The NY Times ran a great article on the military's obsession with PowerPoint. Just wanted to add "No kidding!" This has been obvious for any manager or sales exec for several years.
What started as a tool to help people understand your argument through bullet points and graphics, has become a time sucker and a distraction. It has also become a way of over simplifying things to the point of embarrassment.
It seems consistent though with our sound-bite mentality. Quick and to the point so we can move onto the next tasks. Superficiality has become a "way out". No need to be educated about a topic to make a solid decision, instead read the headline, follow a character -limited tweet, or view the scroll at the bottom of the news story. Good enough right?
I applaud the military for realizing the dangers in replacing real work with the facade of a graphic. Maybe if the financial companies spent less time making beautifying bogus products, we would have a different Wall Street.
That being my rant, I still would not even think or doing a presentation without PowerPoint for fear of being seen as ill-prepared or lacking in cleverness or boring.
BTW - check out HBR's tweet on the subject http://blogs.hbr.org/silverman/2010/04/powerpoint-is-evil-redux.html#comments
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Love the topic, forwarded to the fam.
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