On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 7:59 AM, Palit, Nilanjan <nilanjan.pa...@intel.com> wrote:>>> From: Ben Tilly>> Sent: Monday, April 06, 2009 10:34 AM >> >> Personally I don't like the way that Powerpoint is used because it >> encourages oversimplification. Also I think that spending great >> energy on fancy presentations for internal use is a waste of company >> time and money. > > I think it is really naïve to blame a tool for an outcome -- it's > just as silly as blaming poor driving on cars/roads rather than the > drivers! What MS did with PPT was that it enabled professional > looking presentations with relatively low effort. What people did > with it is another story. PPT does not "encourage oversimplification" > -- it's the people who are using PPT, not the tool.
It appears that you didn't read what I wrote, then launched a rant that would be better aimed at someone else.I say this because I had linked to a chapter on how to effectively communicate with PPT, then complained about the way that it is used. This should tell you that I'm blaming the technique, not the tool. > What happened with PPT is this: we got a powerful *tool* that allows > people to create professional presentations. Except, there was no > training on how to actually do professional presentations -- i.e., > no training on the art of communication, something that was > previously limited only to people (at least purportedly) trained and > paid > to do so. PPT enabled the /masses/ to take that into their own > hands > without the training to go with it. What do you think would > happen if all of a sudden, due to a technological breakthrough, > everyone could afford a personal jet, but no training was offered on > how to actually fly them? If you read the article that I linked to you'd have had this point reinforced. There are widespread misconceptions about cognition, which cause systemic misuse of the tool. > But it is equally naïve to say that "spending great energy on fancy > presentations for internal use is a waste of company time and > money". Presentations are about communicating both mundane & complex > ideas and also about *selling* ideas. There is a lot of selling that > needs to be done inside companies, as much, if not more so than > outside (especially for big companies, but I'm sure for small ones > as well). In some ways, selling internally is a lot harder, since > you're trying to communicate (or sell) to people who are just as or > more competent as you, have as much or more significant stakes than > you do > in the outcome of the decision and in many cases control your > paycheck. The art of communication is as much a requirement inside a > company as outside. What tool you use/abuse to do that is totally > beside the point! As an individual within a company, absolutely. But for the company it is a different story. The way that companies often work is that people spend tremendous information on these internal sales efforts, and have to do it because they are competing for attention with other employees who are putting in a similar effort. The end result of all of this effort is decisions of similar quality to what would have been made without the sales effort. (Decisions made on the quality of the sales effort are not noticeably better than ones made for other reasons...) However making those decisions takes a lot more work. Therefore a company culture that encourages this kind of sales effort leads to expending a lot of internal energy to no real company benefit. Which is exactly why I called it a waste of company time and money. Though I would highly encourage any employee of a company with that kind of culture to do the best presentations that you can, because it is necessary for personal success. And there is *no* question that being able to sell well is valuable when dealing with other companies. > Presentations/animations (& thus PPT by extension) are also crucial > to convey complex ideas/thoughts, especially in fields of science of > engineering (& I'm sure in many other fields). There are countless > cases I can list where an animation (rightly done) can convey a > complex idea otherwise impossible to describe in words. "Animations" > can be as simple as builds, but can enable one to build a complex > idea step-by-step. As a former mathematician I distrust giving people the illusion of comprehension without the substance. While animations can indeed illuminate, they can just as easily - and more often do - mislead people into thinking they understand what they don't. I have also found that the more complex the idea, the more important it is to work through it interactively rather than hoping that the right presentation will be received correctly. A prepackaged presentation does not replace a whiteboard. > Moral of the story: it's the people, not the tools! As should be clear, we never disagreed on that. Ben _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
