Presentations, PowerPoint, and George Orwell

From a Q&A with Teresa A. Taylor, COO of Qwest, that ran last September in the New York Times:

Q. Is there anything unusual about the way you run meetings?

A. Well, the first is by saying, “Do we all know why we’re here?”

Q. Do you really say that?

A. Yes, because so many people say, “No, I don’t know, I was invited.” . . . I get invited to a lot of meetings where someone wants to brief me, or bring me up to speed on something, which usually means that they want to tell me about their project and then ask me for money. So I open with: “Do we all know why we’re here? Are we making decisions? Are you going to ask me for something at the end?” I try to get that out right away.

It’s amazing, there will be eight people in the room and they all have a different answer of what’s going on there. I’ll also say, once we’re clear about what we’re doing: “Does everyone need to be here? If anyone feels like they want to leave right now, that would be fine.” Every once in a while a couple of people will say, “Yeah, I could use this time back,” and they get up and leave.

Q. But you could chew up 10 minutes just going around the table.

A. Sure, I think it’s a good 10 minutes. I really do.

Q. What about presentations?

A. I use a little saying, which is, “Be brief, be bright and be gone.” It’s also not uncommon for me to say, “Why don’t we put the PowerPoint aside for a minute and why don’t you just talk to me?”

Q. What’s the maximum number of PowerPoint slides you want to see?

A. Six. But I actually prefer no PowerPoint. To be honest, I’d rather just talk. A really great meeting, to me, is someone who is just talking to me and might give me a piece of paper or two to support something, but that’s it.

A couple things strike me about this exchange. One, Ms. Taylor makes a good case for why tools like PowerPoint are best managed by pushy, efficiency-minded people. Like all technological tools, they magnify the qualities of the user. If you’re timid, PowerPoint enables your timidity. If you’re one of the most restless creative minds of your generation, technologies like PowerPoint are more likely to showcase your incredible avidity.

Either way, a limit on its use — six slides per presentation — is good for all parties. Taylor is essentially saying that she forces presenters to edit themselves, and call me biased, but I believe editing tends to clarify one’s thinking.

Two, technologies like PowerPoint make it easy to pass off sloppy thoughts. “Just talk” is less forgiving. There’s no place for half-baked ideas to hide when you’re “just talking.” To borrow from Orwell again, when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself.

In Persuasion Nation, or, Thoughts on a Productive Lunch

If a presentation is too glossy and slick, the message is diluted.

Every intellectually curious person I know is operating at 95% capacity. They barely have an hour to synthesize all of the facts they gather each day.

This means the potential impact of every single act of communication is diluted.

At the same time, competition for our attention is intense. The challenge for anyone who wants attention—for for-profit purposes or not—is overcoming our skepticism and fatigue.

So the question becomes: How to talk to people who may not know us but already don’t trust us? How do you address people who don’t have time to listen?

For-profits and non-profits alike who can figure out how to overcome our ennui will do better than those who fail to realize where their real communications problems lie.

Meaning is made by one’s audience. All you can do is reduce your probability of being misunderstood.

This is easier said than done. I’d recommend professional help.

This is undoubtedly an instance of “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” but I further imagine that this challenge requires blunt, fresh language that paradoxically, imperceptibly, triggers nostalgia. Triggering longing is secondary.

Accomplishing the above requires $10 sentences.

From the notebook

“Writing is the art of saying things in the right order.”

(Who said this? I found this line, unattributed, in a pile of my notes. But it surely isn’t original to me, and Google is playing dumb on the subject.)

Founding Father channels Deepak Chopra, Tony Robbins

I’ve just discovered that on a number of quasi-motivational websites, the following quote is attributed to John Hancock:

“A chip on the shoulder is too heavy a piece of baggage to carry through life.”

Sometimes it appears in an extended version:

“The greatest ability in business is to get along with others and influence their actions. A chip on the shoulder is too heavy a piece of baggage to carry through life.”

A gentleman who expired in 1793 alluding to “emotional baggage”? Dale Carnegie-isms? I call nonsense. The concept of getting along “in business” — and referring to it as such — didn’t appear until well into the 19th century. Never mind what would have been, if Hancock did say these things, a remarkably anachronistic style of speaking. (As in…I’m reminded of Buck Rogers.) How do such bizarre fantasies propagate?

at the cleaners

If you have a close and supportive relationship with your laundry lady, she’ll show you the place on the computer screen where it says how many U.S. dollars you’ve spent on cleaning clothes since February 2004, when you first moved into the neighborhood.* True. The software most dry cleaners (and your more advanced drop-off laundries) use keeps a running tally for each customer profile. Check it out.

My number? $1390.50. I’m not going to comment further because I haven’t yet decided how having spent $1390.50 at Reliable Laundry & Cleaners makes me feel. A little sands through the hourglass, honestly.

*Before anyone starts to think I’m some sort of swell, I live in a big city. There’s no washer and dryer in my apartment building. (If there were. . . eh. Anyone who’s read the epilogue to HTBU will understand my reluctance to explore the basement.)

career guidance from decorating books

How to Win Friends and Influence People-style advice finds its way into a treatise on feng shui:

“Even small objects jutting into close quarters can be detrimental. A U.S. government employee’s office problems were traced to an attic handle hanging down in his hall. Although he worked hard and well, his boss always criticized him. The handle apparently programmed him to receive poor treatment: Every time he walked down the hall, he either had to duck or be grazed on the head, eventually molding his ch’i into a defensive, uneven shape and causing people to pick on him.”

A government employee ducking to avoid collision with an attic handle (?) hanging from the ceiling every time he leaves his office…sounds rather Brazil. (I do appreciate, though, how it’s discussed as an either/or proposition: either you duck, or you hit your head. Your choice.)

“The antidote was, of course, to shorten the handle. Now, the employee reports office and home life are smoother. He works less, but his boss respects and treats him better.”

Of course. (O.K., I don’t really mean that. Consider that half-sarcastic.) The quote’s from Sarah Rossbach’s Feng Shui: The Chinese Art of Placement.

more outsourcing

No original writing for the rest of the week; instead, more lengthy quotations from people who — clearly — have more discipline than I. This one I’ve used in the book, in Ch. 7, which is subtitled something like “Helen Gurley Brown on Having One’s Underwear Forcibly Removed.” It’s not what you think (either the Ch. or the quote). It’s about personal charm, and a number of people who’ve read early copies of HTBU have remarked on it. It starts out slight but winds up as rather a challenge:

“Being sexy is being charming, and if you can sum up what charm is, I think it’s total awareness. A charmer has her antenna up and valves open at all times. With sensitive radar she detects what the other person wants to hear and says it. And she senses what he doesn’t want to hear and refrains from saying it. Charming people, either men or women, are usually warm-blooded, affectionate and compassionate, but they are also thinking ahead all the time….

“I had lunch the other day with a charmer, accompanied by her mother. Two of the girls in the party had babbled ten minutes or so about their new office manager whom the mother didn’t know. Presently the charmer said, ‘You know, Mother, he’s kind of like Joe Winslow at the bank…sort of Prussian.’ Mother was back in the conversation.

“This particular charmer, so accomplished she should package it, puts everything in terms of you. ‘You would have loved it.’ ‘You would have fainted.’ In describing a gown she saw at the opera she says it was a little deeper than your red velvet coat. She remembers what you told her last time and asks questions this time. It’s appalling the things people can forget you told them (like your left fender had just been bashed in and your insurance has expired) and never ask you about it in subsequent conversations.”

From Sex and the Single Girl (1962).

Checks

In the New Yorker a few weeks ago, Atul Gawande wrote about a breakthrough in medicine, only the breakthrough was — is — perfectly unspectacular. He was writing about checklists. A few years ago, a critical care specialist at Johns Hopkins named Peter Pronovost discovered that complication and infection rates in I.C.U. patients dropped dramatically when a simple procedural checklist was followed, and nurses were given the authority to stop doctors if they observed them skipping any step on this list. The items on the checklist were “no-brainers,” things everyone involved knew should be done, but that could easily be skipped or overlooked in the rush of an average day. Monitoring just one hospital over the course of twenty-seven months, Pronovost and his associates determined that “the checklist had prevented forty-three infections and eight deaths, and saved two million dollars in costs.”

I imagine other workplaces could benefit from drafting a checklist or two as well. What’s the right way to do something, and minimize potential damage — never mind body counts, but even simple psychic or emotional fallout? I hope whomever you’re working for (or with) spends a few days dwelling on that question in this next year.

Doing It with Style

This just in from Quentin Crisp’s Doing It with Style.  Actually, this book came out in 1981, is now out of print, and hard to find. Think Oscar Wilde, but heftier. The “It” and the “Doing” in the title refer not to sex but to lifestyle, or a way of carrying yourself — what might be called poise, or your m.o., or world view, if by world view you included beliefs on how to dress, talk, and sell yourself. (You should, some argue. Crisp quotes Lloyd George — dead English prime minister — as saying “Once one has assured oneself of food and shelter, which means security, the next thing that matters is advertisement.”) Here are Crisp’s thoughts on the importance of being aware of how other people see you.  He suggests you first make an inventory of your strong points (”which are not to be confused with your best points”); then compare “the truth about yourself when nobody’s looking” to what others seem to see in you (by watching how they react to you, paying attention to how they tend to treat you, etc.). But this is all just lead-up to another — quite handy — piece of advice: 

“One caveat, though. Never ask people what they think of you. The chances are that either they will tell you what they think you want to hear, or they will take the opportunity to prosecute some petty complaint that just occurred to them. Neither offers an accurate reflection of the image you project.”             

I’m not about to make a list of my strong points. (”Lazy!” it would start, “easily distracted” … and then I’d go work on something more interesting.) And I’m having a hard time imagining a real-life scenario in which someone flat-out asks, “So … what do you think of me?” But point well-taken.

Take Better Notes

Last week I made a note to look up “The Decoy of Lying,” by Oscar Wilde. No more information than that. Today, confused, I Google the phrase and get two hits — both links to a website devoted to bluebirds. Actual bluebirds. Say what? It’s humbling, being outwitted by your own notebook like this.