On PowerPoint

The poor use of PowerPoint is (rightly) regularly berated for producing low-value (let's read these slides together), dull (endless bullets) and trance-inducing (walking away with a slide-deck rather than a set of clear actions) presentations. But it doesn''t stop there. Microsoft produce a package called Word. Word allows parts of speech such as conjunctions. It allows ifs and maybes. Sentences and paragraphs. In other words it allow you to express yourself clearly: it allows joined-up thinking to be articulated. In business life Word is being rapidly replaced by the PowerPoint slide-deck. The slide-deck at meetings, the slide deck e-mailed as an attachment. But these are bullet-rich and lack joined-up thinking. Oh, yes, they are quick to produce and cannibalise. But without clear, fresh, explicit thinking our firms go bust.