Brian Dailey recently had a LinkedIn post about the use of PowerPoint and the value of a well-written narrative over a pptx deck. It reminded me of Jeff Bezos’ famous banning of PowerPoint in Amazon meetings. I don’t think this got the attention it really needed.
When I first started in small business, there was so much focus on creating decks. It seemed like every single day had some time devoted to creating a client-facing deck for some meeting, pitch, etc. And the decks would get passed around via email, and whatever was the latest version would get lost (client_deck_20230212_v10_final_final.pptx anyone?). Joe thought he had the latest version, but really Jane had it. Then we’d have to convene in a conference room to review slide-by-slide which were the updated slides. Then another version was put together. It was nauseating. Eventually, most of our analytics team was solely responsible for putting together client-facing material for quarterly reports, which were delivered in….wait for it….power point presentations. In a company pitch competition, I even joked to a colleague that our mission statement should be ‘We make PowerPoints.’ I laugh about it to this day.
I was involved in a project once where a deck was passed to me that supposedly described the objectives of the project. It was 60+ slides. I recently saw a sales deck that was 116 slides long. These two examples are some of the more extreme, but not heavy outliers.
Look, I don’t hate PowerPoint. But I think an unintended consequence of pptx is that it obfuscates poor communication skills. In my opinion, if you can’t articulate what problem you solve, why, and how you do it better than anyone else in just a few sentences, you need to work on your value proposition. You should be able to do that in one page. In my opinion, there’s little, if any, exception.
Maybe all this disdain of pptx comes from my science writing training. PhDs often write federal grants, and despite the grant often being 100+ pages long, there’s only one (and I mean ONE) important page: the specific aims page. You spend 90% of your grant-writing time on this one page. No matter if your grant is $100K or $100MM, you get one page. In the specific aims page, you communicate what the problem is, how you are going to solve it, explain your novel contributions, and what limitations exist in your approach. You must sell and summarize years (often decades) of science and several years of experimentation. And you get one page to do it. Just one. You pour over every single sentence several times over. 11 pt minimum font and narrow margins are the only saviors of this exercise. My postdoctoral advisor taught me how to write this one page, and I consider it one of the more valuable things I’ve learned over my career thus far. Although the problem is, in a business peppered with pptx, it’s not a valued skill. But I’m practicing what I preach and have decided that this semester, I’m not preparing any pptx slides for class lectures. That’s right, I’m teaching and lecturing this semester with no PowerPoint. It's freed me to think about other types of materials, more focus on class discussions, the use of videos or other types of content for learning. I'm focused on the content I'm delivering as opposed to spending time making sure text boxes are in perfect alignment.
I think there’s a lot of truth that a one-pager or a concise narrative will beat a slide deck any day of the week and twice on Sunday. What are you doing, why are you doing it, and how do you do it better than anyone else? If you can say that with a couple paragraphs and maybe one illustration, you’re ahead of the game. Why do you need anything else?
If you disagree, answer this: what amazing slide deck has been your most memorable? Yeah, same.