New York Times: PowerPoint-Columbia story, September 28, 2003

It is particularly helpful to have the remarks of Columbia Accident Investigation Board about PowerPoint widely distributed. The Board makes distinctions among various forms of presentation, suggesting inherent problems with the tool.

This will all be old news to readers of this board.

The word “slide” is curiously old-fashioned, a relic of carousel slides. How about “lide,” a word midway between “slide” and “lie”?

Slides, Big Business, Federal Government, and “Yes-Men”

There are a couple of interesting stories from Lou Gerstner’s early days after joining IBM in the early 90s. He found IBM’s use of “foils”, IBM’s term for their version of PowerPoint slides, to be a key facilitator to executive obfuscation of the problems within the failing company.

The following is an excerpt from the September 1999 Washington Monthly feature
article: “What Lou Gerstner Could Teach Bill Clinton – Lessons for government
from IBM’s dramatic turnaround“ by Robert Worth.

Worth
Article

…Gerstner’s first task was to change the ingrained attitudes that had prevented
IBM from seeing the world around it. These are often described as a product
of the company’s unique place in American business — as one old company saying
went, “there’s the right way, the wrong way, and the IBM way.” But IBM’s problems
were really not so different from those of any large bureaucracy. “If you
leave institutions in place for too long, whether governments or corporations,
they get focused on maintaining themselves as institutions,” says Jim McGroddy,
who ran IBM’s research labs from 1989 to 1995. “What they achieve for the
customer becomes very secondary.” At IBM, as in the federal government, this
meant that people who made criticisms — however valid — were often ignored
or even punished. “The operating principle was, don’t make the boss unhappy,”
says one longtime IBMer. This attitude, she adds, did incalculable damage
to the company. Legitimate criticism of products and strategy never percolated
up to the people who needed to hear it…

…Gerstner witnessed this “good news only” syndrome at one of his early
meetings, where he heard a presentation from the chip-making division, which
was widely known to be having problems. The head of the chip division told
Gerstner that the problem was that there was no mainframe business, so his
division couldn’t make money making chips for mainframes. Gerstner stopped
him right there and asked why the mainframe guy had just told him his division
was doing fine. As it turned out, the mainframe division was in trouble —
but they couldn’t bear to admit it to the chief.

“Gerstner made it very clear very quick that you tell the boss the truth,”
says one IBMer who witnessed the turnaround. How? For one, he spent much of
his time during the first few months talking to IBMers, consultants, and customers
about the company and making it very clear that he wanted unvarnished truth.
“He was the best listener I have ever seen,” says Sam Albert, an IBM analyst
who worked for the company from 1959 to 1989. Early in his tenure, Gerstner
sat down with Albert, and as he asked him what he thought about the company,
he took five pages of handwritten notes — not exactly typical CEO behavior.

Perhaps Gerstner’s most effective tool for enforcing honesty in the company
was the way he conducted meetings. In the old IBM, meetings were “like a high
mass, with supporting documents as thick as your arm,” says Dan Mandresh,
who was Merrill Lynch’s chief IBM analyst for 20 years. The most famous ritual
at these meetings were the visual-display “foils” execs used to project charts
and graphs onto the wall. “We used to describe talks as a ‘six-foil talk’
or a ‘four-foil talk,'” one veteran recalls. “There were IBMers who literally
didn’t know how to talk without foils.” Meetings were too large, because people
were included based on their rank, whether or not they had anything of substance
to add.

In the government it’s the same story. For many federal bureaucrats, meetings
are an end in themselves, a way to create the impression of activity (and
taxpayer money well spent) where there is none. Being invited to them is a
reflection of rank and status, so that people attend them regardless of whether
they have anything to contribute or learn. At the Energy Department, for instance,
meetings of the Office of Strategic Planning, Budget, and Program Evaluation
have been attended by dozens of representatives from other offices, whose
job is often confined to writing notes about the meeting for their own offices
— regardless of whether it has any relevance to their own work.

Gerstner recognized that all this pointless ceremony was crippling IBM. One
of the first things he did was to convene his top 20 executives and tell them
all to write a short paper, with no visuals, answering these questions: What
is your business? Who are your customers? What is your marketplace? What are
your strengths and weaknesses? Who are your main competitors? He told them
to get it done in two weeks, and that he would meet with each of them one-on-one
shortly afterward to discuss it.

That may sound pretty reasonable to an outsider. At IBM, it was revolutionary.
“People weren’t used to writing in sentences,” recalls Jim McGroddy. When
he met with Gerstner, “it was just the two of us standing at a table. No projector.”
The meeting went well; McGroddy convinced the new boss that he was willing
to help the company change. Others, however, tried to bring out the foils,
and “Gerstner jumped all over them,” says McGroddy. According to IBM lore,
Gerstner actually walked up to the projector at one meeting, turned it off,
and told the exec, “If you can’t explain it to me in your own words, you don’t
understand it.” Before long the foils were gone. With them went all the old
rituals that had made meetings such a waste of time. He insisted that meetings
be as small and as quick as possible. To many company veterans, this felt
like a slap in the face. But Gerstner made his intention clear: “I am trying
to avoid the concept of reward being associated with these meetings.”

So the disease of slides and "yes yes" manager types continues to plague
all types of organizations. It is the senior leaders’ responsibility to ensure
that the facts are properly communicated instead (in spite of?) of hype, fonts
and pretty pictures.

In today’s NY Times, there are three letters responding to the Powerpoint article: two defending Powerpoint, one criticizing it’s use in college lectures. The best part is a graphic of a Powerpoint-like rendition of a letter to the editor (apparently contributed by the Times’ editorial staff), complete with heirarchical bullets. In what is to me an amazing (and ill-informed) irony, one of the defenders of Powerpoint uses Lincoln’s Gettysburg address as his example!

Tom Peters Latest Guru Book and PowerPoint

Tom Peters is just now kicking off his book tour for his latest, Re-Imagine!

In his second chapter he has listed 20 ways to Self-Destruct. (Note: If you
are not familiar with Peters’ most recent direction, self-destruction is what
is required to be successful over the long term).

Number 13: Honor Results…not Great PowerPoint Presentations.

This point continues to build on what has been this thread’s theme.

Here is the latest on the subject. Although it contains no new facts,
it does show that the topic of interest is still considered newsworthy by the NYT.

NYT
Article: PowerPoint Makes You Dumb – December 14, 2003

[link updated March 2005]

In the February 2nd, 2004 international edition of Newsweek, page 54, there is an interview with Imelda Marcos:

Q: A documentary about you called “Imelda” competed at Sundance. How do you feel about that?

A: I met the director, and, [as] it was a documentary, I was all for it. [But] I don’t know what it is all about. All our lives, we were committed to a vision, [an] ideology, theology towards human order. So much so I can put it in PowerPoint.