During the 2000s, slides became even more ornate. Consultancies evolved their formatting rules, and created fancy data-dense charts. They learned that a 200 slide deck made clients feel like they got a lot for their money.
E.g.:
I vividly remember being shown the charts room in fund manager Fidelity’s huge London office. There were graphs of everything under the sun. Was the theatre of the chart room the big sell to clients, or was it a useful tool for the analysts? No doubt Debenhams' bosses had lots of facts at their fingertips, but data didn’t help them save the business.
In summary, from Russell:
Data is distracting. Most of it is just noise. You’re gathering it because you can, just in case, because it seems valuable. Then you spend ages trying to work out what to do with it. When you should be paying attention to just a couple of bits of it and actually doing something about it.