Does PowerPoint make us stupid?
Posted on May 23rd, 2010 by MichaelWe Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint
WASHINGTON — Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti.
“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter.
The slide has since bounced around the Internet as an example of a military tool that has spun out of control. Like an insurgency, PowerPoint has crept into the daily lives of military commanders and reached the level of near obsession. The amount of time expended on PowerPoint, the Microsoft presentation program of computer-generated charts, graphs and bullet points, has made it a running joke in the Pentagon and in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.)
Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.
May 24th, 2010 at 11:57 am
power point is good within reason,in a bullet point kind of way,it worked for me. i understood the facts withont the pictures [they basicaly put me to sleep] i have always tried to make decision of facts[white cap thinking]style hopefuly.
May 24th, 2010 at 5:21 am
Power Point was originally supposed to be an abbreviated way of connecting the dots to make a point.
I believe in the ‘String Theory’ that all things in life can be connected. However, if you cross enough strings, you will end up with a lot of knots & Knot Heads that lead to dead ends.
May 23rd, 2010 at 12:31 pm
Hope one day we can go back to standing up in front of people and brief without cartoons. I like providing a point paper or decision paper and ensuring I can brief the facts without a bunch of slides.