51–60 of 97 posts
I agree in terms to how it's mostly used. I think PowerPoint can be PowerFul when it's used as a visual tool to explain things that need complex diagrams. However those situations aren't that common. And even when they occur the person making the ppt might not have the skill to design it properly, it needs some graphical design chops and ppt is a pretty poor graphical tool with a ton of nasty quirks. But how I see it…
nothing grinds my gears more than "management wisdom" like this and people who then attribute success to small details like that. amazon could have thrived the same way had they used powerpoint, maybe even more. we will never know. also, different people communicate differently. dictating 6-pagers makes you select for people who prefer that, therefore having less diversity in thinking.
The point about bullet points being trash low effort ways to give information without rigorous thought is self evidently true.
Anyone who is considerate in how they formulate questions before seeking answers will tell you the same thing - often the dedicated formulation of the question leads directly to the answer. By just the same way, giving a full and complete answer can reveal to you a question - which may unravel and destroy your answer, or change the course of your idea.
There will be many negative comments here so let me add a positive: writing helps you think. More so than making ppt. My guess that it is helpful in some cases to force this level of detailed thought.
The purpose of presenting isn't for you, it's for audiences. The thought process or lack of it will happen either way, and can be accomplished either way.
nothing grinds my gears more than "management wisdom" like this and people who then attribute success to small details like that. amazon could have thrived the same way had they used powerpoint, maybe even more. we will never know. also, different people communicate differently. dictating 6-pagers makes you select for people who prefer that, therefore having less diversity in thinking.
- you anyway have to create some non presentation handout; there is always a high risks of people having subtle misunderstandings about details and without handout they have no good place to double check after the meeting/in a follow up meeting etc.
- having long "seemingly" productive meetings with everyone leaving with slightly, but highly problematic, different opinions is the norm. Purely speaking based meetings tends to do this the worst, but power-point meetings have that issue too pretty badly as there is friction between a nice presentation and delivering subtle, but important, details
- different people need different times for different facts/parts of the presentation (e.g. because they are different stake holders with different concerns), but presentations have only one time progression
To some degree this points are why power point is so good for "selling" as you can take advantage of them to make a harder for the sales target to grasp the drawbacks you might want to gloss over.
It's also why it's fine in a shallow introduction, it's a) shallow anyway, and b) an introduction so always needs to be followed up if relevant for you.
Now you don't have to make a 6 page paper, but some source everyone can progress and focus on in their own peace where people can focus or gloss over on details as they find relevant is a pretty good idea.
Similar a 6-pager shouldn't be some time intensive supper well written paper with only text. It can (often should) have graphics, and diagram, etc. And there shouldn't be much scrutiny on how "perfectly" this is written or layed out.
And expecting: 1) some very basic ad-hoc writing skill, 2) some very basic reading comprehension/speed skill, you could say in general the skill set needed to read scientific papers and reasonably low effort create drafts in that direction is something you should be able to require in a leading/senior position. This has pretty much nothing to do with variety of mindset and similar. I'm saying that as a dyslexic person not good at any of that who has some form of attention deficit disorder. Because you know just because something isn't your strength doesn't mean you can't learn it to a _basic_ level.
IMHO there is only a problem if they expect a masterfully prefect grammar/spelling everything paper with only dense text to be written ad-hoc very every single meeting multiple times a day or similar.
Saying "no PP" is the same as saying no to whiteboards, or taking notes or sync meetings, or any tool/process that can be mis-used. I went to business school so essentially have a Bachelor of PowerPoint degree, and one of the few-I-mean-great truths it left me was the hard work to make a good presentation; it's a different medium that most just phone-in with some quick copy & paste. I believe the process at Amazon is addressing the fact that everyone is very busy, and if they just start the meeting it's low-quality "advice-style" contributions, so it's better to eat the cost of waiting for everyone to read. This itself feels like a leadership trick that's actually for the executives who are too busy to consume everything async, but it seems better than the alternative for Amazon. I imagine it too is gamed, with people preparing before hand, then pretending to see memos for the first time yet having amazing, well-tought-out strategies ready to propose.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not so sure about that. Specifically in the case of PowerPoint (or decks in general really) distilling ideas down to 4 bullet points that are 6 words each means you lose a lot of detail. People will fill those gaps with their own assumptions. That leads to a lot of confusion. Jeff isn't really anyi-powerpoint. He's pro-detail. Rather than a deck he asks people to share a doc, and has time in meetings to make sure…
> far less waste. While it’s much faster to create presentations today with AI, every time I’ve worked with PowerPoint on my own and especially SharePoint PPTs, it’s been a massive waste of time. However, I’ve only seen a doc presented on big screen in a large company meeting once. It worked, but looked unprepared. I assume that the alternative is sending out the memo ahead of time and then just discussing it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not so sure about that. Specifically in the case of PowerPoint (or decks in general really) distilling ideas down to 4 bullet points that are 6 words each means you lose a lot of detail. People will fill those gaps with their own assumptions. That leads to a lot of confusion. Jeff isn't really anyi-powerpoint. He's pro-detail. Rather than a deck he asks people to share a doc, and has time in meetings to make sure…
> far less waste. While it’s much faster to create presentations today with AI, every time I’ve worked with PowerPoint on my own and especially SharePoint PPTs, it’s been a massive waste of time. However, I’ve only seen a doc presented on big screen in a large company meeting once. It worked, but looked unprepared. I assume that the alternative is sending out the memo ahead of time and then just discussing it?
but also PowerPoint (the product) is kinda terrible at allowing you to efficiently, low time investment create presentations for am internal meeting which then get discarded. And the web version is even worse.
This looks like low quality ChatGPT based content marketing.
I have to agree, the most painful and uninformative meetings I have been at all have one thing in common, powerpoint. Best meetings, no presentations and they get into details. His rule/method interests me.
Same for schools. We only had one teacher use the shiny new digital projector regularly and his lessons were a complete waste of time. Now it's the default lesson format, it seems. Good for teachers, as you can just recycle the same slides forever, good for admins as you can see the teacher's lessons via email, good for schools because it looks high tech, so it must be good, but on average, crap for learning. Not lea…
This has been true since overhead projectors were invented.
Blaming the tool for poor/lazy use of it is a cheap and easy attack. At the end of the day PowerPoint is nothing special, it's just that many people start preparing a topic/subject by making bullet lists. If you're lazy, your job is done: you copy 1to1 that list into a sequence of slides and call it a day. If you're slightly less lazy, you might look for images/graphs/content from somewhere else to support your prese…
It's not a "lazy attack" on the tool, but rather the fact that presentations are mostly used for a unidirectional storytelling and thus most typically suited for all-hands or sales meetings with a specific agenda that is meant to be accepted without discussion or argumentation. For design documents, strategy discussions and the like, it is very useful for both the author/presenter to be able to think through the enti…