Posted on 04/27/2010 7:51:04 AM PDT by Sub-Driver
We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint By ELISABETH BUMILLER
WASHINGTON — Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti.
“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter.
The slide has since bounced around the Internet as an example of a military tool that has spun out of control. Like an insurgency, PowerPoint has crept into the daily lives of military commanders and reached the level of near obsession. The amount of time expended on PowerPoint, the Microsoft presentation program of computer-generated charts, graphs and bullet points, has made it a running joke in the Pentagon and in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.
“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I view Power Point as the notes I would take (and hope you would take) if I were viewing that presentation.... nothing more
That way you audience in engaged with you and not busy taking notes...
And that also why you give them a printed copy before you start, so that can make their own additional notes on the slides
I view Power Point as the notes I would take (and hope you would take) if I were viewing that presentation.... nothing more
That way you audience in engaged with you and not busy taking notes...
And that also why you give them a printed copy before you start, so that can make their own additional notes on the slides
Or even simpler...Power Point is what you would put on the chalk board or white board
Specifically mentioned in the Columbia report is a PowerPoint slide used by the Engineers briefing the foam strike. Due to the amount of information and the poor presentation it minimized the potential danger. Also, in the report, NASA provided what were supoosed to be “engineering reports” in a PP format to the investigating board, absent any data and actual scientific method. Used correctly I guess it can be effective, I just need someone to tell me what “correctly” is. (IMHO)
Interesting for a general to say, “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.” Bring in the heavy artillery?
I have to agree. The skills of presentation, particularly in the text area, have really deteriorated over the years.
I don’t hate Powerpoint but I do use it sparingly.
I second that. Tufte does a traveling one-day seminar that I attended a few years back, and he packed the hall.
He did a brisk business selling his wares to his nerd groupies, such as myself. He autographed my copy of Minard's graphic of Napoleon's losses during the Russian campaign of 1812.
Same goes for word, excel, and a lot of others. Too many people use these programs to compose documents that at first glance look sharp, but contain little real information. This is because most people get distracted by the formatting and neglect the writing. In most cases more information could be conveyed if people used just a text editor with a fixed width font and ascii graphics.
Excellent!
OK, that was funny.
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