PowerPoint Rant Costs Colonel His Job 194
twoallbeefpatties writes "Wired reports that a 61-year-old reservist in Afghanistan was fired from his job as a staff officer after writing a sardonic op-ed criticizing the daily briefings provided by his taskforce, portraying them as little more than a neverending stream of redundant PowerPoint slideshows. This came after attempts to reform the process by giving his superiors a presentation that, of course, included five PowerPoint slides." Maybe he should have presented it as an art project instead of a complaint.
Should have kept his rant to PowerPoint (Score:4, Insightful)
He should have kept his rant to PowerPoint instead of basically saying he was a part of a worthless organization. You should expect to get fired in any industry when you say that to your boss or the media.
-John
Re:see power point can cost you your job (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately sometimes you can't just talk one-on-one to everyone and you will have to present information to a large group. Your options for presenting information to a crowd:
--vocal: just talking for an hour, which is popular in many religions, and we all remember what the sermon was about last Sunday, right?
--visual text: just endless paragraphs so they can read along which, as far as I can tell, no one does
--multimedia: pictures, audio and video that attempts to explain in a manner easily digestible, hence Powerpoint
Sorry out of the 3 options I'd have to go with powerpoint presentations. I'm not sure what the Colonel would prefer, but I'm pretty sure there would be a quiet riot if someone walked in and just spoke for an hour or put endless pages of text up on a overhead.
Re:see power point can cost you your job (Score:3, Insightful)
Agreed. The content may have been inane, but that's not PowerPoint's fault.
Re:Powerpoint in the military (Score:3, Insightful)
Powerpoint also ASSUMES your audience is stupid.
Too stupid to grasp the facts unless presented as bullets.
Powerpoint has the presenter making the notes (on slides) that the audience should have made. Essentially the presentation seems to go directly to notes without bothering to stop in anyone's head along the way.
Cliff notes minus the student.
Re:PowerPoint sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree. I think Powerpoint, like all of Microsoft's products, does an excellent job of making someone who is not very good at a task, look at least competent. Microsoft seems utterly devoted to form over function. If it were not for Microsoft products, 90% of people in the computer industry today would be exposed for the incompetent boobs that they are.
Re:Powerpoint in the military (Score:5, Insightful)
No, god damnit, it doesn't. Power point is a tool designed to be used in presentations. It is NOT AND HAS NEVER BEEN a substitute for presentations. You're SUPPOSED to put your points in bullets because you're there giving the presentation to elaborate upon said bullet points. The audience is not "too stupid" to grasp what you're talking about. However, if you put three paragraphs of text on one slide and talk at the same time then the audience has to decide whether to listen to you or read your slides.
The notes field is there so that you can distribute the presentation to people who weren't there, or to save your audience the time and work of writing down their own notes. This gives you the ability to add information relevant to your presentation that should not be directly discussed. For example, you might simply put an equation and its solution on a slide. You can show your work in the notes for anyone who wants to check this. It also prevents different people from copying down incorrect things. (i.e. your slide says "3.14159" and someone writes down "314159" by mistake.)
If you have found that your audience is "too stupid" to understand your presentations when you read directly off of the slides then the problem is with you, no one else. Not the audience, and most certainly not the tool. Seriously, bitching that power point results in bad presentations is like complaining that a hammer results in injuries when you smack yourself in the head. Power point is absurdly easy to use, the only reason presentations are bad is because people don't take the time to make good ones, and anyone who calls them on this gets the same treatment of the colonel mentioned in the article. Anyone who criticizes bad presentations gets the axe, and people continue to make bad presentations.
Re:He should be happy (Score:5, Insightful)
The military is a very large organization, and like any large organization, it has lots of people who are involved in running the organization rather than actually doing whatever the organization actually does. Based on my own service, I'd wholeheartedly agree that we need a lot fewer staff officers and a lot more boots on the ground, but pretending that the military -- or even that portion of the military deployed to the theater of operations -- is ever going to consist solely of people who are actively engaged in killing the enemy is just silly. An army without a command structure isn't an army at all, it's an armed mob.
Re:Should have kept his rant to PowerPoint (Score:2, Insightful)
".... basically saying he was a part of a worthless organization."
Strawman.
he said no such thing. He said they were using power point incorrectly.
It's not saying you part of a worthless organization if you correct they way someone is using their weapon, or correct them when they don't file document correctly. This is no different.
Re:see power point can cost you your job (Score:3, Insightful)
It IS possible for something to just be terrible and still widely used for reasons of pure inertia and arbitrary (likely unintelligent) mandates. Not everything that is popular is also necessarily good.
Re:He should be happy (Score:3, Insightful)
If he's 61, he's lived through a few world-class military-political fuckups and knows better than you do about what happens when you let the terrorists run around unabated, and that the only way to prevent that is to put someone in harm's way, and if the pussies behind the keyboards won't do it, then you have to do it yourself.
You can thank him when he gets home. I hope he decks you.
A Lamborghini Dump Truck (Score:3, Insightful)
Our military is being wasted as an occupying army.
In a war (a real war) the dumbass powerpointers would have their sorry asses shuttled out of the way. In Afghanistan, they're running the show. That's a sign just how messed up it is over there.
Re:let's put it in perspective (Score:3, Insightful)
The Taliban are inveigled into civilian populations throughout Afghanistan and half if not all of Pakistan.
If we were simply to nuke those areas we'd get about a 0.01% ratio of bad guys to collateral damage. Then the rest of the world would rightfully come after us.
So no. When that idea was presented (probably milliseconds after 9/11, probably by GW Bush), it was rejected as more expensive than just nuking ourselves.
It's at this point you should expect someone to tell you to grow the fuck up. And if you didn't expect that, then you're even farther behind than I thought.
Re:A Lamborghini Dump Truck (Score:5, Insightful)
They run the show in every war. The thing about Afghanistan is that it's not a war so much as an attempt to start an economy and a cultural revolution while policing random thugs.
Which means the people at the rear don't have anything of substance to work on, and are engaged in continually statusing each other on the things they put in place years ago hoping to accomplish the mission they knew was a marathon of cyclic behaviors, not a race to beat the Rooskies to Berlin.
It sounds like they could combine the information flows and reduce the HQ by a significant number. But unless the person on top of them does that for them, they're going to continue the status quo, making only incremental improvements, because those show up as just as many bullets on their promotion packets.
Hopefully either Petraeus or POTUS will jump into the circle and make some changes.
Re:Powerpoint in the military (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Powerpoint in the military (Score:3, Insightful)
Nice set of four bullet points there. All you need is some completely irrelevant clip art and a useless animation and you'll be ready to for the CUA.
Re:Powerpoint in the military (Score:5, Insightful)
No, god damnit, it doesn't. Power point is a tool designed to be used in presentations. It is NOT AND HAS NEVER BEEN a substitute for presentations.
Unfortunately, what PowerPoint slides (and presentations) are being used for is a substitute for every other form of communication. Instead of specs, essays, helpful diagrams, and properly organized data, we have slides, slides, slides, and slides. Usually the slides are explained once in one meeting or conference call and then passed around, giving the illusion that information is written down in a usable form. In reality, if you really want to know what's going on you have to call the author (if they even bother to write their name), wasting your time and theirs.
You're right that PowerPoint doesn't force people to communicate poorly, and poor communication has many causes. But PowerPoint does make poor communication easier, and 80-90% of people are using it wrong. The argument of Tufte et al boils down to this: regardless of whether it's a good tool or a bad tool, PowerPoint is not the *right* tool.
Re:Should have kept his rant to PowerPoint (Score:1, Insightful)
are you stupid or just a retard ? go read the fucking article.
Re:see power point can cost you your job (Score:3, Insightful)
Uh..
That slide is absolutely terrible. For one thing, it won't even be legible for anyone not doing the presentation in an IMAX theater, or at least one with individual screens. Certainly not the poorly focused SVGA projectors that seem to go hand-in-hand with it.
Further, there's way too much information on there. People won't be paying attention to the presenter while that things up (at the IMAX presentation room, remember). They won't even be absorbing the information in it. They'll be lazily playing "Euler's Bridges" with the line art.
You don't put an image like that up, except as a joke to help you introduce the glossy, high-resolution B-size handout and packet explaining it, close to the end of your presentation.
The fact that you think it's actually a good idea goes a long way suggesting that powerpoint itself is a big part of the problem.
Re:Powerpoint in the military (Score:4, Insightful)
So what are you saying about them? If it can't be effectively summarized in a single slide of bullet points, I assure you that most of it is going to melt into a buzz in your audience's ears. There is a limit to how much information human brain can absorb at once before you have to stop and think about it, which requires tuning out the lecturer.
There's a reason why PowerPoint is so popular, and that reason is that it allows you to memorize the main points of the representation despite not catching most of the details. Of course, this rises the question of whether it really makes any sense to do the representation at all, rather than just emailing the bullet point list, but oh well.
Re:Handy Note Area (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure there is plenty of room - it's called the other side of the page!
Re:Powerpoint in the military (Score:2, Insightful)