DID you know that the average time people spent in meetings doubled from 10 hours a week in the 1960s to today’s average of 23 hours a week?
This comes from the Harvard Business Review, as Geoffrey James states in his Inc.com article. Its title, “PowerPoint’s Flaws Show the Fundamental Problem with All Business Presentations,” shows how this tool that many of us use has actually hindered productivity by doubling the amount of time each week we spend in meetings that go on endlessly. They have, in fact, become “information dumping monologues.”
And he is not alone in his thoughts on PowerPoint. In the same article, he quotes Former Defense Secretary James Mattis who famously said, “PowerPoint makes us stupid.” This is because “like many among today’s top military brass, he sees our culture’s addiction to PowerPoint as a thread to the efficiency and effectiveness of our armed forces.”
Carmine Gallo, author of Five Stars: The Communication Secrets to Get from Good to Great, recalls how in his 2018 annual letter, Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos “repeated his rule that PowerPoint is banned in executive meetings.”
She goes on to say that “in his letter, and in a recent discussion at the Forum of Leadership at the Bush Center, Bezos revealed that ‘narrative structure’ is more effective than PowerPoint.”
According to Bezos, “new executives are in for a culture shock in their first Amazon meetings. Instead of reading bullet points on a PowerPoint slide, everyone sits silently for about 30 minutes to read a six- page memo that’s narratively structured with real sentences, topic sentences, verbs, and nouns.”
This she discusses in her Inc.com article “Jeff Bezos Banned PowerPoint in Meetings. His Replacement is Brilliant.”
It’s also no secret that the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs was no fan of PowerPoint for internal meetings. James quotes him in another Inc.com article, “The Real Reason Steve Jobs Hated PowerPoint,” saying, “I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking. People confront problems by creating presentations. I want them to engage, to hash things out at the table, rather than show a bunch of slides. People who know what they’re talking about [and] don’t need PowerPoint.”
In the same article, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is quoted as saying, “As soon as you get to the space where you actually have something to play with and something tangible, that’s when the real learning happens. Get out of Keynote, get out of PowerPoint, and just start building and showing it off to people.”
Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer joins in these voices saying, he prefers, that before most meetings, he prefers that “you send me the materials and I read them in advance.”
But why this disdain for PowerPoint? James says that, “smart leaders hate PowerPoint because business presentations straight jacket meetings into a slow-moving liner direction. This discourages conversation and discussion, turning the other attendees into passive chair potatoes. PowerPoint, when used as designed, reduces attention, understanding, and worst of all, retention.”
James also points out that Jobs “wanted meetings to be interactive, to have people ‘hash things out’ as part of a creative process. For this to happen in an intelligent manner, people in a meeting should be actively involved. Showing a slide deck, however, puts everyone but the presenter in a passive state, which delays discussion to the end of the presentation.”
By banning PowerPoint from meetings, James says that CEOs like Bezos and Dorsey hope to “1) reduce the average time they and their employees spend in meetings, and 2) switch the focus of these meetings from information-dumping to issue-discussing. They clearly believe that the change of focus will result in faster and better decision-making.”
But what to do? Gallo mentions in her article that “narrative memos have replaced PowerPoint presentations at Amazon,” a move she describes as “brilliant.” Here’s why:
Our brains are hardwired for narrative. Gallo says that prominent neuroscientists she has spoken to recently confirm that, “the human brain is wired for story. We process our world in narrative, we talk in narrative, and the—most important for leadership—people recall and retain information more effectively when it is presented in the form of a story, not bullet points.”
Stories are persuasive. She, likewise, says that “neuroscientists have found emotion as the fastest path to the brain. In other words, if you want ideas to spread, story is the single best vehicle we have to transfer that idea to another person.”
At the Bush Center Forum of Leadership, Bezos mentions that he is “actually a big fan of anecdotes in business. He goes on further to explain why he reads customer e-mails and forwards them to the appropriate executive. Often, he says, the customer anecdotes are more insightful than data.
Bullet points are the least effective way of sharing ideas. Bullets don’t inspire. Stories do, says Gallo, adding that some of the world’s most inspiring speakers like Bezos, Elon Musk, or Richard Branson don’t use bullet points.
That’s because “stories inform, illuminate and inspire—all things entrepreneurs strive to do.”
We will discuss other smarter alternatives to PowerPoint in next week’s column.
PR Matters is a roundtable column by members of the local chapter of the United Kingdom-based International Public Relations Association (Ipra), the world’s premier association for senior professionals around the world. Millie Dizon, the senior vice president for Marketing and Communications of SM, is the former local chairman.
We are devoting a special column each month to answer the reader’s questions about public relations. Please send your comments and questions to askipraphil@gmail.com.
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