> 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. 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? 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! 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. Moral of the story: it's the people, not the tools! -Nilanjan _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
