“PowerPoint makes us stupid.”
Gen. James Mattis, retired US Joint Forces Commander
PowerPoint presentations are “easy for the presenter, but difficult for the audience.”
Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon
How are we STILL having this conversation?
At best PowerPoint is a crutch for under-trained and unengaged presenters. At worst it’s so useless that it’s dangerous.
I’ve written before about an article that said the “NASA report on the 2003 crash of the Columbia space shuttle indicated engineers had become too reliant on presenting complex information in jumbled slides, making it difficult to assess risks”, and how “It is easy to understand how a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation”.
Another example – during the war in Kosovo, NATO & US intelligence both misunderstood what a PowerPoint slide said and mistook it for an order. They bombed a Serbian arms factory… which turned out to be Belgrade’s Chinese Embassy.
If PowerPoint can’t communicate vital information to leaders from the world’s #1 space agency or the world’s #1 military power in life-or-death scenarios, what chance do your people have with it?
In fact, a 2009 educational study by Savoy, Proctor, & Salvendy showed that students who stayed at home and read the relevant bit of their textbooks understood and retained more than those who attended a PowerPoint-led lecture. Boy oh boy.
Amazon, Linkedin, GlaxoSmithKline, most of the US military, and many more have already banned PowerPoint completely—why haven’t you?
Using the right visual comms in the right way can unlock huge potential for your sales and marketing teams, allowing them to socialize and share ideas and value like never before.
– Tom @WSL
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