You have just made a power point about presentations. Could not agree more.

Your comments are right on target. PowerPoint is a great tool, but in the hands of an idiot, it becomes a deadly weapon. I particularly hate those people who read off of their slides. Slides are for bullet points only; they are cue cards to remind you what to discuss. A little animation is OK, but animating every freakin' sentence is distracting.

One thing the program does help do (at least it's supposed to) is that it saves some paper. I remember when we had overheads, copied verbatim into handouts. The summary sheets for PowerPoint are shorter and allow notes. This program and its predecessors (eg, Aldus Persuasion) are the unsung heroes of modern business communication. Focus your vitriol on the idiots who misuse them.

By the way, the calculation about how much money is wasted on presentations is astonishing. Nobody can make a numerical assumption like that without fudging the data, making wild assumptions, and extrapolating ad nauseam.

I am the expert Jared quoted who calculated the cost of the poor presentations and if you want to see how I did it, I have it all explained in an article on my web site at http://www.thinkoutsidetheslide.com/articles/wasting_250M_bad_ppt.htm . I also have an article on how to calculate the cost for an individual organization at http://www.thinkoutsidetheslide.com/articles/real_cost_presn.htm .

When you go through the calculation, I don't think the experiences cited in the article or by others are out of line with the assumptions I made in the $252 million/day estimate.

There are three problems with your calculation, Dave.

First, no organization has presentations 52 weeks a year (even in a good year). Maybe the formula would be better if you used real numbers gleaned from a statiscally significant (p value80) sample size rather than hasty generalizations "guesstimated" (to use that awful word) by random people you queried.

Second, the assumption that there is an "average" percentage of bad talks in the range of 25% is off the mark. Again, you need to do a rigorous sampling of small, medium and large companies--each of which would have a different profile. In my company of 281 employees, I would say that fewer than 2-5% are poor; maybe you forgot the dash.

The third and most significant point is that poor presentations often highlight poor job performance. I have been known to fire people who clearly had no grasp of their jobs based on inept presentations (three firings in 20 years at last count). In those instances, the bad presentations were essential to preventing long-term damage to the company by a bad employee in a high position.

I use PowerPoint presentations not only to keep me updated on changes in my company (primary purpose)but also to assess job performance by the presenters. If someone cannot state their points clearly, then how are my customers going to deal with them? Granted, not all bad presentations warrant dismissive action, but most of us can tell the difference between who is incompetent or who is just a bad speaker.

Your cursory, pseudo-formulaic treatment of PowerPoint belies its intrinsic import in identifying employment issues critical to any organization's goals.

John,

Thanks for taking the time to look at the calculation and give your thoughts. Let me see if I can provide a little more insight into my process.

First, you say that no company presents 52 weeks per year. This may be true, but my experience shows that many, if not most, presentations are weekly status type presentations that will occur on a nearly weekly basis or sales presentations where one person could present 3 or 4 times in a day. I agree that this is probably not true for small businesses, so even if we use a figure of 45 weeks, the waste is still very large.

Second, your experience says that much fewer than 25% of presentations are done poorly. It is great to hear from someone who sees few poor presentations. In a survey I did last fall, among people who see over 100 presentations per year, they said 25-40% of the presentations they see suffer from one or more annoying PowerPoint problems. So I based the percentage on the low range of that result and also assumed only some of the meeting time was wasted, not all of it.

I think that assessing communications ability through PowerPoint presentations is certainly one way to assess job performance among other factors you use. Most of the presenters I see don't know how to structure a presentation or develop visuals because they have never been taught these skills. So their poor presentations reflect not poor knowledge of their job, but truly a poor approach to presentations. I am sure that the people who you dismissed had other performance issues as well as their clear lack of ability to communicate.

We can look at the calculation in detail in many ways, but I think the bottom line is that most medium to large sized organizations are wasting tremendous amounts of their staff's time sitting through poor presentations. And many organizations are losing sales due to poor sales presentations. The worst part is, as the article suggests, none is willing to tell the presenter how bad the presentation is, so the mediocrity continues.

John,

One more thing I forgot. Since every organization will be different, I wrote the second article referred to in my first post so that each organization could do their own calculation. I would guess for your firm the amount of waste would be small and you would focus on other issues to improve company performance. But at least you have thought about it. How many organizations have never taken the time to think or calculate how much they are wasting due to poor presentations and meetings?

I challenge you all to take the Powerpointwhack test. Come up with the most esoteric of topics. Put it into Google and add ".ppt" to see the Powerpoint stacks on it. Choose one at random (although .gov and .mil will offer the best results).

Sample the slide show: 99% I guarantee will be garbage, full of bullet points, heavy on the text, lousy with poor clip art or pixelated jpegs, and maybe even awful audio and abhorrent builds. I do this test every time I teach presentation skills and it has never failed to demo to audience the tyranny of Powerpoint.