Productivity
Three Reasons PowerPoint Gets A Bad Rap
Assessing when and where PowerPoint should be used.
As I sit here on a Sunday morning adding finishing touches to a slide deck I’ve been working on for the past week, I can’t help but admit that I’ve grown a love-hate relationship with PowerPoint. It’s the modus operandi for conveying any ideas, proposals or post mortem for projects at work. I once had a colleague tell me, “If it’s not in a PowerPoint, it didn’t happen.” He was referring to an analysis that he was working on for his executive team and he made a valid point.
When it comes to communicating, you definitely want to speak the language that is understood by all but what if there is a communication gap and ideas begin to get lost in translation? What if we as a society have grown too dependent on presentation software to the point where we have sacrificed creativity for becoming master deck builders?
“We don’t do PowerPoint (or any other slide-oriented) presentations at Amazon,” Mr. Bezos wrote. “Instead, we write narratively structured six-page memos. We silently read one at the beginning of each meeting in a kind of ‘study hall.’”
Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos, stated in 2018 that PowerPoint is banned from executive meetings. Bezos has stated that instead of…
