The Communication Blog

"Okay, I want you to take your tank and turn right, no, left, wait...um..."

I’ve come close to saying that, in a slightly different fashion. As someone trying to help a client, and keep the client, a consultant may wish not to offend the client with direct language; instead, one helps the client understand why it might be that…

Aw, screw it. Enough with the nice-nice. Here’s the skinny: PowerPoint can, indeed, make the presenter look stupid, and make the audience feel like the presenter is stupid for making everyone sit through a bullet-laden, sentence fragment populated, “What, there’s a different way to do this?” presentation.

To all my clients, assoiciates, friends and others (?!?), you all know my views on this. Now, as quoted in today’s New York Times, there’s some muscle that supports my never-ending quest to rid the world of bullets, text-dense slides, and slide-reading presenters. The link to the story is at the bottom or this post, but here’s a sprinkling of it:

“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint  Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He  spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint  presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal  Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal  threat.

“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of  control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in  the world are not bullet-izable.”

For those of you who haven’t seen the alternative universe of visual, well-designed, effective PowerPoint slides, I know it can be hard to conceive of a world where PowerPoint slides make you say, “Ooo!” instead of “Oy…”. Until I can show people that world, though, it’s so good and, concurrently, so sad, that the biggest guns of the world’s best place to be have to point out how goofy it is to use PowerPoint to disseminate critical information.

Bullets don’t really mean anything. Those small circles in front of fragments or words only exist to indicate “what follows cannot stand alone to convey what I intend.” There is enough information without context in our lives; we don’t actually need software that enables us to compose nice looking incomplete sentences and short strings of words. What we need is more exposure to presentations that work.

I realize the article has ‘war’ as its focus, but the core of the story — how to effectively, successfully, convey critical information using presentation software and technology — is relevant to every industry sector.

In General McMaster’s view, PowerPoint’s worst offense is not a chart like the spaghetti graphic, which was first uncovered by NBC’s Richard Engel, but rigid lists of bullet points (in, say, a presentation on a conflict’s causes) that take no account of interconnected political, economic and ethnic forces. “If you divorce war from all of that, it becomes a targeting exercise,” General McMaster said.

Commanders say that the slides impart less information than a five-page paper can  hold, and that they relieve the briefer of the need to polish writing to convey an analytic,  persuasive point. Imagine lawyers presenting arguments before the Supreme Court in  slides instead of legal briefs.

As you read the last words of the article, remember them as you put together your next presentation.

Hmm…might be time for me to put on a seminar, and call it…

Senior officers say the program does come in handy when the goal is not imparting  information, as in briefings for reporters.

The news media sessions often last 25 minutes, with 5 minutes left at the end for  questions from anyone still awake. Those types of PowerPoint presentations, Dr.  Hammes said, are known as “hypnotizing chickens.”

How'd they like your presentation?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/world/27powerpoint.html?th&emc=th

Steve Jobs revealed the iPad (it’s still happening as I write this), the world’s worst-kept secret.

I’m watching live picts and comments via Endgadget.

Bottom line: it is waaaaayyyy cool.

And, as a musician, any story about Les Paul sets me to shakin’; I acquired my ’69 Les Paul Custom over thirty years ago, and those early models still reign as the Stradavarius of electric guitars.

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Les Paul died last week.  I am sending this out to honor a man who not only made huge contributions to my profession but also made an impact on me personally.  I shot Les Paul in the early 90′s for a show about home recording studios.  He had the original home recording studio – because he invented the idea – and was a true original in so many ways. 

Les invented the electric guitar and multi-track recording.  He also enabled singers to sing into microphones from inches away (which greatly increased vocal clarity) and he had many other inventions.  Before digital processing he created a small box into which he plugged his guitar and made it sound like 100 guitars playing simultaneously.  When Les Paul was making records, all other recording artists showed up at recording studios when the label told them to and didn’t hear the finished piece until they heard their own record.  Les would deliver finished tapes to his record label and confound them on how he was achieving such clear and clean sound.

Although Les Paul was an accomplished musician and a brilliant innovator I’ll remember him more because he was so genuine, engaging and funny.  We shot him at his house in New Jersey just after noon on a fall day.  His agent was very strict about our allotted time and told us that we only had him for two hours.  At 2pm we packed up, sent our NY crew home and thanked him for his time but Les wasn’t ready to let us leave.  Apparently he liked us so he asked (in his way) “Are you boys hungry?”  We said sure and soon we were all sitting in a New Jersey diner listening to his stories.  The one I remember best was this:

One night after a gig Les was driving home.  It was around 3am and it was snowing really hard.  He was on an unfamiliar road trying to see just what that sign up ahead said.  Which way was that arrow pointing?  Right or left?  When he got too close he realized that it was pointing in both directions.  He slammed on the brakes and slid across the road and up onto someone’s lawn.  He was sitting in his car, bleary-eyed trying to figure out what to do.  Close behind him was a cop car who pulled up on the lawn behind Les, lights flashing.  The cop comes up to the window and asks “Sir, have you been drinking?”  Les responds “Well I sure as hell ain’t no Goddamn stunt driver!” 

The cop laughs.  When Les hands him his drivers license the cop recognizes his name.  Luckily the cop was taking guitar lessons and tells him that he’s having trouble making some chords.  Les sees an opportunity and gets out of his car, pops open the trunk and hands the cop his guitar.  He tells the cop to show him what’s bothering him.  Illuminated by the headlights of the cop car as the snow continues to fall the cop puts one foot up on Les Paul’s rear bumper and tries to make a difficult chord.  At that point Les tells us “Just then I look back at the cop car and see his partner in the front seat leaning way forward and looking through the windshield trying to figure out what the hell’s going on…  I got out of that ticket.”

After the diner we went back to his house to drop him off.  Again we said goodbye but Les said “You boys want a beer?”  We went inside and sat around his kitchen table drinking beers until 1am.  This is one of the most memorable days I’ve had in the business.  I’ve shot a fair number of celebrities but very few of those experiences come close to my day with Les Paul.  This extraordinary man was such a regular guy.  I’m very lucky to have been able to spend a day with him. 

The world is a better place because there was a Les Paul. 

JIM IACONA
Director of Photography
San Francisco Bay Area
510-749-0055

www.jimiacona.com

cool video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AP7qI5RVtxw

The Communication Newsletter

Here’s the article that appeared in the spring edition of the Communication newsletter; the summer edition goes later this month. The Communication newsletter is always free, and you can get it via snail mail or email. Just drop me a line with delivery info if you’re interested.

Clarity,  Context, and Vision

It’s intimidating to move forward with sales, marketing or growth plans in this dark economic climate. You need vision to find your way through these tough times.

Visual context
Whenever you use visual context to present data and information, your audience has a greater opportunity to understand your message. If your information is complex or obscure, it’s important to present it in a way that everyone can understand.

Detailed explanations and formulae explaining how heated water produces steam may be accurate, but more people will understand the process when graphics or an animation are used to show that as the temperature of water rises, it energizes molecules, the water boils and creates steam.

Visual context is certainly effective for presentations in general, but it can also be used in many other formats and situations to insure a better grasp of business, operations and processes, customers, or of dynamics in the marketplace.

Visual context to show what you know and what you don’t know
The “what you know and what you don’t know” phrase received wide exposure over the last few years, but as a business and engineering concept it’s been around for ages.

I’m a vociferous proponent of applying reverse engineering to anything that needs to be understood, from “How do I put on a trade show?” to “How can I convince everyone that I’m a space alien?”. Car companies and electronics manufacturers acquire their competitors’ products and take them down to the tiniest screws. Successful businesses do the same, and the really good ones do it to themselves.

The know/don’t know approach can be analogous to reverse engineering, disassembling something, having all the pieces laid out in front of you, then reassembling everything to understand how it works. A few years ago a TV series followed the head of London’s Heathrow airport as he left his office to work for a short period in every operational position, from janitorial to ticket counter.

He found it rewarding, eye-opening, and occasionally frustrating. He found out what he didn’t know.

Many executives and managers can’t undertake the same internal trip, but by doing an internal operations audit and then taking that data and giving it context, what’s known and unknown can be remarkably revealing…when presented well.

For all the 3-D effects, colors and perspectives you can use to design a bar chart, it’s still a bar chart. Most audiences would prefer to look at just about anything than a bar chart. Take that chart’s data and give it real-world, effective context, and the difference can be staggering.

If you need to demonstrate the effectiveness of a new shipping system, don’t just put up a bar chart. Take the time-to-ship data of the old and the new systems and use animated stop watches (on separate slides, not side-by-side) and show the difference. It’s such a strong visual concept I venture you envisioned it as you were reading about it.

Include visuals of what’s happening in other departments during the before and after comparisons, and you’ve created a more informative, overall vision of how the new system affects everything.

Context provides vision
Don’t fixate on my specific example. What’s important is realizing the contextual value that well-chosen pictures, graphics, or movement add to any presentation, study, evaluation or report. Visually formulating and presenting information gives everyone, including yourself, the greatest opportunity to understand, and, in understanding, there is clarity of vision.

 And in times of darkness, vision is important, wouldn’t you agree?

Since this blog is about communication, in every form, I find this next bit of info interesting and frightening. As reported by several outfits, including one of my faves, Baynewser, Michael Jackson’s death brought down a few of the country’s most sophisticated technological ‘net icons, to wit:

“King of Pop Dies, Internet Crashes

First, TMZ broke the story of Michael Jackson’s death. Then it crashed as readers stormed the site. Then the LA Times posted a report on Jackson, and it crashed.

“[N]networks still buckle under the weight of traffic when something like today’s events shakes the whole world,” Dean Takahashi wrote. “In some ways, the servers worked today. As one site went down, another picked up the torch. But the transitions were rocky.

“As tragic as Michael Jackson’s death is, it’s only a small taste of what would happen in a true calamity,” he concluded, in a post titled, appropriately enough, “Michael Jackson is a test. He is only a test of the emergency broadcast system.”

Heed this warning, because it is serious. We got things happening in the world that we need to communicate about, and just because something is out of sight — the nation’s grid, telecom networks, the Net and all the millions of things it carries about us and for us every moment — doesn’t mean that it doesn’t require attention and oversight.

It’s an area of communication that we rely on more than ever in our lives, and we rarely give it a passing thought…until it ain’t working.

And then, what? Who you gonna call? How you gonna call???