Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint”

My observational experience is the opposite. A powerpoint must have "professional" design and "professional" multiple fonts and "professional" multiple colors, and "professional" multimedia such as stock photos and such. A lack of extensive customization shows a lack of motivation or a lack of respect. It doesn't matter if it contains actual content as long as it looks nice, because all actual content was already discussed interactively via email or phone call or written reports. So a presenter starts with generating 30 minutes of content then spends 6 hours adding meaningless flair, getting it approved by boss, bosses boss, then endless editorial changes to the multimedia, "move that stock photo a little to the left", etc. The graphics arts load on the presenter is huge and extremely expensive, yet provides no monetary value, especially for internal presentations.

On the other hand the reviewer doesn't really learn anything because any important topic was discussed in written email format in detail, the presentation is a mere formality / dominance ritual. So powerpoint is pretty easy on the audience, if its a powerpoint, that means you should tune it out.

I would also disagree in that its a crutch for the absolute bottom of the barrel presenters, because no matter how bad awkwardly reading slides to the audience is, its better than silence / choking up / repeating themselves / skipping intermediate concepts. Being read to like a preschool child is better than not getting a presentation at all, well, at least most of the time.

Thank you for finally providing me a concise word for so much of what goes on with typical Powerpoint use.

--

P.S. For those unfamiliar with the term (in this context).

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=flair

I was thinking particularly of its use in the movie "Office Space".

I didn't invent it, I have personally been subjected to a conversation right out of the movie WRT powerpoint at a previous employer, "Yes, I know you have the corporate minimum of 25 pieces of flair in your powerpoint, but you only have the minimum 25 pieces, and brownnoser over there has 47 pieces of flair in his powerpoint, isn't that great, and you wouldn't want my boss to think you only want to do the minimum, would you? I mean I'm not telling you that you have to add an animated dancing robot to card #72, but I'm hoping you yourself will want to add an animated dancing robot, without my having to tell you to do more than the minimum..." What a steaming pile of coaching. I am thankful not to work there anymore... It wasn't word for word outta the movie (didn't use the word flair, I believe it was "animations and font color changes") but close enough. Actually I think the coaching conversation happened before the movie?

Fancy animations and zooms can't fix this inherent limitation of the slide format.