The future of publishing: Why ebooks failed in 2000, and what it means for 2010
This post is adapted from a speech I gave at the O’Reilly Tools of Change publishing industry conference in February. It’s a great time for ebooks. There are at least six ebook reader devices on the market or in preparation….
Harvard Business Publishing: Umair Haque - What Apple Knows That Facebook Doesn’t
Too often, we don’t recognize the power of platforms - even in Silicon Valley. Nilofer Merchant, Rubicon’s CEO, writes frequently on the topic and ties it together with strategy. The piece below by Umair Haque, draws an interesting difference between…
If all you have is a PowerPoint hammer, everything starts to look like a bullet point
Why do we use PowerPoint so much? Is it to convey information more effectively or merely to communicate more information? How much thought do you give to your choice of tool in light of the objective in communicating the information: instruction, background, decision aid, or don’t know?
The truth is that we communicate information for a variety of reasons, but the rise of PowerPoint has caused people to stop linking how they communicate with the business objective. PowerPoint is a powerful tool for some purposes, but actually an obstacle to others. T.X. Hammes has an really excellent article on how PowerPoint is changing decision making in the military.
Notwithstanding the issue of PowerPoint skills, at its core PowerPoint forces us into a template-based communications process that is especially bad for complex decision making. With apologies to Abraham Maslow, if all you have is a PowerPoint hammer, everything starts to look like a bullet point. Poor choices have consequences. By using the wrong tool, you are actually holding your company back and causing poor decision making.
At Rubicon we strongly advocate collaborative decision making. While a group of people can author a PowerPoint presentation (collaborative work), PowerPoint presentations don’t foster collaborative decision making as well as other tools. Here are just a few tools we use but are too-often neglected in the business world:
- Backgrounder. Write a briefing paper discussing the issues. You can distribute it via email, but it needs more thought than the typical email.
- Brainstorming. Meeting with people individually or in small groups or good old-fashioned brainstorming with a paper flip chart are hard to beat.
- Collaborative discussion. You’ll get a much more free-wheeling discussion if you prepare and distribute a briefing paper in advance rather than using the first 20 minutes to run through bullet points. Your bullets won’t do justice to the meaty issues and people won’t be fully prepared.
- Whiteboard. Not only does the projection screen generally cover the whiteboard, but the structure of PowerPoint smothers the collaborative spontaneity of grabbing a marker and saying, “What if we changed this?”
The damage goes beyond merely decisions that get made without being sufficiently thought out and discussed. T.X. Hammes points out that the 20-minute PowerPoint briefing frees leaders to meddle in many decisions that are more properly made lower in the organization, meaning the organizations are less capable.
I’m a consultant, so I’m not about to say we should get rid of PowerPoint. However, we all need to remember it is only one of a number of communications tools we have in our toolbox and often there is a better tool available for a given task. If an important decision is at stake, saving the decision makers a few minutes via a flawed process isn’t a good thing.
Categories: Innovation, Learning
Tags: collatortive decisionmaking , La Fetra , PowerPoint
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