brisebois blog

In the category of “skills”-are-overrated-how-about-preparation-and-passion:

Here is a good analysis about PowerPoint v. Zen: Gates, Jobs, & the Zen aesthetic

[E]xactly 20 slides displayed for 20 seconds each. That’s it. Say what you need to say in six minutes and 40 seconds of exquisitely matched words and images and then sit the hell down.The result, in the hands of masters of the form, combines business meeting and poetry slam to transform corporate cliché into surprisingly compelling beat-the-clock performance art. (Wired)

Pecha Kucha Night, devised by Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham (Klein Dytham architecture), was conceived in 2003 as a place for young designers to meet, network, and show their work in public. (Pecha Kucha)

 

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Words and visuals: Why are you there?

How do you set people on fire?

Presenting the appalling presenter

How do you set people on fire?

The art of ruling the minds of men

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PowerPoint creators: Tufte is right, but…

Presentations and that creature called PowerPoint

Words and visuals: Why are you there?

How do you set people on fire?

“All the things Tufte says are absolutely true. People often make very bad use of PowerPoint.”

Mr. Gaskins [one of the creators of PowerPoint; see below] reminds his questioner that a PowerPoint presentation was never supposed to be the entire proposal, just a quick summary of something longer and better thought out. He cites as an example his original business plan for the program: 53 densely argued pages long. The dozen or so slides that accompanied it were but the highlights.

Since then, he complains, “a lot of people in business have given up writing the documents. They just write the presentations, which are summaries without the detail, without the backup. A lot of people don’t like the intellectual rigor of actually doing the work.” (…)

Now grade-school children turn in book reports via PowerPoint. The men call that an abomination. Children, they emphatically agree, need to think and write in complete paragraphs.

Still, the men don’t appreciate PowerPoint being blamed for crimes it didn’t commit. Mr. Gaskins studied a vast collection of presentations before designing the program. Bullet points, he says, existed long before PowerPoint. (…)

If they have a lament, it’s that complaints about PowerPoint are usually not about the software but about bad presentations. “It’s just like the printing press,” says Mr. Austin. “It enabled all sorts of garbage to be printed.”

As Mr. Gaskins puts it: “If they do an inadequate job with PowerPoint, they would do just as bad using something else.” (WSJ)

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PowerPoint’s history

Robert Gaskins, a former Berkeley Ph.D. student, conceived PowerPoint originally as an easy-to-use presentation program. He hired a software developer, Dennis Austin, in 1984 to build a prototype program that they called “Presenter,” later changing the name to PowerPoint for trademark reasons. PowerPoint 1.0 was released in 1987 for the Apple Macintosh platform; later that year Gaskins’s company Forethought and the program were purchased by Microsoft for $14 million. The first Windows and DOS versions of PowerPoint followed in 1988. PowerPoint became a standard part of the Microsoft Office suite in 1990. According to Microsoft, more than 30 million presentations are made around the world with PowerPoint every day. (source and photo credit: UC Berkeley)

 

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Presentations and that creature called PowerPoint

Words and visuals: Why are you there?

How do you set people on fire?

[E]xamine your work from previous talks [and] remember this rule of thumb: if your presentation visuals taken in the aggregate (e.g., your “PowerPoint deck”) can be perfectly and completely understood without your narration, then it begs the question: why are you there? (Presentation Zen)

Just in case there’s anyone who doubts your ineptitude, indolence, ignorance and supercilious nature, make sure you include the following elements in your next presentation:

* Ass Narcissism - “I’m just going to turn my back on you now and read all my slides off the screen. Enjoy the view!”
* Tolstoy wannabe - “I know that I can fit the entire text of War & Peace onto the next three slides. Thank God for sub-bullets!”
* Myopia - these presenters literally cannot see beyond the end of their nose and so fail to notice that their audience is either asleep or has gone home.
* Tunnel vision - those who can see only the one person in the audience who is smiling and nodding out of sympathy, not the other 99 who have fallen asleep/gone home.
* “I’m Eclipse Boy!” - “There must be some moth in my genetic heritage; but you can read the slide off my chest can’t you?”
* Hypoempathy - presenters who use the phrase, “Now this is a very important point” more than once never ask themselves the essential question - important to who[m]?
* “Gotta sing, gotta dance” - “Sure, this topic could have been covered in an email, but what can I say? I just loooove being bathed in the glow of the data projector.”
* Jazz hands - a subset of “Gotta Sing” in which the presenter imitates a puppeteer on speed (thanks Mike)
* Slide amnesia - a subset of Ass Narcissism, when the presenter seems surprised that a certain slide has popped up on screen and is forced to read it out word for word …
* Dispunctional - the presenter has no concept of time and is eating into the next presenter’s slot or, worse yet, into coffee break.
* Complarrogance - a rare condition, characterised by all of the above symptoms. (Fortifyservices)

[from a blog that I am closing] Why is persuasion so difficult, and what can you do to set people on fire? A master storyteller believes that executives can engage listeners on a whole new level if they toss their PowerPoint slides and learn to tell good stories instead.

In his best-selling book Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting, published in 1997 by HarperCollins, Robert McKee (the world’s best-known and most respected screenwriting lecturer) argues that stories “fulfill a profound human need to grasp the patterns of living—not merely as an intellectual exercise, but within a very personal, emotional experience.” A digest of thoughts appeared in a HBS Working Knowledge interview.

The book is almost 10 years old but the message remains relevant because it addresses a “profound human need”.

Related entries:
Speaking is NOT writing

Presentations and that creature called PowerPoint

The power of the spoken word, especially when well-delivered and articulated, is immense; and this archive of speeches is an excellent tool to delve into the subject of rhetoric.

UPDATE (7-17-06) - Here is an exhaustive list of links to excellent websites and blogs on presentations.

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7-11-06 - I have put together a few of my favorite resources. This is a work in progress. Stay tuned.

A good (short) blog post on the pros and cons of using slides in presentations. A longer detailed discussion: “PowerPoint Presentations: the good, the bad and the ugly“.

Edward Tufte has done wonderful work on helping people improve the visual quality of presentations. The title of his article on PowerPoint is self explanatory: “PowerPoint is Evil“.

Do NOT miss this: A brilliant take on what Lincoln’s Gettysburg address would have been like had it been presented on PowerPoint. And the author’s “Making of“.