Davies’s take is that meetings are about power, and that banning PowerPoint ensures power stays at the top.īezos-style critiques of PowerPoint were there from the start. If everyone’s got the document in hand, you don’t have to cede the floor or wait through an underling’s meandering. A deeply researched document has its advantages – especially if you’re the boss. This is now hailed as that One Weird Trick that helped Amazon take over the world, and there is certainly some validity to that notion. In 2004, Jeff Bezos famously banned PowerPoint from all executive meetings at Amazon because, as he said in an e-mail to employees, it gave “permission to gloss over ideas, flatten out any sense of relative importance, and ignore the interconnectedness of ideas.” Instead, presenters must prepare six-page memos that all meeting attendees spend the first half-hour silently reading. And, more often than not, these people are eloquent white males who already command the room. Journalists, cultural critics, academics and CEOs are all people who are “good at the sort of long, dense, performatively literate material that got them where they are today,” Mr. Davies to connect the bullet points: The people who actively despise this presentation software are the people who don’t need it. And people with a platform seemed desperately keen to hate on PowerPoint.” “It was an easy target when you couldn’t think of a subject for your weekly column. “Someone, somewhere is almost always writing an article called ‘Death by PowerPoint,’” he said. His interest in PowerPoint made him a curiosity, “like your uncle who collects pottery owls.” That led to his unofficial role as Britain’s go-to expert on the software, which is another way of saying friends would send him every media mention of PowerPoint. ![]() He began his career in the late 1980s, when presentations were generally done on overhead projectors, and he proudly declares himself the first person he knew who could put an image into a digital slide. Davies recently published Everything I Know About Life I Learned From PowerPoint, and its 262 cleverly designed pages suggest he has learned a fair bit. “Maybe me standing up and presenting the Q3 results isn’t as good as ‘to be or not to be.’ But the average PowerPoint presentation is far better than the average extemporaneous speech.” “Maybe the best presentation in the world isn’t as good as the best speech in the world,” Mr. Not that Microsoft deserves all the credit the same goes for Keynote, Slides, Prezi and every other program that has followed PowerPoint down the slide of slides.
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