Tom, our senior leaders have convinced me to not turn in my command and staff slides this week. I hope this covers me :)

I really do.

Same as paper 'handouts'. Old sales technique- if you want your audience to pay attention, don't give 'em something to read....

So, does General Mattis's extensive library include the work of Edward Tufte?

power point produces poor decisions, inferior performance, costly undertakings and failed acquisition programs. And no one is held accountable. But all are promoted.

Properly edited and sequenced, PPT helps produce consensus, promote a feeling of inclusiveness, accelerate buy-in. That's what media research would lead me to expect.

It does so faster, more cheaply and flexibly than overhead projector cells, producing a video, or handwaving without any aids. Less distracting and more focussed in meetings than a wordy printout. If the analysis is clear and compelling, PPT is as good a way as any to bullet the major points, show a geographic map or conceptual Ven diagram.

It's a poor workman that blames the quality of the work on the tool. If you're wasting your time in meetings, it's not the PPT.

I despise .ppt as much as the next guy, but even the best of us fall into the trap sometimes. Interestingly enough the Army now uses CPOF (Command Post of the Future to the unitiated) to turn a valuable C4ISR (look it up on your own) into another droning .ppt-esque briefing at long distances. Indeed, when last deployed, I tried my best to brief my CPOF 'slides' in the fastest, most painless fashion possible to my higher headquarters...sometimes I could brief my Task Force status in total in as little as 45 seconds.

Having said that, a good meeting technique we often used in my old outfit was stand-up meetings outside. We'd circle up outside our TOC and run the command and staff meeting as quickly and expediently as possible. Never underestimate the power of simply standing up outside subject to the elements to encourage your staff to communicate quickly and effectively. Long-windedness goes away and only what is important gets communicated - usually only one time.

This has the added benefit of forcing more interaction between command and staff and lateral communication between commands in the periods before, during and after the meetings.

Someone (much smarter than I) once said "There is one word in the lexicon that is indicative of the fact that we will never meet our full potential as human beings...that word is 'meetings.' Therefore never have a meeting unless you have a clear purpose, an understood agenda/format, and desired outcomes....or if communicating individually/directly to the parties involved separately becomes too unwieldy.

. . . white board. It's set and ready-to-go. The conclusions and parameters of the talk are already filled in. A white (or better, chalk! markers can look healthy but be dry, but chalk is chalk!) board is a communal construction--together, the presenter and the "audience" alike, will have a discussion and the board will reflect that. Plus, without the distraction of the visuals, people are freed to be more purely conceptual in those moments where analysis is required. And--double-plus!--when the power goes out, a white/chalk board keeps working!

I dont know how it works in the military, but in consulting (one of my previous gigs; a field considered slightly less revolting than lawyering, but not by much) one noticed that after doing 6 months of work, producing databases, software tools, flow charts and and doing hundreds of pages of very detailed writeups, that 90% of the time the only thing the key end-users (KEU: the people whose budgets paid for the work and on whose divisions' behalf we were making our efforts) ever even *looked at* was the "summary deck" presentation, usually delivered in a one-to-two hour session (the apparent limit of human sit-ability)...

Usually what happened was that 6 months later we would get calls from slightly-lower-down-the-food-chain end-users asking questions like, "what is the X thing referred to on slide 23?"

We'd be like, "uh, the enormous database we built for you? Has your boss not shared the stuff?" It literally would take a year for simple things to filter down to people, often to the point where we'd have to go back and re-explain the entire point of the work we did. By which point many of the KEU's had either been promoted out of the group, moved on to other firms, or otherwise had a change of agenda such that what we had done was no longer a priority.

I got to the point where I'd refuse to do a meeting until I had confirmation that each attendee had *already* read/used/and shared the primary deliverables and was coming for actual Q&A on implementation and execution.

PowerPoint is often a simulacrum of actual thinking, a shorthand for often unstated objectives and processes that sometimes get lost in the blanks between the bullet points. By itself it can be a useful tool for giving a pitch, say, or giving an "edutaining" speech at a conference, but for really detailed work, like reorganizing whole corporate groups, changing strategic direction of an institution, or sending divisions into battle... by itself I would argue it is insufficient. A powerpoint deck is not a plan, and is too often something to hide weak thinking behind. It is a safe medium because it doesnt always make clear what exactly is so specifically different about the thinking behind the deck; one can put up a lot of flow charts and graphs and a few "take-aways" for each, stringing them together in some form that resembles an argument, but often when you look beneath the surface it is more like statements of the obvious with a few semi-opinionated bullets thrown in to make the presenter sound insightful. I like powerpoint for certain things, and could not have done my job(s) without it, but there were many cases where I felt like it often provided an easy-out for both the presenter and the audience, requiring little from either, and avoiding making hard choices or specific decisions about the matter under examination. "Well, we had a meeting and there was a deck; something happened, I think!"

If PowerPoint makes you stupid, then what do Field Manuals do?

Have you ever read a field manual? Especially a Marine Corps one?

Personally I love them. I collect them actually.

PowerPoint is a tool. In the hands of someone who knows what they are talking about, a very powerful tool. The real problem is that most people are resistant to change or lazy. And if you don't know your audience, it can get ugly, fast.

I have been on both sides of a presentation utilizing PPT, and if what is being said is not conveying the message, the PPT will only make you look stupid. Also the PPT needs to match what you are saying. Far too often I have been in a preso and what is being said is 180 opposite of what is on the screen. Good times!

And of course the real issue with PPT, is making sure the person giving the preso is the one who made the PPT to begin with. Real Ugly.