Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti.
“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter.
The slide has since bounced around the Internet as an example of a military tool that has spun out of control. Like an insurgency, PowerPoint has crept into the daily lives of military commanders and reached the level of near obsession. The amount of time expended on PowerPoint, the Microsoft presentation program of computer-generated charts, graphs and bullet points, has made it a running joke in the Pentagon and in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.
PowerPoint does not turn poor communicators into good ones. Rather, it tends to illuminate those who can’t tell a story or deliver a message.
It’s not PowerPoint’s fault but an organizational problem… It could be Visio or a Jpg slideshow. No one can understand a diagram that complex! I bet only space shuttle avionics engineers or Lockheed warplane makers can be expected to work with such an impossibly complicated chart! If the situation on the ground is that messy, it would be better to just pack’n leave!
I agree. Some people in my company can’t talk without 25 friggin ppt slides. Then they read every 8 point font word on the slide. Usually they’re republicans.
You can almost always identify a top notch sales person….he will be the one that shows up for a meeting and DOESN’T use power point.
Yeah, try going to a college class these days without a powerpoint. It does make people dumber. It also makes the professors even more lazy because most of the slides are prepared by the book company.
#3 Yeah I can’t stand when people paste a novel into a slide and expect you to be able to read it. It’s just laziness. Reminds me of the lazy profs in college who would continue to write on the white board after their marker ran out of ink.
LOL, Red! I’m one of those book companies, coincidentally smack in the middle of creating a set of Ppt slides that will accompany a tech manual. The good news is that I also worked in sales for a while and learned the lesson Duck mentions…my slides are images and few words…no sentences! But, I fill the speaker’s notes section with a suggested dialog.
Clifford Stoll had a lot to say about PowerPoint. From his book High Tech Heretic, he writes… It’s in Google books: read it yourself starting on page 179.
He is especially critical about using PowerPoint in church instead of hymnals.
#5, Especially since I downloaded my slides and read them before class. Nothing new presented in lecture. The trifecta of PowerPoint, WebCT, and boredom make the instructor unnecessary, yet I had to pay an extra $20 fee because it was a “web blended course”. Web-blended means the instructor is worthless and adds nothing to the lecture.
Of course this leads to a presumption, and I agree that the military were a model of efficiency and common sense before powerpoint existed.
The substitution of email for face-to-face meetings that are often easily possible logistically also makes them and every other organization “stupid” and less effective. I’ve heard more than one military person say that much more was accomplished when their email system was down for a week due to a serious security compromise that had to be cleaned up. Phone calls and face-to-face meeting turned out to be far better than email.
An Edward Tufte PowerPoint wallpaper for you.
Ppt does indeed make you stupid, and it seems completely appropriate to me that it took the military and not some T.E.D. talkie type to figure that out. “The medium is the message” Mcluhan explained some 40 years ago; nobody seems to have “got it” still.
I just walk out of Ppt presentations.
powerpoint make you stupid…. i wonder what this says about using m$ software in general :O
PowerPoint dumbs down the ability of people to read music. In church they replaced hymn books, which have music and lyrics, with a PowerPoint that only has lyrics.
PowerPoint doesn’t make people stupid. Stupid people use PowerPoint for things that it wasn’t intended to do. Sometimes full sentences are better than bullet points. Duh.
A friend of mine does PPT. He says “use enough colors and it doesn’t matter what the slides say.”
Every tool has its uses, and abuses. Experts know how to use/appreciate their tools. Non-experts like the colors.
#15
I couldn’t agree more 😀 I hate seeing this done in Excel too. People come up with numbers out of thin air.
#14, Benjamin,
I’m sure that invisible dude in the sky doesn’t give a rat’s pattooty if your church sings the right notes or not.
*
#15, Mark,
Very True. Anything, be it Oxycotin, texting, or fried foods can be abused. If someone gives a poor PP demonstration, they most likely would have given a poor demonstration no matter how they did it. It is only when the abuse is constantly in your face that you notice.
#6 Agree. I’m a big fan of Apple presentation styles. Very few words – sometimes one.
#8 Benji – url shortening tools will impress your teacher and will not clutter your powerpoint slides.
Dallas, here’s Benji’s link, shortened:
http://5z8.info/startdownload_z8s2z_kkk
I used my favorite shortening tool.
I would go further and say that COMPUTERS have made people stupid, as they are too lazy to spell correctly, too lazy to look things up in books, too lazy to research anything without their internet, too lazy to do math, and a whole host of other minutia.
Powerpoint has not made the military more stupid. Before, they spent just as much time making indecipherable charts on paper. Don’t blame Microsoft, blame the mil academies who teach these officers how to present.
BTW, I’ve been to several very good PPT presentations. They usually consist of one or two salient points on a slide and one slide for every three or four minutes of exposition by the speaker.
#20 Thanks Olo… However, I wouldn’t touch your URL with a ten foot pole.
I won’t believe this article, until someone can make a powerpoint presentation explaining it.
What, you don’t trust me here on this non-registered anonymous blog? 😉
They should have called that url site “How to keep smart people away from your links.”
(I forgot about the www.)
the ruminations on PowerPoint are certainly interesting, and you have to commiserate with anyone willing to admit that the necessary shorthanding that comes with it is intellectually destructive, especially in the case of a war strategy… which is exactly why it’s odd that so much of the conversation about the slide itself concerns the use of PowerPoint and not what the image actually represents… like this:
http://huffingtonpost.com/meghan-ohara/diagram-of-a-war-strategy_b_555389.html
bureaucratic military hierarchies are stoopid. ppt lets them express that stoopidity in more ways. and it’s all done on our dime.
#18 Mr Fusion said, “I’m sure that invisible dude in the sky doesn’t give a rat’s pattooty if your church sings the right notes or not.’
I am sure you are right on that. Nothing in the Bible prohibits PowerPoint.
The Taliban use KeyNote.
Unfortunately an unconvincing argument can be made more credible if one makes a detailed presentation. Where more bullets made means more favorable arguments. A detailed map to explain why we’re there and how we can save these poor Afghani’s from the ‘insurgents’. I wonder if there’s an Al Qaeda officer preparing a powerpoint presentation right now?