I'll send you a deck
I read with interest an article (PowerPoint: Killer App?) discussing the problems of a presentation-fixated corporate culture.
Some years ago, I took on a copywriting project for a large multinational manufacturing and chemicals company. My task was to interview one of their senior staff, and distill into about 1500 words his views on a particular issue. It sounded straightforward enough.
But the chap I needed to speak to was a very busy man. He could barely spare the time to answer my emails, let alone talk to me on the phone.
"I'll send over a deck," he said, "and we can go through it on the phone while I'm on the way to the airport."
A deck? I wondered.
He sent me a deck - a PowerPoint file, each slide within it groaning with information, fonts squeezed tiny so it would all fit. How anyone could ever take anything from this while watching this guy make a presentation was beyond me.
We whizzed through the slides as his car whisked him to Heathrow. He treated the call much like a presentation; I could hear his voice adopting the same tones, the same pauses, the same "A-ha! And this is the clever bit!" revelations that you'd expect to hear as an audience.
Ultimately, my job became converting this chaotic, over-stuffed .ppt into something more like reasoned prose. It was very difficult, not least because when I asked for some additional help from one of the big guy's minions, I was told: "Sure, we can send you some useful information," and what they sent was more PowerPoint files.
I'm not totally against PowerPoint, or presentation software in general. I can see when it can be put to good use. But as the Washington Post article makes clear, there are many people who just don't understand what 'good use' means in this instance, and apparently treat PowerPoint as an all-purpose tool for sharing information - any kind of information, be it well-suited to slides or not - with other people.
On another occasion at about the same time in my career, I went with a colleague to give a presentation to a roomful of strangers. We had worked for days on our slides, but of course the laptop died at the crucial moment. We had nothing to present.
So I winged it. I remembered what I needed to say, and made much of it up as I went along. I used gestures and facial expressions to make my points; I used physical objects in the room to represent abstractions and analogues. And it worked. Afterwards, someone said to me it was the most interesting and enjoyable presentation they had ever been subjected to. I was quite proud of that.
