Power point and the military

[dieseltaylor]

Some of you guys may know this but I was shocked at GenFranks. As a non-fan of Powerpoint and Excel graphs I cannot claim not to rejoice in them being slammed.

Implicated in 2 space shuttle disasters. Banned by a combat commander in Iraq. Making sense of our collected and stored information is hard enough. Does PowerPoint thinking make it harder?

The New York Times quotes Marine Corps Gen. James N. Mattis: “PowerPoint makes us stupid.” And Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the fight to secure the Iraqi city of Tal Afar, likened PowerPoint to an internal threat.

An Army platoon leader in Iraq, Lt. Sam Nuxoll, said he spent most of his time “Making PowerPoint slides.” When pressed, he said he was serious.

According to the book “Fiasco” by Thomas E. Ricks, Gen. Tommy R. Franks, who commanded American forces, did not issue explicit orders on how he wanted the invasion conducted, and why. Instead, General Franks just passed on the vague PowerPoint slides that he had shown to defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

Full article here, and its worth reading the links.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=878&tag=nl.e589

[JonS]

[dieseltaylor]

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[Los]

BTW this is totally true.

Stupid as this sounds, when the war started (I'm retired now), because I was master of PPT in my unit, I was able to ensure my guys got some of the most critical operational tasks on some of our missions because I made the slides. The CO would come by and see me working on them and I would carefully insert our names where I thought all the critical action would be. he'd see the snazzy animations and say sure this looks great and then we were in. After a few ops, we had established ourselves as utterly reliable and we were off to the races by then.

Eventually the time it took to make these stupid PPTs became an obstacle given the tempo of ops. They and the stupid very long op orders that went behind them were dumped in favor of an execution matrix when we got a more right thinking commander.

Also I knew the CO at the time was prione to rants about getting what he wanted, so I was careful to keep a wav file ready to play up on the PPT PC that I could invoke at just the right time from Austin Powers regarding wanting the sharks w frikken laser beams on their foreheads.

Los

[Affentitten]

God I remember my last Marketing Director who would call us in for "a catch up" meeting. He'd then fire up the projector. He never knew you could maximise the slides so it would always be in outline view. You'd see Slide 1 of 78 sitting there and your heart would break. He'd have slides with about 300 words of tiny text on them and read it out. He'd have a slide with a pie chart entitled "Competitor market share" with all the percentanges clearly labelled and proceed to say "This slide shows our competitors' market shares. As you can see, ABC has 14.8 percent. BCD has 13.1 percent, DEF has 12 percent....."

[Stalins Organ]

There's nothing wrong with good power point presentations - both of them are fantastic!