Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti.
“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter.
The slide has since bounced around the Internet as an example of a military tool that has spun out of control. Like an insurgency, PowerPoint has crept into the daily lives of military commanders and reached the level of near obsession. The amount of time expended on PowerPoint, the Microsoft presentation program of computer-generated charts, graphs and bullet points, has made it a running joke in the Pentagon and in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.
Read it all from the front page of Tuesday’s New York Times.
I was at a great legal eduction seminar where the lecturer condemned PowerPoint – he said could you imagine Martin Luther King giving the “I Have a Dream” speech with power point?
As usua,l the Old Gray Lady is behind the times, again. Rage against Powerpoint has been around for quite awhile. For more info. see Edward Tufte’s essay, “Powerpoint Does Rocket Science,” here – http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB&topic_id=1&topic;=. Tufte is the reknowned author of “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information” and general acknowledged as one of the world’s foremost authorities on presenting information.
Also, for a laugh see Lincoln’s Gettyburg address updated for the Powerpoint generation at this web site – http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/. It shows how Powerpoint can truly dumb down a topic.
When I worked for General Electric, a part of the core qualifications for analytical positions was only half humorously stated as “must be able to give good Powerpoint.”
Thank goodness when I was on active duty PowerPoint hadn’t been invented, but as a division staff officer in the USAR, it was the bane of our existance. The generals wanted more and more gee-whiz PowerPoint presentations to take to their numerous conferences and impress their peers and superiors and the presentation almost became an end in itself. “PowerPoint ranger” became a term of derision for those staff officers adept at producing the complex presentations. They became the fair-haired boys of the command group but were so consumed with constructing the PowerPoints that they were virtually useless for any other staff functions.