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As part of the presentation skills training services
our company provides, we ask participants to send copies of
recent PowerPoint files they have created for our review and
editing. Hence, we
see literally thousands of slides each year.
Very few do an acceptable job of aiding Knowledge
Transfer.
In fact, in the 10 years we have been in business,
we have seen a slow and steady decline in the quality of
on-screen visuals from all industries.
No sector seems to be immune.
As PowerPoint has grown to dominate the boardroom,
ballroom, and even the classroom, its overall contribution to
the persuasive arts has been continually diminished by its
increasing misapplication.
Now before you start thinking that this is just one
more rant against another evil product from Microsoft, hear
this: Our firm not
only believes that PowerPoint is a wonderful piece of software,
we claim that it can serve the purposes of true knowledge
transfer better than any other visual presentation tool
available. And we
don’t blame the poor souls who create most of the incomprehensi
we see – most businesspeople are simply issued a laptop and a
copy of PowerPoint and ordered to go forth and multiply the
company’s revenues, with little or no thought to training them
to best do so.
The real culprits here are found not in the field,
but rather back in the main office, from whence, being at least
once removed from the actually application of their misdeeds,
they can comfortably issue edicts of what one shall and shant
not do with the design and construction of presentation slides.
If you’ve ever been subject to edicts handed down from
the Department of Presentation Regulations, you know what I
mean.
So when we see a slew of equally bad slides from
different people in the same company, we’re fairly certain
that the company has a slew of workers in a Presentation
Regulations Department working feverishly to hamstring any
attempt by an employee to make their slides understandable, much
less compelling.
Our first such encounter was with a large consumer
products company in Pittsburgh, where class participants
presented us with slides that for the most part looked like
full-page Excel spreadsheets copied and condensed to (barely)
fit within the projectable borders.
Can you imagine how much fun it is to try to read 8 pt.
Arial font that’s been compressed lengthwise by, say, 20
percent?
Halfway into explaining why its best to not go much
below 20 pt. type when projecting images at the current maximum
resolution of 96 dpi, one
student raised her hand to explain that they had to use very
small type to get all the information they were expected to
deliver in the maximum of 8 slides they were permitted.
In other words, Regulations had ordered a limit to the
number of slides – not the number of minutes (a
perfectly acceptable limit) one had to present.
When we redo a client’s presentation to conform to
the rules of comprehension, we often take 10 slides and turn
them into 24 – all for the purpose of being able to deliver
the presentation in less time.
With properly designed visuals, there is usually an
inverse relationship between the number of slides and the time
it takes to deliver. Know
this: keeping your presentations short is almost always a good
thing. Few people
ever complain that the presenter simply didn’t drone on long
enough.
After numerous inquires by both letter and phone, we
discovered that the 8-slide maximum was part of a larger policy
that, among other constraints, limited middle-managers to the
number of slides they could present based on their company grade
level. So managers
in the 50-65 level could deliver 8 slides, 70-85’s were
allowed 12, 90’s and above could have as many as 20.
No mention of the harshness of the penalties for any
transgression, but evidently nobody was willing to go
head-to-head with the company’s Prohibitor General.
Amazingly, a few letters later we learned that the
source of most of these dictates had actually left the company
four years ago, but her successor was unwilling to mess with
corporate policy. And
that, it seems, is how many of these immensely damaging
protocols come from – people long removed from accountability,
who together form that great entity THEY, from whom all things
are denied.
The other day we received a PowerPoint template via
email that THEY require every corporate presentation to adhere
to – no exceptions. Nevermind
that THEY reside in corporate headquarters over 500 miles away
and this small, special branch just wants to communicate within
the branch – the template rules.
As
long as large corporations feel the need for excessive numbers
of employees, it seems there will always be a THEY.
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