Posted on 04/04/2007 6:50:36 PM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
Many people do it because they believe that their company's credibility would be ruined unless their PowerPoint presentation is not flashy.
Sometimes, I feel that the main point to get across is "We are good!", not the content.
Corollary: Bill Gate is Evil.:-)
thanks, bfl
LOL!
Close. The point is "We look good!"
The difference between looking good and being good is kind of like the difference between looking professional and being professional.
Those that want their employees to always 'Look professional' will never get it. Nor will the understand why their offices are full of empty suits.
Power point presentations are generally pretty useless. If all your going to do is run a slide show why not e-mail the information to interested parties beforehand. Those that would have slept through the meeting will not open it, others will be able to read it at their own pace and respond after thinking things through.
Once the email cycle has completed a useful meeting might be arranged between those that are interested enough to have spent the time reading and commenting.
But the reality is that those that run one way meetings (he/she talks, everybody else listens) are the worst enemies of productivity in existence. You want to get their attention, calculate what one of their meetings costs the company per hour. Then point out that the opportunity costs are higher.
This interpretation of the research is obviously flawed.
One doesn’t read Ppt slides. One speaks to them. That makes them visual aids.
Otherwise, one concludes that TV & Movies cannot educate.
Two productive ways to use this information without throwing out the metaphorical baby: The is to use the Lessig method for preparing a super-stripped-down presentation when you’re addressing an audience. For more on this exciting departure from convention, see http://presentationzen.blogs.com/presentationzen/2005/10/the_lessig_meth.html.
And the other way is to use conventional methods when your presentation is to be self-delivering. Powerpoint has become a fairly powerful authoring tool and can be used quite effectively as a standalone multimedia communications carrier with an inherently high bandwidth.
bump
I was thinking the same thing. TV and Movies thus can’t educate us by their reasoning. Look at what all the news organizations do. They make you listen, then show footage of theings ya have to look at, all the while crawling even more text.
I listen to Fox News Channel through a little transmitter/receiver set up I resurrected from an old hearing assistance system. It’s much better that way....hmmm...maybe they are on to something.
The Air Force requires me to give a quarterly briefing to all the bosses on a certain program, so last year, I stood before the group every three months, in front of the obligatory PowerPoint slides and pointed out the highlights. I also handed out printouts and advised them to review them at their leisure.
That worked pretty well, but then I got the okay to EMAIL the briefing and simply file all the read replies as proof that I had provided the info.
I received MANY grateful thank yous and now I don’t have to put together a fresh presentation on the same material every 90 days.
The ONLY plus about having to do those briefings is that it made me very comfortable speaking before a room full of Generals and Colonels and such.
Just imagined them sitting their in their underwear? (Do your think they have stars printed on their T shirts?)
Thisi alone will bring the American military to a screaming halt...
The PowerPoint Commandos in the Pentagon will go stark raving mad at hearing the news.
I call it "brainmelt" - happens along about 3 o'clock daily at the IT seminar...
One tool that I use a lot is a Flash based program called Xcelsius that turns Excel spreadsheets into interactive simulations. It is an amazing tool that adds a lot of value, particularly as an alternative to dozens of slides full of quantitative data, or in situations where "what if" scenarios are the order of the day.
Does this mean we can pull PowerPoint from the ASAS-Light?
I’ll write up the SPR tomorrow...
Thanks for an important article..will share.
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