly, and where appropriate.
If you attend Edward Tufte's seminars you get this in poster form. Probably the best statistical graphic ever drawn, this map by Charles Joseph Minard portrays the losses suffered by Napoleon's army in the Russian campaign of 1812. Beginning at the Polish-Russian border, the thick band shows the size of the army at each position. The path of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow in the bitterly cold winter is depicted by the dark lower band, which is tied to temperature and time scales.
This is a benchmark for delivering a story in a graphic. Alternatively, a grid prison of numbers in ppt and someone droning on, is the death of business.
Sorry...YOU, the speaker, are the king (or queen if you’re a woman) of content. YOU must come prepared, with fact and figures memorized and delivered SLOWLY, concisely, clearly, and ONLY where appropriate.
Used properly, Powerpoint is a good tool. Or it can be sleep inducing, and a great way to use up the time allotted for the meeting. It's a matter of trying to ensure the message gets delivered.
In theory sure. But if you have public anxiety you don’t WANT to be king. That was the big problem with the software boom. You get a bunch of guys who’d rather lose a limb than speak in public and you tell them to speak in public they’re going to find a way to hide. And of course they’re software nerds, so they wrote software to give them a place to hide.
I remember the days!
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