hope the bullets are aligned
it’s pretty much common knowledge that there are experts in powerpoint and there are amateurs. amateurs have misaligned bullets, develop slides with 10-12 lines of text, forget to check for font and color consistency, and use the dreaded cartoon ‘clip art’ to convey their often lame messages. it’s also pretty much common knowledge that experts can be sent into cardiac arrest when asked to review the work of “amateurs.” this one is for you experts out there.
according to the new york times, the u.s. army has fallen in love with powerpoint, “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.” secretary of defense prints out his ppts and reads them each morning; the president and his team use ppt to explain complex things; and general mcchrystal gets at least two ppt briefings a day.
not everyone is in love with the program and the resulting decks.
- general petraus calls his daily ppt briefings ‘agony’.
- another general (mccaster) calls the decks made in ppt ‘dangerous’ because “it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control…Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable”
- my favorite, is an essay called “dumb-dumb bullets“written by retired marine colonel thomas x. hammes, hammes talks about how much time is wasted and how much is lost through powerpoint, “Rather than the intellectually demanding work of condensing a complex issue to two pages of clear text, the staff instead works to create 20 to 60 slides. Time is wasted on which pictures to put on the slides, how to build complex illustrations and what bullets should be included. I have even heard conversations about what font to use and what colors. Most damaging is the reduction of complex issues to bullet points.”
- finally, one general said it makes the army “stupid” and he’s has banned the use of the tool in any of his meetings.
i feel like snoop dogg when he said “you don’t have no love for the west coast?” i think “you don’t have love for the ppt?”. i agree that powerpoint is over-used and masks the important issues with pretty colors and sharp pictures–i call it getting ‘mckinseyed.” i was also surprised that there were no women interviewed for this story — back in the day, one of the groups at a firm that shall remain nameless was nicknamed “chicks making slides” a riff on “change management services”–at the time, the value that was placed on powerpoint skills and the women who made them.
If you enjoyed this post, subscribe to our rss feed, ' or leave a comment.Similiar Stories:
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment