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 ...
Yeah, looks like mine. I made sure we had whiteboards up to 3 years ago, when I retired.
The big issue was virtual attendees. That is the worst.
Just to prove how old I am, I will point out the fact that we used Harvard Graphics prior to Powerpoint - roughly 1985-1990.
I retired from a Powerpoint-intensive company. I think that the worst part was sitting there looking at the PP presentation while some schlub stood at the dais reading the same thing we were reading.
Spirit killing clap-trap!
#16 that looks like a woke chart of losses for Target and Bud Light and Fox News etc...
What became clear, was that while most people ultimately considered this a satellite image of North Korea at night, many people thought it was a picture of the Earth, a picture of China, a picture of South Korea, or a picture of the ocean.
The drawing in of the audience, the engagement, and the real-time learning didn't come from great software. It came from the presenter.
I sort of feel like a member of a secret club whenever I meet someone else who’s a fan of that chart, and geeks out, and expresses hatred of PowerPoint.
It’s more stupid people pretending to be (and accepted) as experts. It’s not PowerPoint.
BS. We had overhead projectors and transparencies, and meetings were even longer and more tedious, adding in the time for the presenter to position each slide on the screen. I attended a seminar by graphic expert Edward Tufte back in the 80's - he stated that the standard business overhead slide was the lowest form of communication known to man in terms of information per unit. His book "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" is still the best resource to learn about conveying information graphically. PowerPoint is better.....but please don't stand there and read your PowerPoint slides in a monotone. May as well have used an overhead.
If you attend Edward Tufte’s seminars
= = =
I have.
Loved them.
COVID gave me Power Point overload. All the youtubers I watched who used to meet in person in the field went to zoom type meetings intermixed with power Point slides.
In a typical client-facing presentation, we can have up to 100 slides in our deck with five or six "subject matter experts" speaking to them with usually a 45-minute time limit.
I have never been in a presentation yet where we either finished in 45 minutes or got to all the slides in the deck.
I recognized that early on (and I hate presenting) so I always limit myself to one or two slides when I'm part of a presentation. That way my piece is done rather quickly. In fact, my standard presentation is to simply list bullet points of what my department is responsible for on the slide, speak to them for a minute or two and then ask THEM if they have any questions. That way, the presentation becomes interactive and I'm addressing only what is of interest to the client.
Another reply here nailed it. Powerpoint is excellent fore PREPARING a presentation but an awful way to present it.
When I give a presentaton, I will create multiple slides and then print them out for myself, to use as cue cards. Only one or two slides will be in the actual deck that basically summarize what I am presenting. I speak to the details and then I am prepared to answer any specific questions.
The mistake many people make when presenting is when they read from their slides word for word in a monotone voice. That technique will lose your audience every time. You never read off the slides but speak TO them. Throwing in some humor is good as well, when appropriate. You need to be able to read your audience. Oftentimes, they are getting presentations from other vendors that same day so they are already burned out. So I keep it short and sweet and let them drive the interaction by letting them ask questions. They seem to appreciate that much more than sitting through slide after slide while somebody reads off of them.
Genuine slate chalkboards were the best!
I’m the odd bird in most cases. I actually developed a fondness for technical writing. That didn’t come easy. I hate Dxygen crap in source code. It clutters the source code and is super sub-standard quality documentation. If something is worth documentation, it is worth stand-alone, well composed documentation.
I’m with you all the way. The walls need to be smooth and painted with whiteboard paint. Then there needs to be no fewer than two 4X8 roll-around whiteboards.
The slate chalkboards were the very best in classroom presentation.
Prior to overhead projectors, they just passed out little handbooks. There was a time when those in the meeting were expected to take notes. Of course, it was common to use one’s own brain back in those days.
LOL!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.