Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti.
“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter.
The slide has since bounced around the Internet as an example of a military tool that has spun out of control. Like an insurgency, PowerPoint has crept into the daily lives of military commanders and reached the level of near obsession. The amount of time expended on PowerPoint, the Microsoft presentation program of computer-generated charts, graphs and bullet points, has made it a running joke in the Pentagon and in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.
I would go further and say that COMPUTERS have made people stupid, as they are too lazy to spell correctly, too lazy to look things up in books, too lazy to research anything without their internet, too lazy to do math, and a whole host of other minutia.
Powerpoint has not made the military more stupid. Before, they spent just as much time making indecipherable charts on paper. Don’t blame Microsoft, blame the mil academies who teach these officers how to present.
BTW, I’ve been to several very good PPT presentations. They usually consist of one or two salient points on a slide and one slide for every three or four minutes of exposition by the speaker.
#20 Thanks Olo… However, I wouldn’t touch your URL with a ten foot pole.
I won’t believe this article, until someone can make a powerpoint presentation explaining it.
What, you don’t trust me here on this non-registered anonymous blog?
They should have called that url site “How to keep smart people away from your links.”
(I forgot about the www.)
the ruminations on PowerPoint are certainly interesting, and you have to commiserate with anyone willing to admit that the necessary shorthanding that comes with it is intellectually destructive, especially in the case of a war strategy… which is exactly why it’s odd that so much of the conversation about the slide itself concerns the use of PowerPoint and not what the image actually represents… like this:
http://huffingtonpost.com/meghan-ohara/diagram-of-a-war-strategy_b_555389.html
bureaucratic military hierarchies are stoopid. ppt lets them express that stoopidity in more ways. and it’s all done on our dime.
#18 Mr Fusion said, “I’m sure that invisible dude in the sky doesn’t give a rat’s pattooty if your church sings the right notes or not.’
I am sure you are right on that. Nothing in the Bible prohibits PowerPoint.
#3 Usually you’re just stoopid, but today you’ve surpassed yourself.
Then again, you might have just been inundated b y powerpoint presentations. That General might be onto something.
The Taliban use KeyNote.
Unfortunately an unconvincing argument can be made more credible if one makes a detailed presentation. Where more bullets made means more favorable arguments. A detailed map to explain why we’re there and how we can save these poor Afghani’s from the ‘insurgents’. I wonder if there’s an Al Qaeda officer preparing a powerpoint presentation right now?
PowerPoint is a tool, certainly, but it facilitates the organization of thoughts into specific channels that tend to presuppose certain ways of thinking about presenting ideas.
Keynote is a little better, but neither is ideal.
It may be of help to some to write out the story you’re trying to tell in longhand or as a text document way before attempting to produce a PP or K deck.
I suspect that people try to write IN PP or K as if it were the first draft medium, and that masks communication problems.
#29 Pedrito. This conversation is about effective presentations and whether powerpoint helps or hinder.
When the conversation is on mule motivation techniques, we’ll text you.
#33, Dallas,
Tweet him. He is all a twitter about his tweets.
#33 That’s exactly what I thought the conversation was about… until you decided to barf. That’s why I said you outdid yourself in dragging the subject to your sheeple arena.
Now, go back and clean some white house floors.
#34 Aw, conFused just got out of the psyche ward. How cute.
#32 Buzz said, “PowerPoint is a tool,…” Agreed.
So is a gun, a car, and a sledgehammer. It’s all about the person using the tool.
One of my pet peeves, when the student is to busy reading the ppt slides and not listening to the instructor. My employer let me go to a train the trainer class, (I get to go to quite a bit of training as part of my job, this was by far and away the best one I have ever gone to) the instructor stated no more than six things on the slide 12 words per item at a maximum. I ended up with half the number of slides that I would have normally used. Because the slides were like the old index card idea. Put only the important stuff on the slide not the whole book. Downside of that idea (at least for my students) they have to actually take notes.
It’s not Powerpoint that is the problem. It’s the content. If you think you’re “dazzling” your audience with as much info you can squeeze on a slide then you’re an idiot. Keep it simple is the way to go.
Here’s a URL for a big version:
http://blogs.ft.com/westminster/files/2009/12/coin-security.jpg