The Medium Is More Than The Message

The conference room was in semidarkness; the hum of the air-conditioning system hypnotic. Sitting next to me was Crawford J. Huggins, our VP of public affairs, his stocky frame radiating heat. The odor of his aftershave lotion permeated my nostrils, mixing unpleasantly in the back of my throat with the taste of the sticky bun (my second) I'd unwisely just consumed. I yearned for the pager in my pocket to summon me away to some crisis, but I knew there would be no liberation. Kratmeyer's team was making a presentation, and when the head of International Operations does a show and tell, the rest of us sit and listen.

At the moment, one of Kratmeyer's minions, whose name I had conveniently forgotten (assuming I had ever known it) was in his glory explaining International Operations' latest E-business project, one designed to rescue the company from the doldrums of the economic downturn which had put our profits into a hole so deep that few of us would have believed it possible a year earlier.

Not that you would know it from the PowerPoint presentation we were witnessing. The fades and patterned dissolves on the screen were marvelous to behold. For a few minutes, I watched, trying to guess whether the next line of text would shoot in from the left, the right, or perhaps from the bottom of the screen.

Then there were the whirling images. I was jealous in a way. Here I am, the techie in the executive suite, and I have no idea how to produce that on my computer. And don't forget the sound clips. They were impressive. Idly, my mind wandering, I wondered whether the guy had used the audio clips from the Microsoft Office setup disk or if he'd ripped them off using Napster or Gnutella, and were we going to get sued, thus canceling out any money we might have made from Kratmeyer's latest brainstorm? And where did he get the time to learn all this stuff and then build it into his presentation? Doesn't he have a real job? I was in PowerPoint Purgatory. Would the performance never end? I gazed at Crawford. His eyes were slits. He was in dreamland.

Perhaps because I have the attention span of a six-year-old high on sugar wafers, I couldn't concentrate on what the speaker was saying. The pyrotechnics of the presentation kept getting in the way. I wanted to listen, but the glory of PowerPoint simply was distracting me from the meat of the message. And then it hit me. Intrigued, I paid attention to his words with a new intensity. A few minutes later, my suspicions hardened into certainty. I was seeing a lot of sizzle, but the reality wasn't as appealing. International Operations' new E-business project might just work (our IT group was heavily involved and Kratmeyer, for all my complaining, is good at his job), but it certainly wasn't the sure thing that was being touted. I sat back, gratified. The meeting wasn't a total waste.

I had just discovered a new business axiom, or at least one that I hadn't known before. I'll call it Lovelace's Law of PowerPoint: The fancier the PowerPoint presentation, the less valuable the ideas being presented.

It was perfectly clear. While I'd been sitting there stewing over the wasted time that had gone into developing the presentation--after all, who has the time to learn all the little tricks and gimmicks that are possible with PowerPoint?--I'd missed what was apparent. More effort had gone into making a wonderful presentation than into thinking through the product offering.

I began to muse: Is PowerPoint counterproductive to business success? Was the dot-com bust engendered by people who had suddenly realized that they had invested a fortune based on a few beautiful graphics that were laughingly called a business plan? Have other executives had the same epiphany?

Making a presentation look good and adding bells and whistles to it (sometimes literally) can be fun. More than once I've had the urge to improve some of the dull slide shows I created, but I have a feeling we might be just as well off if PowerPoint (and its clones from Corel and Lotus) weren't quite so capable of impressing us with their features. Besides, has anyone ever added up the time wasted as we waited in dazed silence for all those little lines and graphics to build on the screen?

And now with Office XP being released, Microsoft is telling us about all the additional things we can do with the Office suite. I haven't bothered to learn what extra features it will have that I won't use, but I'm sure there are many. What they don't understand is that I don't want PowerPoint to do more--I want it to do less. Then, maybe I won't have to sit in meetings for such a long time.

Herbert W. Lovelace shares his experiences (changing most names, including his own, to protect the guilty) as CIO of a multibillion-dollar international company. Send him E-mail at [email protected] and read his online column at informationweek.com, where he will provide real--and sometimes whimsical--answers to your questions.To discuss this column with other readers, please visit Herb Lovelace's forum on the Listening Post.To find out more about Herb Lovelace, please visit his page on the Listening Post.