Ordinary Gweilo

Interesting piece in The Observer about that curse of modern corporate life PowerPoint.

People spend hours preparing presentations, trying to distill what they want to say into a few bullet points and stick them on to a few slides. Of course, bullet points are useful as an aide-memoire for the presenter, but to make an impact the speaker needs to have the knowledge and the confidence to talk about the subject naturally. The slides should illustrate the points that are being made, not list them all in detail. If the audience manage to stay awake, they are unsure whether to read what is on the slide or listen to what the presenter is saying, and probably end up doing neither. The presenter probably forgets what is on the slides, and finds himself missing out half the points on the slide that is showing and jumping ahead to what is on the next slide.

Powerpoint turns virtually everyone into a presenter, regardless of whether they have an aptitude for it, and so much effort goes into putting together the slides that there is no time left to think what to say, or to consider the objective of the presentation. Even if there are powerful points and interesting or valuable information, it is likely to get drowned in a sea of virtually identical slides. Poor presenters become competent but dull, whilst good presenters are likely made more boring. There is an amusing example of this here, with the Gettysburg address in Powerpoint form.

I have to admit that I am not a good presenter – when I first tried it I was dreadful, and I slowly improved to the level of mediocre. I have done lots of presentations with Powerpoint, and I am sure most of the audience were bored to death. I eventually realized that if I really wanted to get a message across, the best way was to talk as briefly as possible and without slides. Perhaps sometimes there is a point you need to explain or reinforce, but normally you can do that by writing on a whiteboard.

Take away Powerpoint and presenters are forced to spend more time on the content and focus more on getting the message across. Some presentations would probably be a complete shambles, but this would highlight the fact that the people concerned should either work harder at presentation skills or stop doing presentations.

Powerpoint also suffers from the problems that afflict most corporate software.

• Most people don’t really understand how to use it, and so spend longer than they need and produce results that are less impressive than they could be.
• Also, for reasons that no-one quite understands, corporate HQ will periodically change the Powerpoint templates, forcing employees to waste their time updating their presentations to fit the new standards (and to ensure that this is not easy, the new format will have a different sized shape where you are actually allowed to put text, meaning that on some slides the text will no longer fit on the screen).

I remember reading that within Microsoft, employees are not allowed to do fancy presentations for internal meetings – everything has to be kept simple. It’s a good rule, and I don’t think I need to point out the irony here!