Innovative Express

"Improving effectiveness by making the complex simple and making the simple work!"

July 2007

In this issue:

Welcome to the first-year anniversary issue of Innovative Express. Thank you for being a loyal subscriber over the last year. Last month's story about Chick-fil-A generated a good bit of "fan" mail:

  • John thought that it was a great, inspiring summary. It brought back many memories of eating meals at the Dwarf House (Truett Cathy's first restaurant) across from the Delta Headquarters in Atlanta where he worked.
  • Ron knew about the religious underpinning at Chick-fil-A and In-N-Out Burger and had this to say: "It would seem both companies have found a way to run their businesses as they want to without shouting out their spiritual beliefs."
  • Risa loved the story and my storytelling skills. She said: "You are an amazing writer - when's the book coming out...seriously!"

Thank you to all for sharing your thoughts and comments!

This month's newsletter “Next Slide Please” is about creating compelling communication. Although PowerPoint has been much maligned, it has become a ubiquitous reality of business life. What we can't cure, we must endure! To that extent, we should understand why some people hate it with passion and, more importantly, how best to overcome its limitations through basic intelligence and common sense.

Inspired to agree, disagree, or otherwise comment? Have an interesting or humorous story to share? I hope that you will let me know your thoughts.

Abhay Padgaonkar
President, Innovative Solutions Consulting, LLC

Happy Birthday!

Recently, PowerPoint quietly celebrated its 20th birthday.

Even those of us, for whom PowerPoint has become life's necessity, can recount an awful experience of having to sit through an interminable slide show of 108 slides—one boring slide after another—only to wonder what came over them to cancel the dentist appointment instead.

Lee Gomes wrote in The Wall Street Journal about the most influential and most groaned-about pieces of software: "There won't be a lot of birthday celebrations for PowerPoint; the program is one the world loves to mock almost as much as it loves to use. While PowerPoint has served as the metronome for countless crisp presentations, it has also allowed an endless expanse of dimwit ideas to be dressed up with graphical respectability."

Speaking of mocking, here are ten hilarious cartoons that take some pointed jabs at PowerPoint:

PowerPoint cartoons

back to top

Love-Hate Relationship

Someone squarely in the second camp, and perhaps one of the harshest critics, is Edward R. Tufte. In his scathing critique titled "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within," Tufte rails against PowerPoint by saying that "The evidence indicates that PowerPoint, compared to other common presentation tools, reduces the analytical quality of serious presentations of evidence." He lambastes PowerPoint for its "ready-made templates, which corrupt statistical reasoning, and often weaken verbal and spatial thinking."

Tufte is hardly alone. Peter Norvig asks us to "imagine a world with almost no pronouns or punctuation. A world where any complex thought must be broken into seven-word chunks, with colorful blobs between them." Then he reminds us that we don't have to imagine it. It is a present-day reality of a PowerPoint presentation. As a hilarious example of how Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg address would have appeared in PowerPoint format, visit Norvig's website.

Robert Gaskins, the co-creator of PowerPoint doesn't disagree. Apparently, PowerPoint presentation was never supposed to be the entire proposal-just a quick summary of something longer and better thought out.

Others argue that Tufte is simply criticizing the symptom. For example, Richard E. Meyer says, "We would not necessarily say that books are rarely a good method, because books can be designed using effective or ineffective methods. In my opinion, the same principle applies to PowerPoint."

Regardless of which side of the argument holds more credibility for you, one cannot argue that presenting to someone is inherently one-way communication. And that's rarely a very effective method in most situations. Oftentimes, PowerPoint creates an obstacle to an honest, shirtsleeve conversation. While PowerPoint didn't invent one-way communication, it certainly perfected it.

back to top

Let's Just Talk Business!

Lou Gerstner's remarkable turnaround of IBM from near-collapse began with a briefing he asked for on the state of the mainframe business that accounted for more than 90 percent of the company's profits, which were sinking fast when he took over. Gerstner describes this critical meeting in his book "Who Says Elephants Can't Dance" as follows:

"At the time, the standard format of any important IBM meeting was a presentation using overhead projectors and graphics on transparencies that IBMers called-and no one remembers why-"foils." Nick was on his second foil when I stepped to the table and, as politely as I could in front of his team, switched off the projector. After a long moment of awkward silence, I simply said, "Let's just talk about your business." I mention this episode because it had an unintended, but terribly powerful ripple effect."

Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Julia Keller wrote a long critique for the Chicago Tribune titled "Killing me Microsoftly with PowerPoint." In that she said, "PowerPoint has a dark side. It squeezes ideas into a preconceived format, organizing and condensing not only your material but-inevitably, it seems-your way of thinking about and looking at that material. A complicated, nuanced issue invariably is reduced to headings and bullets. And if that doesn't stultify your thinking about the subject, it may have that effect on your audience-which is at the mercy of your presentation."

back to top

Dumb and Dumber

Whether people can have an honest discussion reflects equally on the organization's culture and leaders' desire to know the truth. If the culture supports not talking about the elephant in the room, there is nothing PowerPoint can do to help. I had an experience recently where the senior leaders were in no mood to understand the complexity of the project during a planning update. They indicated that they only cared about the short-term results-not about complications created by interrelated processes cutting across different stakeholders and resulting in sizable change management issues. The leaders simply didn't want to hear any bad news. "We're on target!" is the mantra they wanted everyone to chant. In these situations, PowerPoint becomes the easy tool of choice to facilitate the charade.

The Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) looking into the shuttle disaster had this to say about PowerPoint: "As information gets passed up an organization hierarchy, from people who do analysis to mid-level managers to high-level leadership, key explanations and supporting information are filtered out. In this context, it is easy to understand how a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation."

back to top

Compelling Communication

Whether we like it or not, PowerPoint has become ubiquitous in the global business world. But that doesn't mean that we have to check our common sense at the door. Here are some useful tips for creating compelling communication:

Ten Commandments: Contrary to popular belief, using PowerPoint is not one of the ten commandments. Ask yourself if using PowerPoint is going to help or hurt. Is it going to dumb down the content too much? Recognize the inherent drawbacks of PowerPoint. Is PowerPoint the right medium for your communication? As Tufte says, "'The core ideas of teaching-explanation, reasoning, finding things out, questioning, content, evidence, credible authority not patronizing authoritarianism-are contrary to the cognitive style of PowerPoint." Remember, there is a grave danger in making things so simple that they become simplistic!

What's Your Story? If you must use PowerPoint, think about your storyline. Headline at the top of each slide should be a complete sentence that conveys one main idea. Headlines shouldn't just introduce the topic, but should make a concrete statement to serve as the conclusion. Headlines read in sequence should tell the whole story of the presentation. In her book "The Minto Pyramid Principle" Barbara Minto said, "This classic pattern of story-telling-Situation, Complication, Question, Answer-permits you to make sure that you and the reader are "standing in the same place" before you take him by the hand and lead him through your reasoning." So provide a framework that will hold the listeners' interest. What is the current situation as you objectively see it? What are some of the barriers to resolving the issue? What is it that you are trying to achieve? What are the specific actions you recommend to remedy the situation or capitalize on the opportunity? What are the results you expect? Make sure to answer the who, what, how, when, and where. If you leave these things out, your slides will simply seem like advertising billboards.

Vertical Logic: Avoid creating more than a couple of levels of hierarchy on a slide. It is difficult to relate to something buried five levels deep. As much as possible, write full sentences rather than writing shorthanded, fragmented, and clipped jargon. The content on the slide should provide solid support to the headline. The bullets should provide the "how" and "why" that justify the conclusion in a headline. Listeners shouldn't be left scratching their collective heads to figure out what your point is and why you arrived at it. Think about a hand-out that is 3-4 page written briefing paper that doesn't "promote a cognitive style that disrupts and trivializes evidence," according to Tufte.

Graphic Violence: If you use graphics, make sure that you can easily explain the graphic and that it conveys the key message on that page while displaying complex data and relationships. Avoid visual clutter and eliminate excess data. Make sure to include title, labels, legend, and source for your exhibits and avoid clip art or flashing Vegas lights! Just because it's easy to do, don't imbed video clips. Without a good sound system, people can't hear it properly.

Data Dump: As tempting as it may be, don't feel obliged to tell the audience everything you know about the topic. Be selective when showing the information. Don't show irrelevant information, and at the same time, don't hide relevant information even if it counters your argument. Be honest about what you don't know yet. If appropriate, put supporting material in the appendix. Also, as a rule of thumb, allow 4-5 minutes of comments and discussion per slide. When delivering the presentation, don't turn your back to the audience and read the slides. Worse yet, don't wave the laser pointer at the slide to show them what you are reading!

Bottom Line: Remember, PowerPoint is simply a means to an end. It is only a visual aid. Don't hide behind it and don't let it overshadow the protagonist-the speaker. As Mark Twain once said, "I never let schooling interfere with my education." Similarly, don't let PowerPoint interfere with your communication. This will have the added benefit of having your audience awake and engaged! Next slide, please?

back to top

Personally Speaking...

Charity begins at home. After helping clients create and deliver many presentations over the years, I saw an opportunity when my 4th grader came home last semester with a school speech event flyer. The rules prohibited costumes (not my forte' anyway), but allowed audio-visual support in the form a PowerPoint presentation. In fact, the rubric encouraged students to enhance their presentation with posters, props, or PowerPoint. I had his older brother help him research the topic (Aztec civilization) extensively on the internet. I also got him books and a movie from the library. We separated the wheat from the chaff and gathered important thoughts along 8-9 main headings. We then wrote the actual speech (about 500 words) and created the note cards. Then, and only then, did we create the PowerPoint presentation with images to illustrate the speech. And then we practiced the two together several times till he felt he knew his stuff.

He was selected to represent his class, and then his school, and did quite well at the district level too. He maintained eye contact, spoke with confidence, used appropriate humor (the Aztecs used cacao beans to make chocolate), and, most importantly, he didn't let the PowerPoint prop distract him from his speech!

Bottom Line: A cobbler's son can very well go without shoes, but a consultant's son must have a PowerPoint presentation!

back to top

Disclaimer: "This written advice is absolutely intended to be used, and if used under expert supervision is known to improve organizational and individual effectiveness substantially."

© Abhay Padgaonkar 2007. All Rights Reserved.