The youth of knowledge professionals, be it finance or HR, is often spent in preparation and beautification of Powerpoint Slides- often complex and excruciatingly long.
It started in childhood – Class 9 & 10, when one’s first interface with PPTs was through 10 mark assignment projects. The “love affair” continued through adulthood upto high stake strategy presentations. Add up the total hours spent and it would be at least in double digits in terms of % of your lifetime spent on PPTs
500 million people use Powerpoint, On a given day, ~30 million PowerPoint presentations are delivered i.e. ~20,000 presentations started every minute.We spend ~ 15 million person hours per day viewing presentations. We call it “death by powerpoint”
But if you recollect, has someone in your audience ever told you after your PPT session – “That secondary bullet point on slide 38 really moved me! It was life changing! I will remember it forever!” .
I guess , its a NO
Amazon recently has bid Adieu to PPTs. You would have read online that Jeff Bezos Banned PowerPoint in Meetings
The 2018 Annual Report of Amazon reads:
We don’t do PowerPoint (or any other slide-oriented) presentations at Amazon. Instead, we write narratively structured six-page memos. We silently read one at the beginning of each meeting in a kind of “study hall.” Not surprisingly, the quality of these memos varies widely. Some have the clarity of angels singing. They are brilliant and thoughtful and set up the meeting for high-quality discussion. Sometimes they come in at the other end of the spectrum.
One has a strong reason to believe that , “six-page memo that’s narratively structured with real sentences, topic sentences, verbs, and nouns.” are actually more effective.
“Since stories are best told with pictures, bullet points and text-heavy slides are increasingly avoided at Google,” CEO, Sundar Pichai said at a conference last year
The human brain is wires for story-telling and thus processes narratives far more effectively than bullet points.
David Ogilvy, founder of Ogilvy & Mather, and known as the “Father of Advertising”, famously quipped, “most people use PowerPoint like a drunk uses a lamppost – for support rather than for illumination.”
Bullets don’t inspire. Stories do.
There seems to be a growing consensus that it an be fresh to deliver the message without a PowerPoint at all – a world without slides where audience engagement and retention is far higher
So, it seems old school is now new again?
Whats the scene out there in your company ? PPTs or Memos ?
Would love to hear from you