When PowerPoint Becomes a Cultural Disease
This last rainy Sunday, I leafed through Fortune magazine’s 2006 “100 Best Companies to Work For” issue. Since Genentech is prominently featured in my upcoming book, I was especially interested to note that the company was rated #1—the best company to work for.
The Fortune article did a nice job in describing the vibrant, “flout conventional wisdom” culture of the company, but one statement of CEO Arthur Levinson caught my eye. It’s about PowerPoint, which on the surface has nothing to do with culture but in reality has everything to do with it.
I’m all in favor of PowerPoint—I use it myself in corporate presentations. But PowerPoint can be used to camouflage as well as enlighten. We’ve all sat through PowerPoint presentations which are so tediously glutted in obscure data and so humdrum in gobbledygook that they deflate our capacity to think critically. Or alternatively, they are so technologically “gee-whiz” eye-popping that they distract us from the business at hand. These types of presentations are often symptomatic of a culture where obscure communication trumps clarity, or where style trumps substance.
I suspect Levinson would agree. In a December 2005 e-mail to senior managers, he bemoaned “…the spread of unintelligible, gibberish-laden PowerPoint presentations…I have recently sat through several presentations that were simply incomprehensible—mind-numbing, bloated discourses that were full of buzzwords and otherwise devoid of meaningful content. This is a serious problem, and the worst part is that it’s spreading like the disease it is.”
Genentech knows physical disease, and Levinson knows cultural disease. What’s it like in your company? When PowerPoint obscures rather than enlightens, when it sucks out peoples’ energy rather than excites them with compelling information, when it’s more of a show than a force for problem-solving, and when engineers, marketers, department managers, and such are as personally preoccupied in preparing PowerPoint slides as they are in candidly confronting tough problems—then the organization is deep in a cultural morass. I’m not exaggerating. Apparently, neither is Levinson. Clear communication is the glue that holds your organization together. Nip the PowerPoint disease in the bud.
One more thing. Calling in a consultant might aggravate the problem, according to Levinson. Consultants, in his view, do more “corporatespeak” than anyone. Come to think of it, they do more PowerPoint too.
The Fortune article did a nice job in describing the vibrant, “flout conventional wisdom” culture of the company, but one statement of CEO Arthur Levinson caught my eye. It’s about PowerPoint, which on the surface has nothing to do with culture but in reality has everything to do with it.
I’m all in favor of PowerPoint—I use it myself in corporate presentations. But PowerPoint can be used to camouflage as well as enlighten. We’ve all sat through PowerPoint presentations which are so tediously glutted in obscure data and so humdrum in gobbledygook that they deflate our capacity to think critically. Or alternatively, they are so technologically “gee-whiz” eye-popping that they distract us from the business at hand. These types of presentations are often symptomatic of a culture where obscure communication trumps clarity, or where style trumps substance.
I suspect Levinson would agree. In a December 2005 e-mail to senior managers, he bemoaned “…the spread of unintelligible, gibberish-laden PowerPoint presentations…I have recently sat through several presentations that were simply incomprehensible—mind-numbing, bloated discourses that were full of buzzwords and otherwise devoid of meaningful content. This is a serious problem, and the worst part is that it’s spreading like the disease it is.”
Genentech knows physical disease, and Levinson knows cultural disease. What’s it like in your company? When PowerPoint obscures rather than enlightens, when it sucks out peoples’ energy rather than excites them with compelling information, when it’s more of a show than a force for problem-solving, and when engineers, marketers, department managers, and such are as personally preoccupied in preparing PowerPoint slides as they are in candidly confronting tough problems—then the organization is deep in a cultural morass. I’m not exaggerating. Apparently, neither is Levinson. Clear communication is the glue that holds your organization together. Nip the PowerPoint disease in the bud.
One more thing. Calling in a consultant might aggravate the problem, according to Levinson. Consultants, in his view, do more “corporatespeak” than anyone. Come to think of it, they do more PowerPoint too.
posted by Oren Harari at 1:01 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home