ER = No More PowerPoints ?

[Olav23]

kcowan, that is great!

I have been with my company for about 3 years now. I have seen it grow from 70 people to 350. It is like personally experiencing a nimble fun company growing into a megacorp. My calendar has exploded into an entire block of meetings every 2-3 days. I literally get double booked from about 11am to 4pm on Fridays now. Many of these meetings are just referred to as "working groups". Tell me that isn't an oxymoron. It is basically an excuse to have no agenda, and sit around and gab about topic du jour. We generally keep it a technical discussion, but nothing comes out of it except another hour wasted.

And of course it has grown from wasting time of 2-3 people, to now 10-15 people; as well as the amount of meetings doubling to tripling per week as the projects have multiplied.

It is sorta getting out of hand, but at the same time, you feel like you become the odd-person out if you say something like "I will not be attending if you do not have an agenda or a goal." So, the norm continues.

How do you guys deal with this? I believe networking is a big part of the job, and being in IT, with constant worries of outsourcing and layoffs, you have to do your best to grow your "friend base". That way when the proverbial ax falls, you have a support group to bug for opportunities.

So, I feel it is sorta the catch-22. I want to work towards a larger goal, and make these meetings more useful, but if the other participants are unwilling and I throw up my hands (and decline the invite), I look like a jerk.

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

People really have to listen to what you're saying?

That was pretty much my point to my boss. I wanted to talk to people and have an open dialog where people are paying attention. Instead we got people reading stuff and not really paying much attention, and the meeting pretty much would go by how the presentation was written.

Charts and graphs and pretty pictures sure can go a long way to explain something complicated to describe verbally. But too much of it is a problem.

 

[Bobbi]

Olav, you are stuck unless the highest ranking person in the "working group", or your common boss, gets on an efficient meeting kick. You know, boss issues email stating, no meetings w/o an agenda, time limit, etc. Maybe you have some meddlesome HR people who can be effectively occupied with this project: call it "managing change". Good luck.

 

[rs0460a]

kcowan, that is great!
How do you guys deal with this?

I retired (on May 1). No more .PPT or "working groups"

- Ron

 

[sidney]

Hope you don't mind me jumping in here. I am about to pull the proverbial plug next month. I am responsible for my co. European ops. Each quarter I do a 30 minute update to the CEO and the other suits... I use one slide:

• England
• France
• Germany
• Spain
• Sweden
• Italy
• Central Europe countries
• Russia

I get the award for maximum slide re-use .. get to use the same slide every quarter. This way I get to say what I want depending on the mood of the group.

Cheers,

Sidney

 

[ladelfina]

sidney -what a riot!

This is precious: our tax dollars at work..
http://www.newfluwiki2.com/upload/CDC_Op-plan_bigW.jpg

I love the upside-down bird and the "Where's Waldo?" guys!

 

[FinallyRetired]

My son told me he recently attended a conference in which Power Point slides were forbidden. He said it was the best conference he had ever attended, people were actually attentive and listened to the speakers.

 

[chinaco]

I am having trouble taking all of this in... could someone create a powerpoint and give me an overview of the evils of powerpoint.

 

[FinallyRetired]

I am having trouble taking all of this in... could someone create a powerpoint and give me an overview of the evils of powerpoint.

Here's a Power Point presentation on how to do bad Power Point.
[SIZE=-1]www.sckls.info/sysserv/tutorials/powerpt/BadPowerPt.ppt [/SIZE]

 

[kcowan]

Olav, you are stuck unless the highest ranking person in the "working group", or your common boss, gets on an efficient meeting kick. You know, boss issues email stating, no meetings w/o an agenda, time limit, etc. Maybe you have some meddlesome HR people who can be effectively occupied with this project: call it "managing change". Good luck.

We had a similar problem, and I would just show up for the last 15 minutes and ask politely for a summary. They eventally accepted it because I said I was double-booked but did not want to miss the meeting entirely.

It was interesting to ask different people to summarize the same meeting! Eventually they appointed a chairman who would summarize for the group.

 

[HFWR]

And of course it has grown from wasting time of 2-3 people, to now 10-15 people; as well as the amount of meetings doubling to tripling per week as the projects have multiplied.

Use to attend (by force) our morning module meetings, where, in a nutshell, 20-40 people explained the causes for down tools and on-hold material to a dimwit without a clue! (instead of actually repairing tools and getting material off hold...)

Just guessing, but I'd bet that meeting cost $10k/day in labor charges alone...

 

[Achiever51]

I once had a boss who called a Monday morning (8:30) staff meeting every week...attendance mandatory. 15 people, each of whom had to give a summary of the previous week's business and a DETAILED prospectus of the current week's activities (i.e., "I have a meeting scheduled with XXX on Tuesday at 2 pm to discuss YYY"; "On Thursday, I'm flying to Washington to meet with ZZZ on ___.") The meetings would last a minimum of 2 hours -- sometimes 3 -- and a few of the older guys would actually fall asleep during the meeting. (15 people x 3 hours x 52 weeks = 2,340 hours a year listening to others reading from their day planners!)

When PowerPoint was introduced, boss thought it would be a great idea to have everyone do their presentations on screen. That made it soooo much more interesting...and allowed the staff to spend part of Friday afternoon preparing for the #*%& meetings!

This went on for months...until one of us had the brilliant idea of suggesting that boss invite his new boss to attend one of these meetings. New boss walked in, sat thru the first PP presentation (with handouts, of course) -- turned to our boss and asked him to come to new boss' office after the meeting. Never heard what they discussed -- we certainly guessed -- but effective immediately, no more Monday morning staff meetings!! (And boss was gone within six months....oh happy day!)

 

[Meadbh]

Once upon a time, I had a boss who decided we had too many committees. So he set up a committee to decide what to do with them: the Committee on Committees!

 

[Cb]

...I remember my first couple of presentations at Powerpoint crazy megacorp. I was scheduled to give a talk to a room full of people and provided 3 slides with 4 bullets on each for a 2-3 hour talk. I was thoroughly assured by the young lady that there was NO WAY that I could speak to 12 bullets for several hours, and she was immediately proven wrong. Then she took me out for drinks, but thats another story.

Wow! That's bad-ass, Bunny. You're like the James Bond of Powerpoint.

Cb

 

[Sandy]

I remember reading that Brian Eno (Talking Heads) was using PP for some of his artistic outlets, but the details escape me at the moment

 

[Nords]

Dismay, disgust, disbelief (Triple-D Effect) when you show up and make that 15 minute presentation without handouts! People really have to listen to what you're saying? How productive is that

Well, the reason those people were at the meeting is because their bosses made them attend in lieu of the boss.

Then when you didn't [-]validate their parking[/-] give them anything to take back to their boss to prove that they'd attended the meeting, you made them work twice as hard as they'd originally expected-- starting with having to actually listen to your brief instead of just courier the handouts back to the boss' cave.

You guys are missing out on the military major-command staff system where you don't get to schedule your meeting with the admiral until you've given their EA & flag sec your PowerPoint briefs and had them explain to you why you can't use them to brief the admiral. (Hint: The answer is never "less" or "fewer", and you haven't even actually briefed the EA or the flag sec yet.) Eventually your "brief" will expand to occupy enough of the space-time continuum, gobbling up all resources unlucky enough to fall into its gravity well, where your gravitational effects can no longer be ignored, attracting the flag officer and all the other major bodies in the galaxy to your [-]black hole[/-] presentation.

Usually the brief will arrive at the conclusion that the CONOPs needs to be rewritten.

 

[rockyj]

I remember reading that Brian Eno (Talking Heads) was using PP for some of his artistic outlets, but the details escape me at the moment

Perhaps you're thinking of David Byrne?

DavidByrne.com - Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information

Brain Eno has his own trajectory through the rock avant garde, with some time as a producer/collaborator with Talking Heads along the way.

Talking Heads - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Brian Eno - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For the record, I think PowerPoint can be useful but agree it's way overly relied upon - a crutch for the speaker - often deady boring - sometimes distracting - in much usage.

Love the Gettysburg slides.

 

[Sandy]

Sparkythewonderdog, thanks.

I tend to get myself in trouble when I rely on my memory rather than quickly check the facts.

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Wow! That's bad-ass, Bunny. You're like the James Bond of Powerpoint.

More like the james bond of flapping my lips...

 

[Nords]

That avatar of the bunny & tiger makes a great photo, and any bunny owner can recognize by the body language that the tiger is in a heap o' trouble, but I'd hate to see the rest of the film...

 

[RunningBum]

kcowan, that is great!

I have been with my company for about 3 years now. I have seen it grow from 70 people to 350. It is like personally experiencing a nimble fun company growing into a megacorp. My calendar has exploded into an entire block of meetings every 2-3 days. I literally get double booked from about 11am to 4pm on Fridays now. Many of these meetings are just referred to as "working groups". Tell me that isn't an oxymoron. It is basically an excuse to have no agenda, and sit around and gab about topic du jour. We generally keep it a technical discussion, but nothing comes out of it except another hour wasted.

And of course it has grown from wasting time of 2-3 people, to now 10-15 people; as well as the amount of meetings doubling to tripling per week as the projects have multiplied.

It is sorta getting out of hand, but at the same time, you feel like you become the odd-person out if you say something like "I will not be attending if you do not have an agenda or a goal." So, the norm continues.

How do you guys deal with this? I believe networking is a big part of the job, and being in IT, with constant worries of outsourcing and layoffs, you have to do your best to grow your "friend base". That way when the proverbial ax falls, you have a support group to bug for opportunities.

So, I feel it is sorta the catch-22. I want to work towards a larger goal, and make these meetings more useful, but if the other participants are unwilling and I throw up my hands (and decline the invite), I look like a jerk.

If you can't get out of a meeting that isn't worth your time, how about taking your laptop to these meetings and trying to be as productive as you would be working at your desk? Sitting in the back or in a corner can help if you want to be discrete.

I telecommute, so it's easier for me to do, though in one meeting my director could hear my keyboard clicking and asked what I was doing, and I explained, truthfully, that I was working on solving a customer problem. I did apologize for not putting the phone on mute. He still sounded a bit miffed that I wasn't focused on the meeting though.

Powerpoint is a nice target to attack but their were other presentation packages before that which were no better and in fact took longer to put together. It's been a long time since I've used it for anything other than a class I've given to customers or a formal presentation at a conference.

 

[Jake46]

At Megacorp, PP's were utilized heavily at management meetings. What I never understood was why someone would make a PP presentation and merely read all the words on the slide -- like no one else in the room could read! The worst experience was when a manager started her PP presentation, hit a bottom, left the room and then a recording of her voice merely repeated all the words on the slides as they rolled out. That was the final straw.

 

[Achiever51]

At Megacorp, PP's were utilized heavily at management meetings. What I never understood was why someone would make a PP presentation and merely read all the words on the slide -- like no one else in the room could read! The worst experience was when a manager started her PP presentation, hit a bottom, left the room and then a recording of her voice merely repeated all the words on the slides as they rolled out. That was the final straw.

I worked with one [-]moron [/-]guy who thought that the idea of PP was to put as many words on a slide as possible...small font, maybe 400 words or so -- then he'd turn his back to the meeting and read every last word! Oh, and every slide was introduced with those cheesy transitions -- fly ins, shutters, fade in/out, swirling words, "ta da" sounds --- oooohhh, it grates my teeth even now!

 

[Jeb-NY]

I certainty can't add anything new to the negative PP comments already given, accept been there, hated it.

Three events came to mind reading the postings.

Back in my MegaCorp days anyone being brought in for an interview for a technical position was expected to do a presentation. Most in recent years were the standard PP snore. One fellow came in, setup two blank flip charts and proceeded to blow everyone a way for an hour. Completely from memory he talked and drew examples as he explained his work. He got the job even though he was the underdog going in.

Same MegaCorp, a couple of fellows that were equally fed-up with the boring meetings of the week, started a Friday afternoon cookie talk series. People could talk on any topic they wanted, work related or not. Cookies were supplied and no PP was allowed. One of the best and longest lasting talk series ever. It may still be going on for all I know. Talks covered everything from string theory to mid-evil musical instruments. Several talks generated ideas that led to patents being issued.

My last PP moment happened a few months ago (I'm pushing the 2 years FIREd) a charitable board I sit on had a fellow suggest that his wife would be happy to put a presentation together for the organization and that she knew PP. It was unanimously decided that a presentation would be good to have but she could not use PP. Between those retired from MegaCorp and those that wish they were retired from MC, not one good argument could be given for boring audiences with a PP presentation.

Jeb

 

[slepyhed]

I have a slide taped up in my cubicle. It has a picture of George C. Scott dressed up like Gen. Patten, and says

"If Patten were alive today:

'No one ever won a war by making Power Point slides for his country. He won it by making the other poor, dumb bastard make slides for his country!'"