How Not To Use Powerpoint

Presentation Zen, a great blog if you are a speaker looking to improve your general performance, has a hilarious example up of how NOT to use powerpoint (Via Fredd Kambo Joint):

This slide brings back all the memories I have of a number of similar presentations I've been to - truly exhausting experiences. Fredd Kambo, an uber-consultant at Shell, points out what's on the slide too. Here's the full transcription of the slide in all its glory:

1. Supposing the new consumer model, we tried to simulate more complicated diffusion process to observe the value alternation phenomenon and the value amplification phenomenon. We obtained the actual percentage of each type of consumers by an empirical consumer survey, and inputted them into the new simulation model. The results indicated that, if the market has more than 40% of technology-sensitive consumers,  the value-alternation phenomenon occured frequently and the demand side hypothesis was supported.

2. However, In this simulation, we only examined the competition between two competing technologies which did not qualitiatively change during the diffusion process. The qualitative change in one technology seems to be difficult to simulate in such a simple and general model, even though in a practical case, technologies may change qualitatively to some extent during the diffusion process. This point is the limitation of this simulation.

This is more exhasperating than an MBA class. Look at how the guy is reading that garbage off the slide too! Unfortunately, as anyone who goes to a number of presentations can similarly testify, this type of thing is all too common.  This slide took me three minutes to draw up against the clock and says the same thing:

Granted, it's no work of art, but it goes to show how much things can be simplified, which is the whole point of Powerpoint. Incidentally, the product looks like a highly sophisticated piece of technology with that kind of conversion rate, so some discussion about how it might be undermined by disruptive technologies should really be amongst that wad of material about 'qualitative empirical testing'.

Comments

[Rob]

I encounter this alot in our medical research lectures. Alot of people make the mistake of thinking the point of a presentation is to impress people about how smart you are, when in fact the point is to make a point, ie know the field, have a hypothesis, test the hypothesis, and draw conclusions based on the test. But, yeah, unless you have a PhD and many many years of experience it's hard to grasp that fact.