The Undeclared War Against "PowerPoints," (or) How Dodging Bullets Became a Favorite Pastime for the Profession

The "Currency" of Client Communications

Jon Faucette, the manager of Sibson Consulting's desktop media (DTM) department, recently attended a conference on board governance. A presenter's slide shows featured a piece of animated clip art on almost every other slide, says Faucette, who can recall little else about the presentation. His focus and the rest of the audience's attention were glued to the clip art that gyrated incessantly on the large screen in front of them.

In too many PowerPoint presentations, the medium is the message. When that message is weak, it poses serious risks to consulting firms that place sizable bets on the success of their communications with clients and prospects.
Faucette regularly scrutinizes the PowerPoint presentations contained on the take-away CDs from the conferences at which Sibson consultants regularly present to strengthen the firm's brand and thought leadership. "The vast majority of the presentations are just awful," he notes. "There is a huge opportunity to differentiate yourself and your firm by doing a good slide presentation."
Sibson's DTM staff aims to do just that with the "scores" of slides they churn out daily. Each slide, Faucette emphasizes, reflects and communicates
his firm's brand.

PowerPoint presentations also mark the key component of Mercer Management Consulting's communication with clients. Each progress report and intermediate result in a client project is documented in presentation form, and all project meetings are supported by slides, notes Karen Mazur, a Munich-based production manager with Mercer Management Consulting. "Slide presentations are particularly suitable to the concise presentation of complex arguments," says Mazur, who emphasizes that the presentations must be visually sophisticated to succeed.
Bain and Company's Stephen Marquart describes PowerPoint as his firm's "primary currency" when communicating with clients. That importance motivated the firm to hire Marquart, formerly the COO of pioneering business-presentation firm Communispond, as the company's director of client communications five years ago. Other large firms, including Mercer and Sibson, operate similar graphics shops staffed by design and communications experts.
"The kind of analysis our firm conducts is very, very powerful," Marquart notes, "but it also must be very clearly and passionately presented. My job is to make sure that the complex analyses our partners present reach clients in a way that is easy for them to understand, but to do so without dumbing down the analysis."

Bain presenters who use PowerPoint, and most do, tend to use the application's electronic slide-show functionality. Resources Connection presenters, on the other hand, rarely present slides electronically. Instead, they use the software's format to organize their thoughts and then print out and leave behind the documents. Still, Hagler emphasizes that the software is well used and well liked at her firm, as long as it "helps guide a meeting without becoming the meeting."
But presentations overshadow presenters and trenchant analyses when consultants fail to resist the tug of the software's potent capabilities and obliging interface. Sibson Consulting principal Peter LeBlanc uses PowerPoint in each of the 15 or so presentations he performs at international conferences each year. One of his main objectives when developing or massaging his slides, he says, is to resist the software's powerful functionality.
"I once met with an HR vice president, a client, who walked over to his bookshelf, pulled out a bound version of a PowerPoint presentation, and said to me, 'Do not bring back a presentation that looks like this," LeBlanc recalls. "The report was produced by one of our competitors. My client said, 'I paid for this, probably too much. I've never read it. It's too dense.'"

Stop Making Slides

Tufte, who has achieved Drucker-esque status in the design community, makes the same point in his 28-page essay, "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint" (Graphics Press, 2003). He dismisses hefty PowerPoint reports as "physically thick and intellectually thin."
Much of Tufte's strongly supported, well-written criticism has a sharp edge. He denounces the tool's "poverty of content," "obnoxious transitions," and "relentless sequentiality." He depicts tacky graphical examples of PowerPoint "Phluff," warns against "witless" PowerPoint pitches, and takes issue with the tool's "attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch."

Byrne uses the phrase "planet of salesmen" to describes the biases and tendencies of the software in his PowerPoint artwork, which is animated and set to music. "Microsoft would like us to think — as would almost all software vendors — that their product is merely a neutral tool," Byrne writes in the notes that accompany his slide show. He writes that PowerPoint users who rely on the auto content wizard are "subtly indoctrinated into a manner of being and behaving, assuming and acting, that grows on you as you use the program."
Microsoft does not respond directly to these barbs, choosing instead to point out through a spokesperson that plenty of PowerPoint assistance and other resources are available on the company's Office Online service. While that bridge to a sales pitch might reinforce Byrne's point, his creative, entertainingly trippy, and slightly self-deprecating application of PowerPoint also calls into question whether it is the tool that is responsible for sucking the life out of a conference room, as he and Tufte suggest, or the presenter.

Because PowerPoint is the weapon of choice for the vast majority of consultants who conduct presentations, criticism of the software, particularly when it comes from an authority like Tufte, is worth considering. Marquart, for example, describes Tufte as an "intellectual guru" and echoes many of Tufte's points. But he also believes that the design expert sometimes glosses over the "furious pace with which one often has to generate slides in the business climate." PowerPoint is built for speed, which is a mighty valuable capability when the tool is in the right hands.