We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint | Hacker News Reader

We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint

nytimes.com

115 pointsmechanician41 comments

I say less PowerPoint, more Latex.

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.

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.

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

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.

I'd suggest also watching Larry Lessig. He puts almost no information on any individual slide, but he gets his meaning across with about 4 slides per minute. He often repeats slides for emphasis.

In a tech talk, you'll never quite match his style. But getting halfway there can improve many talks.

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.

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.

We have a pdf of slides with mockups and detailed specs for our product. Each page - a slide. Each facet of functionality - a set of slides. Each step and interaction a user can go through - a slide. As a visual reference for implementation, it makes life a lot easier than reading pages of textual specs, so it can definitely be useful.

On the other hand, this is not exactly the common powerpoint presentation, it's just a a deck of specs passed around in that format, so not the same thing at all in the end.

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.

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.

I was sitting in a meeting with my then-manager once, watching an elaborate PowerPoint complete with animation and he turned to me and said, if anyone working for me made something like this I'd fire them for wasting time.

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.

The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/index.htm

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.

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.

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

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

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

One-liners should be avoided at all costs.

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.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...

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.

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...

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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?)

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

Nah. It's like replacing the drafting table with a "look and feel" vision statement, then handing it off to the foreman.

> “hypnotizing chickens.”

This phrase needs to enter the popular lexicon.

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)

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

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...

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")

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.

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.

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"

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

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

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

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

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