

We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint - mechanician
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/world/27powerpoint.html?hp
I say less PowerPoint, more Latex.
======
pge
As a VC, I am frustrated that Powerpoint has become the standard format for
presenting a business plan. If there is ever a time not to be "hypnotizing
chickens," it's when you're presenting your company for funding. Here's an
anecdote to illustrate how ingrained it as become. The other day, a CEO came
in to meet with me. He dutifully plugged his laptop into the projector and
opened up Powerpoint to page 1 with the company name and date. Then we started
talking. Half an hour later, the presentation was still open to the title
page. I asked him if he was going to go through the slides. He answered, "Only
if you want to, I hate powerpoint." With that, we turned off the projector and
had a lively conversation. I mention that story, because it was enlightening
(and disappointing) to me that someone who was a great presenter without
powerpoint felt compelled to bring a PPT presentation and put it on the
projector. PPT is doubly insidious because it makes for poor presentations
first, and then second, the content-poor PPT becomes a leave-behind document
that tries to stand on its own without the accompanying narration. It's bad
enough when it is being spoken to, it's much much worse as a format for a
standalone document to be read in isolation. Let me make this suggestion to
startups looking for funding and meeting with VCs. The best deliverable is a
4-5 page PDF text document (with accompanying or embedded charts or diagrams
where they are critical to illustrating a point). Text forces you to complete
your thoughts in way that powerpoint does not. And a text document stands
alone much better than a powerpoint and conveys a lot more content in the same
volume of print. When you do present, use charts or diagrams to illustrate key
points, not as the substance of the presentation. I don't mean to say never
use PPT, that's as absurd as saying always use PPT. I recognize that for some
people, powerpoint serves as an important guide as they present (a publicly
visible form of notes). If you present better with PPT, by all means use it,
but don't feel compelled to if you don't want to. And for those that like PPT,
I would encourage you to go through the exercise of thinking through how you
would present _without_ powerpoint. I think you will find that your
presentation improves. You start thinking in whole concepts instead of trying
to convey your ideas in bullet points.

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mc
Powerpoint isn't the problem. It's a symptom. The real problem is
communicating effectively with ideas/pictures.

There are two books which have made me better at this:

1\. The back of the napkin [<http://www.thebackofthenapkin.com/>]

2\. Slide:ology [<http://blog.duarte.com/book/>]

These books kick-started my journey to understanding (and appreciating) the
use of diagrams, colors, fonts, and imagery for the purpose of conveying an
idea.

Update: Added links.

~~~
swolchok
Slide:ology has some prominent negative reviews at Amazon complaining about
the content being shallow, derivative, and ad-laden.

~~~
mc
I haven't read the remarks, but I think it's possible for people with a lot
more experience than I do to make that sort of assessment and be spot on.

It helped _me_.

One day, with any luck, I'll be able to look back and make the same remarks.
Hopefully it will be because I'll be a lot better at it by then.

------
raffi
When I was in the military, I experienced this. I have a dagger on my
bookshelf engraved with "Powerpoint Ranger" precisely because my colleagues
knew my disdain for Powerpoint. I felt like technical accuracy was sacrificed
for the sake of fitting a situational description in a table or a bullet
point. Keep in mind, this kind of reporting wasn't for a live presentation or
to summarize some other more thorough communicate. It was our communication
medium. Take each event, update the slides, mail them out in the morning. Ugh.
God help you if your font or colors deviate from the expected standard. Also,
the General does not like orphan bullets. Watch out for those too.

I keep a copy of Tufte's "The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint" on my bookshelf
now. If you ever want some arguments against PowerPoint, I recommend reading
it.

------
wisty
PowerPoint is great as a replacement for Malcolm Gladwell / Joel Spolsky style
essays. The ones where you tell a funny story, and deliver a few key points,
but don't actually explain everything. It is good when you trust the author,
and don't have to get up to speed on the details.

Trust is important, because the presenter doesn't have to explain themselves
very well. The emotive impact of pictures (or funny stories) can trick you
into thinking they have filled the credibility gap. Malicious presenters can
leave out details that should really be there - such as how the implementation
will actually occur, or the justification of decisions, and so on.

It's also good if you already understand the details, or if you don't know or
care about the technicalities. A written report has more space for the
technicalities, which is very important if the information has to flow out of
the silo you are in, or if the reader wants to drill down and check that you
actually know what you are talking about.

I think that the whole "interactions" bit is a little over-hyped. PowerPoint
can include interactions, and reports can leave them out.

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prog
In many software companies I have seen powerpoints replace design documents
and technical solutions. The most recent case I came across was in a company
which needed to improve product quality and reduce testing time. As an
engineer, to me thats a simple problem of doing automated testing (there is
only partial automation at this point). That should be simple as the product
is actually a library.

But then the testing team decides that "we have a problem that needs to be
solved". It starts of as slides with "vision" with "goals" and how to achieve
it we need to develop "critical thinking" and have "better recruitment
practices" and what not. Now the ppt is about 50 slides with all kinds of zen
pictures and 1 bullet buried inside saying we need automated tests. After a
few more reviews it will be presented to the entire organization as "strategy"
document.

~~~
sketerpot
Such overwrought, content-free PowerPoint presentations have their place:
Hell.

Maybe the problem could be averted if the presentations were replaced with
short articles, like blog posts. It would be hard to do worse than what you've
described.

~~~
prog
I have generally found simple text files to be most effective in actually
solving problems. The moment it moves to richer formats, some amount of mental
bandwidth is taken up by the presentation aspect.

------
magoghm
The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation
<http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/index.htm>

~~~
erlanger
That could be so much funnier if it weren't a lazy translation. It needs some
interlude image-only slides, single-word slides, "Fin" slide, etc.

~~~
mseebach
It's 10 years old. PowerPoint looked like that, then. The style you're
referring to is much newer.

Although, it would be fun to do a hipster-with-Keynote update of it.

------
endtime
>“Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”

Anyone else tickled by the (presumably unintentional) pun here?

~~~
SpacemanSpiff
love it. Was just getting ready to post this myself.

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tokenadult
It's not surprising that PowerPoint endangers soldiers, when it is well known
to kill astronauts.

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2005/08...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2005/08/29/AR2005082901444.html)

[http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-
msg?msg_id=0...](http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-
msg?msg_id=0001yB)

After edit: Somehow, I think the most effective international terrorists
manage to do without PowerPoint entirely, but have interactive CONVERSATIONS
on a need-to-know basis about important operational details. Maybe the United
States armed forces should look into doing the same.

------
brown9-2
_No one is suggesting that PowerPoint is to blame for mistakes in the current
wars, but the program did become notorious during the prelude to the invasion
of Iraq. As recounted in the book “Fiasco” by Thomas E. Ricks (Penguin Press,
2006), Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan, who led the allied ground forces in the
2003 invasion of Iraq, grew frustrated when he could not get Gen. Tommy R.
Franks, the commander at the time of American forces in the Persian Gulf
region, to issue orders that stated explicitly how he wanted the invasion
conducted, and why. Instead, General Franks just passed on to General
McKiernan the vague PowerPoint slides that he had already shown to Donald H.
Rumsfeld, the defense secretary at the time._

This probably sounds eerily familiar to any developer who works in a mid-sized
company or larger.

And I thought getting UI designs as PPT slides was bad...

------
FluidDjango
It doesn't matter how effectively you critique or ridicule a
product/process/technique/habit. That won't make it go away.

It goes away only when you offer _an alternative_ which is
catchier/easier/more elegant.

------
teaspoon
Unfortunate for PowerPoint that it's become synonymous with idioms like
"mindmapping" and the bullet point, which seem to be the devices this piece is
really raging against. I see PowerPoint as a quite unconstrained way to
present an series of arbitrary images, paired with an image editor that's
evidently more usable than anything else business- and military-types can get
their hand on. Perhaps it's the tradition surrounding slide presentations, and
not the software used, that permits speakers to be inarticulate and
longwinded.

------
eoin_murphy
“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the
illusion of control,”

This would explain why it's so popular for middle management type meetings.
People talking about things they don't understand but are responsible for have
to give the impression that they're in charge.

------
hoelle
For me, Powerpoint has always been a handy tool for limping through speaking
in front of others. Handy source of notes, gives the audience something to
stare at that isn't me.

Probably not the best aide for /improving/ at public speaking, though.

------
wingo
> “hypnotizing chickens.”

This phrase needs to enter the popular lexicon.

~~~
dpritchett
It's not entirely foreign. Burroughs wrote about it in the 60s and then Iggy
Pop's "Lust for Life" referenced that in 1977. Iggy's song has had resurgences
in 1996 (Trainspotting) and 2007 (Guitar Hero). There's a long treatment of
chicken hypnosis in the book "The Power of One" which was made into a movie
sometime in the 90s.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lust_for_Life_(song)>

~~~
dpritchett
Listening to the song now...
<http://listen.grooveshark.com/#/s/Lust+for+Life/2C5QwY>

------
dctoedt
Blaming a bad presentation on PowerPoint is like blaming an ugly building on
the architect's drafting table.

(Do architects still use drafting tables, or is it all computerized?)

~~~
mseebach
Only if said drafting tables are marketed as enabling the owner, regardless of
training or abilities, to build a high-rise in an afternoon.

------
cosmicray
The title of this piece is a parody of the classic Pogo comic strip where the
phrase was coined "We have met the enemy, and he is us" (from 1972, referring
to the rapid pollution of the planet).

wiki has more about it here:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogo_(comics)#.22We_have_met_th...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogo_\(comics\)#.22We_have_met_the_enemy....22)

------
bigiain
I suppose since he was head of Sun at the time, pointing out that Scot McNealy
banned powerpoint presentations back in '96 isn't especially supportive of the
"ppt bad" camp...

(grep <http://www.acs.org.au/president/1996/atm/npc/im961009.htm> fr
"powerpoint")

~~~
jimmyjames
Mc Nealy banned all Microsoft products at Sun, period. It was much more of an
emotional decision than a rational one, and all it did was force thousands of
employees to go through bureaucratic hell to receive exemptions just so they
could get their work done. Yes, I was there, and it was one of Mc Nealy's
comically horrible decisions as a CEO (he made many more).

And then, the next step was trying to find a Windows machine... Some employees
sometimes had to go to a different building just to fill expense reports.

Good times.

------
johnl
It's not so funny when you think that everyone depicted in the diagram is
heavily armed. McChrystal is right though, rearrange the dependencies into a
more controllable bureaucracy (like writing a program) and you will have a
better chance of success.

------
DanielBMarkham
The article alludes to this: there's an entire subculture at DoD dedicated to
creating PowerPoint decks. Lots of really high-paid contractors have the main
job of creating PowerPoints for senior command. The whole place runs off of
PowerPoint.

After I read Beyond Bullet Points, my opinion of presentations totally
changed. Back of the Napkin helped some, but BBP really ingrained in me the
right way to do a deck.

Now when I teach or present, I have a brief deck full of pictures and
conveying a simple, reasoned discussion not involving a lot of data.

What happens is that the PPT takes the place of the thinking that goes into
analysis. That's really, really bad. Instead, do the thinking, solve the
problem, make a recommendation, come up with the couple of points you have to
teach, THEN create a multimedia presentation around it. Presentations are like
movies -- people absorb them differently than a book. Too often the people
making PowerPoints are trying to write a book or impress us with their
knowledge of graphics, and the information overload leads to "death by
PowerPoint"

------
strebler
Powerpoint is not the disease, it's the symptom.

------
jimmyjames
Yet another article saying "Powerpoint sucks" without offering any
alternatives.

~~~
jcromartie
Alternatives include directly speaking to other human beings coupled with
intelligent charts, graphs, writing, and other representations of data.

~~~
jimmyjames
All of which you can do with PowerPoint. The article is more against bullet
point presentations than PowerPoint.

