The mystery is why everyone is using presentation software for communication that is not a presentation.
Predicable, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this post since first reading it.
The mystery of this is that everyone complains about slides-driven work cultures, but the revealed preference is that people like it because everyone does it. So…slides must…work…?
(One answer is that it’s not the people who make the slides that like them, it’s management whose staff makes the slides for them that like it. I suspect that if management had to make their own slides, we would have less slides.)
I know many people whose professional lives revolve around building slide decks. It’s what runs major decisions in their work. All those layoffs we’ve been seeing are likely reasoned out in endless revisions of slides. Every ornate keynote and product announcement? Slides. Deciding which ice-cream flavors to have for a community meetup? Slides.
In that way, you can look at slides as “the receipts” that responsible decision making was made, that management spent a lot of time on this. “We spent hours agonizing over laying off thousands of people.” A huge chunk of hours were spent getting the slides just right, and they are proof of that agony.
Slides are the visible exhaust of corporate decision making that proves the work was done, not just flippantly uttered in a hallway between meetings or done via tapback emojis.
I came to understand, accept, and kind of like slides when I did M&A at Dell for a couple of years. I’ve also seen many deck virtuoso at work over the years. I have strong aesthetic and information architecture opinions on slides, and I think I have a good grasp on using slides for org hacking tactics.
I mean: I make a lot of slides. I like slides.And not even on a “most decks are crap, but the good ones are works of art” kind of way.
But, I still have very mixed feelings. Reading prose is often easier and faster, and has higher fidelity for information transfer. People forget that with slides, the presenter needs to be there to explain what is going on in the slides.
Conversely, people who are not good at corporate slide craft don’t realize that these slides are not keynotes and they should not have just one big picture per slide. (And, yes, Gemini’s image generation capability is great - but really, if you find yourself putting images like that in your slides, just swap it out for some bullet points instead that explain the point you’re trying to make.)
I’m sent slides a lot that look great, have wonderful graphics and perfect text - you can see the blood and tears dripping off the slides. Game recognized game in deck-craft.
But I’m often left thinking “but what is our strategy?” or “but what does this mean I should do?” or, simply, “weird use a chevron there, Duchamp…and could you make that an inline link instead of just pasting the URL awkwardly at the bottom of the slide like a 6th grader?” Except I keep that last part to myself because I strive to be a kind co-worker.
Most of the ways people use slides are not good. They should have just written a doc or recorded a short video…or just rambled at one of the robots and had it convert it to a short doc/email.
And yet…slides. You can hang all the maps of Napoleon’s March on the walls behind your webcams, but still, slides run the world.
Better get your deck ready.
Related, I suggest this advice and, sort of, ode to slides.