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.
Re:Should have kept his rant to PowerPoint (Score:5, Interesting)
[...] You should expect to get fired in any industry when you say that to your boss or the media.
Who else here thinks that is exactly what he wanted. He's a Ph.D., stuck in the reserves in a sinecure job in Afghanistan. He just wants to go home.
Re:Powerpoint in the military (Score:3, Interesting)
The presenters you've seen are doing it wrong. The presenter must put important information on the slides but it is still up to the audience to fill in the gaps with notes. I love the 3 slides/page handout because it comes with a handy note-taking area next to each slide.
Re:His commanding officer... (Score:3, Interesting)
In another article I read there are some 1800 LT colonels, and 700 actual troop commanding jobs for them in the british army. that is just asking for trouble.
You got your numbers wrong. One of these lieutenant colonels is supposed to command 700 troops. The number was that there are about 100 times that many in the British army, so 100 LT colonels would be needed. Out of 1800. Not 700, but 100.
Re:see power point can cost you your job (Score:2, Interesting)
I recently got out of the military. Powerpoint is used A LOT in the military because A LOT of the people being briefed are only able to handle highly formatted, repetitive, infovomit.
Re:see power point can cost you your job (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is that Powerpoint, like Word, defaults to making it very easy for the user to do stupid things or does stupid things by default.
Changing the font size on a slide should be difficult because you should very rarely if ever do it. Fitting more than 4 bullet points on a slide should be hard because you should very rarely if ever do it. There shouldn't be any templates that let you put half a billion graphs and a picture on one slide. Backgrounds shouldn't be complicated and busy by default. There shouldn't be default colour schemes that make Egyptian Hieroglyphs easy to read or reminds people of the good old days of green on black monitors.
Transitions shouldn't be something one picks out of a line up, they should be something you look up how to do because you have a good reason. Unless you are trying to emulate the wipes from Star Wars then you have no good reason to go wiping slides from left to right distracting your entire audience. The default font for body text on a slide should be big enough that it is not only easy to read but also makes it impossible to write an essay on the slide.
Most people are crap at giving Powerpoint presentations but can you really blame them? It's a piece of shit that just cant compete with something like Beamer for sensible defaults. It practically begs you to do 500 slides filled with wipes, animations, walls of text, half a billion shitty Excel graphs with crappy hard to understand axes, stupid colour schemes, shitty backgrounds and walls of text and then rush through the presentation like your morning coffee was laced with methamphetamine.
Re:see power point can cost you your job (Score:3, Interesting)
I do not understand this whole thing. The slide [msn.com] touted in your link as the epitome of what is wrong with PowerPoint slides (what does a complicated diagram have to do with presentations?) looks very useful. It illustrates many relationships between the many elements involved, and illustrates how ANSF, for example, has no effect on the economy or infrastructure or vice versa.
Admittedly there is too much information in it, it should be split in 2 for showing institution interactions and concepts, and strength of relation should be shown by line thickness.
I routinely deal with very similar charts for biochemistry and intracellular signaling. They are a godsend for those times when you get lost and forget which element does what, and with complicated systems I get lost every 5 minutes.
Re:Powerpoint in the military (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Brilliant analogy! As a physics prof I've had colleagues express surprise that I use electronic slides at all (I actually use OpenOffice since its maths with OOoLatex is far superior to PowerPoint). However I use them as you describe interspersed with more detailed derivations/examples on the whiteboard and while it took a little trial and error to get the balance between the two right it seems to work very well for me now and the students love have the slides as a framework to annotate.
Re:Powerpoint in the military (Score:2, Interesting)
I love the 3 slides/page handout because it comes with a handy note-taking area next to each slide.
I hate those things. Unless you are a very concise note taker, there is never enough room for decent notes, and IMHO they make the slide itself way too small. Also, (and I know this is as much the presenter's fault as the format) I HATE when the slides are "made available" electronically by distributing .pdf's of them in that format.
I'm in the USAF... (Score:5, Interesting)
... at least once a month, I get an e-mail informing me that there's a commander's call, or some such event.
It never actually says this in the e-mail body, though. The actual date, time, and location, is in a single-slide Powerpoint file, attached to the e-mail.
Powerpoint isn't the problem, people's over-reliance on it is the problem.
Re:Powerpoint in the military (Score:3, Interesting)
Even if you don't bother learning your own presentation beforehand, powerpoint can be an improvement with the presenter view. You can essentially write exactly what you're going to say on the screen you see, and just put the important points up on the main screen.
Needless to say, lazy presentations using -any- format or technology will be inferior to a well thought out presentation using a chalkboard or even charades, but I suspect a lazy powerpoint presentation could be nominally better than a lazy chalkboard presentation.
It's certainly better for those of us who find ourselves going off on pointless tangents when we're actually in front of people. Get me in front of a crowd talking about my work, and it suddenly becomes stream of consciousness. Even working off a paper outline, I'll catch myself going into unnecessary detail at certain points and skipping ahead before looking down at the paper and then backtracking, losing anyone who may have still been following. It's like "OOH! And I should mention this which when I was preparing the presentation thought was non-essential, BUT IS AWESOME!"
I do realize that this is something which could be corrected by practicing the presentation several more times, but I don't always have that kind of time.
2 Types of military man (Score:1, Interesting)
1) The Warrior. He's here to fight, kill, and die. Generals Patton, MacArthur, Mattis, Chesty Puller, etc.
2) The Beancounter. He's here to make sure the Warriors get what they need to do the job.
Unfortunately, the current DoD setup emphasizes the Beancounter. When a beancounter rises to power, if he has no warrior spirit, it is almost always a bad thing. The beancoutners do not know how to fight, they only know how to work a budget. Unfortunately where the Warrior would say "we cannot by without XX, we must have it to achieve the mission" the Beancounter says "ok, we cant have XX but I got you a YY and two ZZ's, use those instead, even if they're useless".
Im being harsh. But I'm making a point.
There's been too much emphasis of politics and asskissers within the military complex. They need to get rid of all the political animals and replace the ass kissers with ass kickers.
When you give a job to do, fine, we'll do it. Just shut the hell up and get the f out of our way and let us do it. The problem is along with all this politcal bullshit theres too much micro managing, telling the military how to wage war. Last I checked, waging war was the military's area of expertise, not the politicians'
But this kind of environment is a breeding ground for the beancounter / political state of mind. And it needs to stop.
Not just the military (Score:1, Interesting)
"Like most military organizations, structure always trumps function."
Like most any organization, structure always trumps function.
Re:Powerpoint in the military (Score:3, Interesting)
I daresay many people here read faster than most people talk and comprehend speech.
Presentations are good for people who have little idea of the subject material. They are also good if entertaining your audience is part of the requirement. People who know about the subject material are fine getting it in formats similar to research "papers, manuals, "errata" or similar.
Perhaps the Generals don't need to know the details. But the details are often important. Why does a bunch of important people have to waste time getting schedules synchronized and sitting down for some powerpoint presentation? If the information is important enough can't they just get in their email so that they can go over it thoroughly, and then call/instant message the relevant people if they have questions?
Whatever it is, I think they are doing things wrong, even their "practice for war" is a sham (more about supporting the military industrial complex than actually winning wars?): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/sep/06/usa.iraq [guardian.co.uk]
Looking at what is happening in Afghanistan[1] I think the US military should have seriously learned from what Lt Gen Riper did (and the bigger picture implications).
[1] http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/02/18/analysis.afghanistan.shadow.governors/index.html [cnn.com]
As long as you have the constraint that genocide is unacceptable you get diminishing returns from being able to kill more and more people, or destroy more and more with a single weapon. In fact it is counterproductive when you start having too much "collateral damage".
So figuring out who to kill for maximum effect is what you need to do, and getting your version of what happened out to the rest of the population is important.
Re:I'm in the USAF... (Score:3, Interesting)
Only once a month?
In the agency I work for, we used to get noticed of meetings / workshops / retirements, etc. at least once a week that way. (Look, I can insert clip art!) Luckily, it's gone down in the last year.
Unfortunately, my mom's a recently retired staff officer from a DoD organization, so I still get notices of newborns, holiday parties, etc, as those one-slide power point files.
Re:Powerpoint in the military (Score:2, Interesting)