Outside In | In praise of PowerPoint – it’s had a bad rap in recent years, but if done well, there’s still nothing to beat it
Some tips and hints on how to make that presentation unbeatable, and avoid the dreaded ‘Death by a thousand Bullet Points’
Summoned to give a presentation last Monday at a conference in Kuala Lumpur on services trade, the organisers gave me a courageous and controversial command: “no PowerPoints please”.
At first, the idea was liberating. Just sit, and talk to the audience. Easy. Or was it?
Suddenly you recall how efficiently a PowerPoint forces you to organise and structure your thoughts, to sequence them in a story, to manage your time, and to provide emphasis and reinforcement when it is most needed. Without it, I felt naked and alone. The command was not just controversial. It was counterproductive.
Much as we love to complain about Powerpoints, the truth is that the technology is invaluable.
It’s how we abuse the technology that sits at the root of that “Death by a thousand Bullet Points” experience that has numbed the mind at so many conferences and lectures over the years.
When Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin at the Silicon Valley tech consultancy Forethought sold PowerPoint to Microsoft in 1987 for US$14 million, I am sure they had no idea what a wonder they had created – and what a fortune they had signed away.