Tag Archives: PowerPoint

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Hate speech. Here’s a fun fact, just because you happen to disagree with something someone says, that doesn’t make it “hate speech.” If that were the hight of the bar it needed to cross, damned near everyone I talk to on a daily basis would have to be considered a hate-spewing douchcanoe. As it is, these people generally just happen to have opinions with which I disagree. I suspect the key difference is being able to tell the difference between getting your little feelings hurt and someone who actually says something threatening. Many can’t seem to make the distinction, or maybe they’re too deep entrenched in their “safe space” hiding from the scary words to be able to tell the difference.

2. The new, new boss. I’ve only just formally met the new boss a few hours ago. He seems like a decent enough human being. He’s the third boss our office has had inside the last 12 months. I have no idea if that says more about us or them, not that it matters. It’s just another dash of mayhem in the day while he learns our names and we learn how he likes his PowerPoint charts and whether he wants one space or two after a period in written communication.

3. Ash and trash. The problem with relying on the media to give you information is that regardless of your source, it’s almost always going to be slanted by bias either intentionally or unintentionally. Like when you see Huffington blazing forth with the headline “The Middle Class is Dying.” While that makes a fine headline and all, they don’t dwell much on the actual meat of the Pew survey they’re referencing. What almost none of the stories I read based on that survey tell you is that while the percentage of middle income earners is decreasing, more of that decrease (as a percentage) is attributable to people moving into the ranks of higher income earners than because they are dropping into the range of lower income earners. You actually have to look at the Pew report to see that “Notably, the 7 percentage point increase in the share at the top is nearly double the 4 percentage point increase at the bottom.” Since that factoid doesn’t fit nicely into the narrative the media wants to sell, you don’t see it unless you dig a bit deeper. Sadly that’s just another example of why we need to be our own fact checkers when it comes to the ash and trash slung out by professional “news” sources.

4. The unmitigated asshat who decided rush hour was a good time to try taking his two-lane wide load across a two-lane wide bridge. Believe me when I tell you that it should not take 40 minutes to navigate the 4.6 miles between Aberdeen and Havre de Grace, but it did tonight thanks to one misguided driver and the parade of state and local police who forced him to see the error of his ways. If I wanted to deal with that kind of traffic buffoonery I would have taken the job at Ft. McNair when I had the chance.

Busy and important…

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Imagine, if you will, ten grown adults in a room. All of them are very busy and important. You know this because they’re wearing ties. Ties are always the sign that you are a busy and important individual. They stare intently at the table before them covered with hundreds of sheets of colored paper, as if trying to divine the sanctified intent of the gods on Olympus. Big BoardAfter a brief bit of this intent staring, all the very important and busy grown adults spend the next 90 minutes alternately locked in conversations unrelated to their reason for being there in the room or attempting to stifle yawns and not look completely comatose.

There’s an 11th person in the room, though. He’s not wearing a tie (because he’s a well respected malcontent and cynic – and because no one bothered to tell him in advance that he was going to be part of this particular gathering). He’s the guy in the room whose sole responsibility is for making sure the PowerPoint slides being shown on the “big board” get flipped on time. That’s another way of saying that for almost two hours, his only responsibility in all the known universe is hitting the right arrow on a laptop keyboard more or less in time with the disembodied voices being pumped into the room over speakers.

I realize that being busy and important is most likely a full time job. Still, I think that in austere fiscal environment where we need to make every hour count towards something productive, maybe one of the other ten people in the room could have handled the hard work of being PowerPoint wrangler rather than calling in an 11th and making that his only mission in life. Of course that’s only true if we care about efficiency rather than personal convenience and giving the impression of being too busy and important to add even the most basic and undemanding of tasks to the hard work of sitting there trying not to fall asleep.

Sex ed…

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My employer has a problem. As hard as it is to believe the testosterone fueled echelons of our institution have a problem with sexual assault, it’s apparently a fact. I know it’s a fact because I spent the better part of three hours watching a movie about it this afternoon. That’s added to the standard yearly on hour Sexual Assault is Bad training, and the special 57 slide PowerPoint briefing about the ways in which sexual Firing Squadassault is bad, and the incredibly awkward conversation with the boss about sexual assault.

Know what? I got the message loud and clear. Actually I got the message before anyone related to my job bothered to mention that “Hey Jeff, you know sexual assault is bad right?” It feels like something that should be pretty common knowledge… and even if it weren’t common knowledge, you’re not likely to convince someone not to do it by blinding them with PowerPoint charts.

It seems to me that if senior leaders have a problem keeping their peckers in their pants or disciplining their subordinates who have that problem, the best possible way to send a message is to convene a firing squad in the Pentagon courtyard and beam the execution live via satellite to every camp, post, FOB, depot, and station on the net. Make it a mandatory participation event so every Joe and Jane, every civilian and contractor can see that it really is a “zero tolerance” policy.

You can show movies, give briefings, and have heart-to-heart talks until you’re blue in the face, but not a damn thing is going to change until you prove that echelons higher than reality are willing to do more than talk the talk. Otherwise we’re just wasting everyone’s time pretending to give a damn.

Fame and fortune…

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Every artist has their medium of choice. Mine just happens to be PowerPoint. That’s convenient, because PowerPoint doesn’t demand a great deal of artistic skill. What it does demand is a willingness to go googly-eyed staring at twin monitors all day long while clicking on a selection of hundreds of small boxes in an effort to bring about the desired effect. Honest to God, sometimes after I get done with a set of charts, not even I know what they’re trying to say, but by God they look good doing it. And really, it’s all about bringing a good looking set of charts to the meeting. If push comes to shove, if they’re built right, the people in the room will be too dazzled by the graphics to be all that bothered by what they’re actually hearing.

Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be much of a street value placed on badass PowerPoint charts. I feel like there should be some kind of trendy art studio that specializes in this kind of thing. Like other great artists, I fear that my work will never be fully appreciated in my own lifetime. Many years from now, surely someone will stumble across a disk of my slides and realize, belatedly, that they are in the presence of a master, whose skill with a slide deck was truly underestimated.

As an alternative, perhaps I’ll start selling signed originals in the hallway after meetings. That’s a sure path to fame and fortune, right?

By the Power(Point) of Grayskull…

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It’s been my experience that sometimes the best products are the ones you smash together on a tight deadline with people breathing down your neck. Unfortunately, these rush jobs are usually thrown at you as part of an outlandishly large assignment and when even a few extra minutes can make the difference between something that looks like crap and something that looks like the PowerPoint equivalent of a work of art. Occasionally you end up with all the time in the world and manage to finesse something just so in the first day or so… and spend the rest of the available time tweaking, adding, massaging, and generally cluttering up the white space until the actual point of the exercise has been lost in the gee whiz of “look what I can do.” Sure, it’s one badass looking slide, but after two days of messing with it, I can barely remember what the original subject was… Thank God that’s very rarely actually important when putting these things together.

In style…

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As I reach back into the dark corners of my mind, I vaguely remember something from one of my “How to Be a Teacher in Two Semesters or Less” classes about there being different learning styles and preferences. Some people are audio learners, some visual, others are hands on, and some do best in groups while others are better working alone. Personally, I did reasonably well following the standard college learning model – let’s call it 15 hours of weekly lecture followed by independent study and reading time. In my worst semester, on my worst day, I never had more than four hours of lectures scheduled on any 24 hour period. Even those four hour days were punctuated with breaks, lunch, and assorted other gaps. I would have gouged out my eyes with a #2 pencil if I had needed to sit through 4 hours of uninterrupted talking.

Of all the dry, dull, and occasionally pointless classes you take as part of a major in the humanities, I never recall sitting in any classroom for eight hours at a stretch going blind on hundreds of PowerPoint slides. The reason for that is most likely because it’s a really shitty methodology for almost everyone involved, up to and including the instructor(s). No matter how engaging the material, there’s a very real limit to how much the average human brain is going to absorb in any one sitting. Everything else is runoff, or more diplomatically it’s simply “exposure” rather than actual learning. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with exposure, of course, as long as you admit that’s what you’re doing up front and don’t expect to much return on investment in the end.

Hot sweaty death by PowerPoint…

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I’ve never really understood the need of management to convey information by jamming as many people as possible into a room and then throwing PowerPoint charts at them until they want to gouge out their own eyes. These events are even more near and dear to my heart when the information could have been just as easily sent to me by email so I could read it at a convenient time rather than rejiggering my calendar to free up three hours in the middle of the week – a task I accomplished by cancelling my one actual productive meeting this week.

As a rule, 120 slides constitute just a few too many in any presentation. That’s doubly true when 31 of those slides fall into the “org chart/wire diagram” category. 1) Nobody in the room can read the eight point font used to squeeze that graphic onto the slide and 2) After ten or twelve wire diagrams, they all look exactly the same. That’s just an observation from a guy sitting in the back rows, so take it for what it’s worth.

When I’m proclaimed King of the Bureaucrats, my first edict from on high will be a proclamation that no briefing will use more than five slides. Ever. If you can’t distill the essence of what you’re trying to convey into five or fewer slides or (gasp) talk about your idea without the visual aids, there’s a pretty good chance I’ll think you don’t know what you’re talking about and will be sorely tempted to send you to sleep with the fishes. Since I’m somewhere just above the janitorial staff on one of those 31 org charts we saw, I suppose everyone is safe for the time being.

But you’ve all been warned. Oh yes, you’ve all been warned.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

A matter of trust…

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After more years than I care to think about in service, there comes a point when the operational assumption should be that you know more or less what you’re doing. Sure, that’s probably not true for some people, but I’m fairly sure that I’ve earned enough stripes to be at least considered competent in most situations. Sure, I’m not going to be the most dynamic presenter or dazzle them with the brilliance of my PowerPoint slides, but I’ll get the meat of the matter across in a clear and concise way that our glorious leaders should at least find informative and useful.

I’m absolutely not asking for carte blanche to do whatever I feel like doing, but I think a reasonable basis to proceed would be to start with the premise that I know how to build slides using a template, I have a better than average grip on the subject matter, and won’t, as a rule, say things to the most senior of senior leaders that would reflect badly on me, you, or the 4 layers of management between me and the guy at the end of the table. As I’ve said before, my goal is to do whatever is going to cause me the least grief in the long run. I believe strongly in the importance of self preservation. In this case, that would involve making a solid enough presentation that the number of questions at the end will be held to a minimum. I know I’m still pretty new in this office, but at some point you’re going to have to trust that I’m not going to walk in and call the Old Man an asshat and piss my pants.

If nothing else, let us consider that I’m going to be the lowest graded guy in the room by a country mile. The chances of the mighty and powerful jumping up and down on my head for a minor mistake are between slim and none. If the worst happens and I completely lose the bubble, you can always blame it on me as the new guy, so really, no matter how it goes, the bases are all covered.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Prep time…

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We’ve been over this 20 slide PowerPoint presentation four times now. The last “dry run” – which lasted just shy of three hours – cost about $3500 when you account for the labor cost and overhead of the nine people who were stuck in the room listening to the Uberboss dither about changing “happy” to “glad” and deciding that he didn’t like sentences that he personally added to the charts three days ago. The lunatics are plainly in charge of our asylum.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

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Yesterday you made a big deal about wanting someone in the room to flip your slides while you gave the new employee briefing. Today you threw that person out of the room once they got their computer set up (I won’t mention that employee then didn’t have a computer to use for, you know, work, for the next 90 minutes). Then you threw out the other “witnesses” in the room who were in a position to argue with what you were about to say to the poor unfortunate new guy.

Is it possible that you were going to weave him a web of lies and that the presence of informed people might undermine that? Are your lies so unbalanced now that you can only tell them behind closed doors? Maybe it’s that you’ve told so many that people are catching on and comparing notes now. Better not to risk having too many people in one place these days. Paranoia is a classy look.

Oh Uberboss, you may have the title, but you’ll never have what you really want. Forget about the respect of your peers. You’d be hard pressed to find someone in this building that even likes you as a human being.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.