31 Days...and it was a day of mind-numbing powerpoint presentations
I'm back in powerpoint land. Help. Someone rescue me.
On Tues AM in the PDX airport, I followed a link on ArtsAndLettersDaily to an article on the abuse of powerpoint. The author, Edward Tufte, is probably my new hero. The timing was ironic considering the powerpoint hell that I quickly descended into this morning.
Today was spent in a hotel ballroom listening to local, state, gov' t professionals talking about critical infrastructure and homeland security. Of the 15 speakers or so - only two of them used powerpoint to ILLUSTRATE the main points of their talk (and the luncheon speaker was exceptional in the presentation of content and illustration). The rest of the speakers and panelists read
- every
- single
- bulleted
- sentence
- fragment
(Segue: Most of our nation's critical infrastructure is privately held. And in the push to deregulate the energy sector, deregulated utilities now operate to maximize profit with little incentive to reinvest in improvements to the power-grid. However, power consumption is increasing every year without a comparable increase in production or transmission capability. It'll be the gov'ts problem when things crash but until then the private sector is reluctant to sacrifice profit to build the capacity and resilience that our power-hungry country requires. The luncheon speaker - the best presenter of the day - was basically at odds with an earlier speaker who was the prototypical political appointee of this administration who defended the 'private sector' against the intrusivenes of gov't.)
And, when I looked around the room, I noticed that most of the people were probably in "higher-grade" jobs than I do on a daily basis. As statistics were cited about the estimated costs to the national economy based on the failure in one of our critical infrastructure systems, I started calculating the cost just to my agency to have 5 people attending this conference. I am a lowly GS-12. There was one GS-13, two GS-14s, one GS-15, and a Lt Col from a district office. Of the GS-employees from my agency, $165+/ hour of salary (not including benefits) was being frittered away as slide after slide flashed up on the screen. And I know there were many other employees (of what is now probably the 2nd largest cabinet level agency) in attendance.
Powerpoint is not inherently evil. Rather, the inherent mind-numbing evil culprit is the lazy presenter who doesn't take the time to concisely describe the issue, directly outline possible solutions and processes, and present data relevant to their argument.
And, I do solemnly swear to do my best to never deliver a boring powerpoint presentation in my life. And, I hope that there is no correlation between bad powerpoint presentations and career advancement. But there is no evidence to indicate the contrary.
(Everytime I reread this - I find one more sentence where the verb-tense is all screwed up. I'm embarassed, but will let it go now.)