PowerPoint Rant Costs Colonel His Job

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.

Comments

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[garyisabusyguy]

Just google, "Powerpoint makes you stupid"

The first that I had heard about this was from a NASA scientist following the Columbia accident. He said that there were too many variables and choices that had to be left out of slides because there was a limit to how much detail could be displayed given (readable) font size and screen resolution

This leads to multiple slides to cover a single topic, and the loss of fresh visual memory as the presentation moves from slide to slide.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/29/AR2005082901444.html

Re:He should be happy

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Replying to myself to clarify: I'm not arguing with Colonel Sellin's point at all; he's absolutely right, and the service could use a lot more officers like him. I was replying only to Simonetta's comment that "If he isn't ... actively engaged in killing people ... then he has no business being there," which shows complete ignorance of how the military functions.