Earlier quoted context omitted.
can you show that intelligent people think alike?
there are many more ways to be wrong than there are to be right
Intelligent people are much more creative at finding new ways to be wrong.
Jeff Bezos doesn't believe in PowerPoint, and his employees agree
61–70 of 97 posts
Re: Jeff Bezos doesn't believe in PowerPoint, and his employees agree
#62I 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…
You can embed diagrams in documents too. Every scientific paper does this
Yes but Word is also terrible for designing diagrams.
Insert one line of text above it and everything gets kicked out of whack.
Re: Jeff Bezos doesn't believe in PowerPoint, and his employees agree
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand having people at the beginning of the meeting to spend e.g 20 minutes reading and fully focusing on evaluating the proposal sounds really good, let's be honest. It is easier to ask good questions and provide arguments for and against if you had time to think instead of trying to do it "at fly"
But someone giving a PowerPoint presentation is going to explain their power points. Or is the problem that no presentations are made?
the problem is
- presentations inherently have a friction between them being fluent and them being detailed (to some degree that is why they work so well for sells, they make it easy to gloss over the parts you don't want attention on without having to worry someone claims you try to deceive them (if you don't overdo it))
- different people often have different stacks/focus points, so they need more details in different parts of an presentation. In a paper and similar you can decide what part you focus one and which you might skim over.
- language is ambiguous and concise precise writing is hard, presentations kind make that worse by a large factor (purely voice presentations even more so) (like I have seen way to often people leaving a meeting all thinking they have an agreement, but all heaving a subtle but in very important points different understanding).
- theoretically if you do a presentation right you anyway should have a handout with all presentation points + references + some additional details/footnotes etc. The approach described here basically say oh we have that anyway, then let's not bother with the presentation.
in general presentation have good use cases, like selling, shallow overviews, introductions, pitching a vague idea without deciding on implementing them
but for meetings which are about making decisions the traditional presentation approach is in my experience just very risk and backfires very often
Re: Jeff Bezos doesn't believe in PowerPoint, and his employees agree
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I think this sentence in the article (and quote from Jeff) says it all: "PowerPoint is really designed to persuade. It's kind of a sales tool". And by Powerpoint, Jeff I believe refers to the concept of slides, and not the tool itself.
> And by Powerpoint, Jeff I believe refers to the concept of slides, and not the tool itself.
pretty sure about that
but also every time I have to use PowerPoint instead of some other tools for presentations I'm surprised how bad it somehow is (at least the Office360 web version)
Re: Jeff Bezos doesn't believe in PowerPoint, and his employees agree
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand having people at the beginning of the meeting to spend e.g 20 minutes reading and fully focusing on evaluating the proposal sounds really good, let's be honest. It is easier to ask good questions and provide arguments for and against if you had time to think instead of trying to do it "at fly"
But someone giving a PowerPoint presentation is going to explain their power points. Or is the problem that no presentations are made?
Different people have different speed of analysis
Sometimes presentation moves too fast
Re: Jeff Bezos doesn't believe in PowerPoint, and his employees agree
#66nothing 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 navy seals have been on successful missions and they basically only use PowerPoint for meetings , at least the last time I read a book written by someone senior in the leadership…
Re: Jeff Bezos doesn't believe in PowerPoint, and his employees agree
#67This doesn't sound like anything new, see Edward Tufte on the Columbia disaster and the role powerpoint played there.
Re: Jeff Bezos doesn't believe in PowerPoint, and his employees agree
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
can you show that intelligent people think alike?
there are many more ways to be wrong than there are to be right
prove that? There are many more ways to be wrong if the question is something uninteresting like how many pennies are there in this jar, sure, but if the question is something interesting maybe there are the same amount of ways to be wrong or right, however there is, in my experience, a statistical likelihood that wrong answers converge on a few common idiotic ideas.
Relatively clever people will also converge on a number of statistically likely right answers, but I think the really bright people will find right answers nobody else ever suspected and which the moderately intelligent will say "that can't be right, can it?!?", and the really stupid people will still be inside the list of common stupid answers but probably focused on the ones that even moderately intelligent people will think, "huh that has to be wrong".
on edit: I probably should amend that to may find right answers that nobody else ever suspected, sometimes there may be a right answer that is the best right answer among the set of acceptable right answers, although that makes it a less interesting question I suspect.
Re: Jeff Bezos doesn't believe in PowerPoint, and his employees agree
#69Re: Jeff Bezos doesn't believe in PowerPoint, and his employees agree
#70nothing 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.
Having less diversity in thinking is not always a downside, e.g. there are good reasons why companies administer approximations of IQ tests