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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.
Apparently he's not alone in his distaste for powerpoint.
He should have kept his rant to PowerPoint instead of basically saying he was a part of a worthless organization. You should expect to get fired in any industry when you say that to your boss or the media.
-John
...Power point corrupts absolutely
You're either with the gargantuan effort to move the drinks cabinet six inches closer to Kandahar, or you're with the terrorists.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
That was good. Not surprised he was fired; but, it was definitely good.
I remember reading about this rant (or a very similar rant) awhile ago and I was wondering what the repercussions would be.
Unfortunately sometimes you can't just talk one-on-one to everyone and you will have to present information to a large group. Your options for presenting information to a crowd:
--vocal: just talking for an hour, which is popular in many religions, and we all remember what the sermon was about last Sunday, right?
--visual text: just endless paragraphs so they can read along which, as far as I can tell, no one does
--multimedia: pictures, audio and video that attempts to explain in a manner easily digestible, hence Powerpoint
Sorry out of the 3 options I'd have to go with powerpoint presentations. I'm not sure what the Colonel would prefer, but I'm pretty sure there would be a quiet riot if someone walked in and just spoke for an hour or put endless pages of text up on a overhead.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
I think you're missing the point (pun intended).
He's talking about just relying on powerpoint to give information. To actually have the slideshow mean something without giving it any real information to start with.
Crap in = crap out. (with pretty graphs and moving icons)
He complains that just having a powerpoint presentation every 12 hours is not the same as having an actual breifing and discussion of information. It's not that you couldn't use powerpoint to do it, but that you have to have, as a goal, the need to actually accomplish something besides presenting a slideshow. Presenting the slideshow not a goal in itself as he claims that it is treated. He mentions that the slides don't even change. Now that would be a hell I would try and avoid.
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
Agreed. The content may have been inane, but that's not PowerPoint's fault.
In another article I read there are some 1800 LT colonels, and 700 actual troop commanding jobs for them in the british army. that is just asking for trouble.
You got your numbers wrong. One of these lieutenant colonels is supposed to command 700 troops. The number was that there are about 100 times that many in the British army, so 100 LT colonels would be needed. Out of 1800. Not 700, but 100.
Seriously, PowerPoint just plain sucks.
I disagree. I think Powerpoint, like all of Microsoft's products, does an excellent job of making someone who is not very good at a task, look at least competent. Microsoft seems utterly devoted to form over function. If it were not for Microsoft products, 90% of people in the computer industry today would be exposed for the incompetent boobs that they are.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Unfortunately sometimes you can't just talk one-on-one to everyone and you will have to present information to a large group. Your options for presenting information to a crowd:
--vocal: just talking for an hour, which is popular in many religions, and we all remember what the sermon was about last Sunday, right?
--visual text: just endless paragraphs so they can read along which, as far as I can tell, no one does
--multimedia: pictures, audio and video that attempts to explain in a manner easily digestible, hence Powerpoint
The delicious irony of explaining the situation with what might as well be a powerpoint slide. Nice bullet points. A+++ would buy again.
More
The military is a very large organization, and like any large organization, it has lots of people who are involved in running the organization rather than actually doing whatever the organization actually does. Based on my own service, I'd wholeheartedly agree that we need a lot fewer staff officers and a lot more boots on the ground, but pretending that the military -- or even that portion of the military deployed to the theater of operations -- is ever going to consist solely of people who are actively engaged in killing the enemy is just silly. An army without a command structure isn't an army at all, it's an armed mob.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I recently got out of the military. Powerpoint is used A LOT in the military because A LOT of the people being briefed are only able to handle highly formatted, repetitive, infovomit.
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.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The problem is that Powerpoint, like Word, defaults to making it very easy for the user to do stupid things or does stupid things by default.
Changing the font size on a slide should be difficult because you should very rarely if ever do it. Fitting more than 4 bullet points on a slide should be hard because you should very rarely if ever do it. There shouldn't be any templates that let you put half a billion graphs and a picture on one slide. Backgrounds shouldn't be complicated and busy by default. There shouldn't be default colour schemes that make Egyptian Hieroglyphs easy to read or reminds people of the good old days of green on black monitors.
Transitions shouldn't be something one picks out of a line up, they should be something you look up how to do because you have a good reason. Unless you are trying to emulate the wipes from Star Wars then you have no good reason to go wiping slides from left to right distracting your entire audience. The default font for body text on a slide should be big enough that it is not only easy to read but also makes it impossible to write an essay on the slide.
Most people are crap at giving Powerpoint presentations but can you really blame them? It's a piece of shit that just cant compete with something like Beamer for sensible defaults. It practically begs you to do 500 slides filled with wipes, animations, walls of text, half a billion shitty Excel graphs with crappy hard to understand axes, stupid colour schemes, shitty backgrounds and walls of text and then rush through the presentation like your morning coffee was laced with methamphetamine.
I do not understand this whole thing. The slide touted in your link as the epitome of what is wrong with PowerPoint slides (what does a complicated diagram have to do with presentations?) looks very useful. It illustrates many relationships between the many elements involved, and illustrates how ANSF, for example, has no effect on the economy or infrastructure or vice versa.
Admittedly there is too much information in it, it should be split in 2 for showing institution interactions and concepts, and strength of relation should be shown by line thickness.
I routinely deal with very similar charts for biochemistry and intracellular signaling. They are a godsend for those times when you get lost and forget which element does what, and with complicated systems I get lost every 5 minutes.
It IS possible for something to just be terrible and still widely used for reasons of pure inertia and arbitrary (likely unintelligent) mandates. Not everything that is popular is also necessarily good.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
If he's 61, he's lived through a few world-class military-political fuckups and knows better than you do about what happens when you let the terrorists run around unabated, and that the only way to prevent that is to put someone in harm's way, and if the pussies behind the keyboards won't do it, then you have to do it yourself.
You can thank him when he gets home. I hope he decks you.
Our military is being wasted as an occupying army.
In a war (a real war) the dumbass powerpointers would have their sorry asses shuttled out of the way. In Afghanistan, they're running the show. That's a sign just how messed up it is over there.
The Taliban are inveigled into civilian populations throughout Afghanistan and half if not all of Pakistan.
If we were simply to nuke those areas we'd get about a 0.01% ratio of bad guys to collateral damage. Then the rest of the world would rightfully come after us.
So no. When that idea was presented (probably milliseconds after 9/11, probably by GW Bush), it was rejected as more expensive than just nuking ourselves.
It's at this point you should expect someone to tell you to grow the fuck up. And if you didn't expect that, then you're even farther behind than I thought.
If Powerpoint is your hammer, everything looks like a thumb.
... Damian Conway Presentation Akido plug... if you've never caught one of his talks, you must. There isn't much info on the web, because he never releases the presentation slides (the slides should back up the speaker, not replace him/her) and only a few people have written reviews of his talk (here's one.
The one thing about Damian, he practices what he preaches. In his other talks about Perl, he follows his own rules. The slides are a tool, not the focal point. You really want to listen to what he says, and the presentation screen adds some spice, but doesn't distract the listener from *him*.
-- "In order to have power, I must be taken seriously." -Mojo Jojo
... at least once a month, I get an e-mail informing me that there's a commander's call, or some such event.
It never actually says this in the e-mail body, though. The actual date, time, and location, is in a single-slide Powerpoint file, attached to the e-mail.
Powerpoint isn't the problem, people's over-reliance on it is the problem.
Uh..
That slide is absolutely terrible. For one thing, it won't even be legible for anyone not doing the presentation in an IMAX theater, or at least one with individual screens. Certainly not the poorly focused SVGA projectors that seem to go hand-in-hand with it.
Further, there's way too much information on there. People won't be paying attention to the presenter while that things up (at the IMAX presentation room, remember). They won't even be absorbing the information in it. They'll be lazily playing "Euler's Bridges" with the line art.
You don't put an image like that up, except as a joke to help you introduce the glossy, high-resolution B-size handout and packet explaining it, close to the end of your presentation.
The fact that you think it's actually a good idea goes a long way suggesting that powerpoint itself is a big part of the problem.
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