My Sentiments Exactly

Good for Bob Parks and Bloomberg Businessweek for this article.  PowerPoint is indeed an overused medium, but I had no idea that 350 PowerPoint presentations are given every second.  That’s scary.

Part of my job is to talk with suppliers who want to do business with my company.  The ones that intrigue me the most are those that both a) come with a clear message and b) come without PowerPoint slides.  Unfortunately, a lot of suppliers can do either a or b, but few can do both.  Those that come with slides can tell you that I have a crazy good ability to predict exactly which slides are in their nicely spiralbound booklet, complete with hard plastic cover.  That’s how unoriginal most supplier presentations are.

But I digress from the point of this post and the article that spurred it.  The sentiments embodied by “Death to PowerPoint!” stem, I suspect, from many of us experiencing Death by PowerPoint.

In 1964, Marshall McLuhan famously wrote, “The medium is the message.”  Yet many deliverers of PowerPoint slides believe that the message is the medium and thus fail to deliver a message at all.