Finally, Some Reasonable Comments about PowerPoint

I was meaning to write something here about all the articles about PowerPoint--the most prominent being the recent New York Times article about what the Army leadership was saying.

See this article in Slate about how to really communicate. From the masters.

I have an important presentation to make in Kazakhstan soon ... food for thought here.

It's Complicated

An outstanding article in today's New York Times on complexity. They sum up:

Of course, nobody at Goldman Sachs or any other large financial institution meant to wreck the economy. The United States military didn’t invade Iraq or Afghanistan thinking that one day its efforts would be mounted on a bewildering PowerPoint slide. The engineers who designed the BP oil platform that exploded and sank and produced one of the largest oil spills in history built it with multiple back-up systems.

But complexity has a way of defeating good intentions. As we clean up these messes, there is no point in hoping for a new age of simplicity. The best we can do is hope the solutions are just complicated enough to work.