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You can't give a talk today without showing slides. Those are some of the most distressing words I have heard all year. This is yet another example of knee-jerk software practice: Use determined by availability, not need. Executives with good speaking skills don't need slides as they talk, and if they do, their slides should elaborate on their ideas, not repeat them. And executives who lack speaking skills make the situation worse with bad slides that compel them to read their speech instead of delivering it. You can't give a talk today without showing slides. I didn't want to believe it, but then I thought back to last year's Ventura conference, where we invited John Meyer back to address the group again. His ideas and his delivery were as crisp as ever, but alas, this time around, he felt obliged to include slides of bullet points. He had fallen prey to the tyranny of presentation software.
I'm writing this as I watch the French Open tennis tournament on television, and NBC has two of the most popular tennis commentators calling the action: Dick Enberg, a veteran play-by-play professional, and John McEnroe, a former player known for his candor and unabashed opinions. Each of them is required, at various times during the broadcast, to comment on a statistic or a notable fact that is being displayed in a graphic. |
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