The End of PowerPoint Culture

“Yay! I’m going to create a PowerPoint presentation today. I can’t wait to get to work,” said no one, ever.

But that’s about to change. There is an entirely new way to make, manage, use and even think about the slides and decks that are so critical to businesses and other organizations.

A new discipline called presentation management is bringing decadesold presentation technology into the 21st century. In short, presentation management stores and manages slides in the cloud, so the slides can easily be re-used, shared, updated, tracked and organized for the whole enterprise. The slides become smart – embedded with data and analytics so you can actually gauge their performance. Machine-learning technology can learn about the slides in the system, understand what’s happening during a live presentation, and suggest slides to help the presenter instantly find a slide that matches the conversation in the room.

Most importantly, presentation management is a state of mind. It flips the very notion of a presentation on its head, making it more natural – like the way people used to talk and tell stories long before PowerPoint was invented. Slide decks force us to build rigid presentations that we must follow in order, no matter how the room is reacting or what questions get raised. (How many times have you heard: “Hold on, I’ll get to that slide in a minute,” when someone asks a question?) Presentation management solves this problem. With presentation management, the slides follow the conversation instead of the other way around. Discuss a point, and the right supportive slide appears. Take a turn into an unplanned side topic, and the slides go along for the ride.

Instead of presenting in meetings – which is a one-way lecture that quickly gets boring – this new approach means we will actually talk to each other, and always have the right supportive materials at the ready.

A growing number of companies are embracing a presentation management strategy. They range from U.S. Bank to Royal Caribbean Cruise Line to major media companies, consulting groups and medical research labs. Companies that adopt presentation management find they get immediate benefits. They are also putting in place a system for changing the culture of presentations and making them more effective for years to come.

In the presentation management era, the dread of making, giving – or enduring! – a PowerPoint presentation can all but disappear. This, then, is the story of presentation management and a guide on how to adopt it, make it work, and use it to drive change in your presentation culture.

What’s Wrong with PowerPoint (As If You Didn’t Know Already)

Like it or not, PowerPoint is the lowest common denominator for business communications. Sure, you can argue that email and instant messaging tools like Slack are used every minute of every day, but critical ideas that require planning and action always make their way into a presentation, usually a PowerPoint deck – or some alternative, like Google Slides. If a business idea has any gravity, it is in a presentation somewhere within the company network.

Yet PowerPoint, which was created over 30 years ago, hasn’t changed all that much. It may have gotten fancier, with smarter graphics and cooler animations, and it’s pretty easy to use, which is why everyone uses it.But for companies, the fact that everyone is using it is a problem.

Inside most companies, PowerPoint is a tangled nightmare – like old wiring behind the walls just waiting to short-circuit. Too many people use too many decks with too many messages that are out of date, don’t match, or even conflict with each other. Need a critical slide at the last second? Good luck finding it. Over 30 million PowerPoint presentations are created every day, constantly adding to the knotty buildup of slides and decks sitting on individual hard drives.

Clearly, there needs to be a better way – a way that takes advantage of innovative technologies like cloud and machine learning – for a company to manage such an important asset.

Presentations are for people who need to understand, act and react.That’s how things get done in business. Every business discipline, whether sales, training, research, investor relations, product development or human resources, relies on PowerPoint as a way to reinforce important messages. The CEO’s five-year projection, the salesperson’s pitch to a prospect, the brand director’s marketing plan, the trainer’s lecture to a group of new hires working to get certified – they all use PowerPoint to get their message across.

This holds true across industries. Financial institutions rely on decks packed with detailed data to raise money, announce quarterly earnings, present research analysis and market trends, and to communicate portfolio gains and losses to their clientele. Travel and hospitality reps use presentations with glorious photos and videos of their luxurious properties in exotic locations to convince travel agents and potential customers that they should spend their limited free time there. What better way to sell a vacation than to show a sandy beach with crystal blue water? Media companies rely on presentations with authentic pictures of their target consumer, combined with charts describing how their network delivers that very same person. Consultants like McKinsey & Co. and Gartner Inc., generate hundreds of millions of dollars selling their decks of research, analysis and forecasts to their corporate clients.The military is known for its reliance on PowerPoint decks. The most notorious is Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s slide that he used at a military briefing in 2009 to describe the complexity of the situation in Afghanistan. “When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,”he said at the time.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/world/27powerpoint.html

McChrystal’s slide, though, shows why we rely on PowerPoint so much: It is visual.

Hear a piece of information and, three days later, you will remember 10 percent of it. Add a picture and you’ll remember 65 percent. A good 90 percent of the information processed by the brain is visual, according to the book Brain Rules by Dr. John Medina. Visual slides are absolutely critical to getting a message across, especially when the stakes are high.

Visual storytelling is powerful and ancient. Throughout the course of history, literacy rates have been abysmally low. It was not until fairly recently, in 2015, that world literacy rates rose to 86.2 percent. In the Stone Age, Neanderthals used cave drawings to communicate with each other. One theory is that the artists described themselves and the animals around them, communicating information that helped them survive. The cave drawings were visual stories relaying critical information.

Visual communications media evolved from cave drawings to paint brushed on wood or stone, to charcoal or ink on paper, then to framed paintings and stained-glass windows. Medieval paintings tell stories of God’s glory and wrath, kings decorated with riches and peasants tilling the fields. In a world where most people could not read, the visuals told the stories and taught proper behavior so that everyone could live in a civil society. Visual stories were how human beings evolved and thrived as a dominant species.

Visuals are also a faster way to communicate than words alone. Humans are visual first, verbal second. We process visuals 60,000 times faster than text. Let’s try an experiment.

Marketers know this. The advertising industry was built on this. In business, the visuals and graphics that helped sell a product or service were long the purview of skilled tradesmen. Illustrators, typesetters, photographers, retouchers and movie directors were esteemed artisans.They were paid handsomely by corporate marketing-advertising experts to help visualize — i.e., tell — the corporate story because businesses saw the importance of conveying the “right” visual story.

Today, media is digital and on-demand. We shoot video instantly on our phones, edit it ourselves, and upload it to YouTube. Pictures can also be taken and retouched right on our phones. Talk about controlling your visual story. We are all the spin-masters of our visual lives.

The ubiquity of digital tools is progress. It’s faster and cheaper than ever to take and distribute a beautiful picture. And it’s faster and cheaper than ever to create your own deck, rather than spend the time and money hiring someone else to do it. While that’s a huge advance, the reliance on PowerPoint has some drawbacks to communications for any kind of organization.

PowerPoint is rigid. It forces the speaker and the audience into a linear train of thought. But as humans, our minds and conversations like to wander. It’s how we create and ideate. PowerPoint’s linear format forces us into an unnatural thought process. It deters creativity.

Bullet points and the outline format inhibit the narrative. An outline has long been a way to organize thoughts and build a compelling story and conversation around them. It was a starting point to a more in-depth proposal and plan. With PowerPoint, the outline has evolved into the final plan. The nuance and critical thinking that was once the meat of the proposal has now been omitted from “the deck.” After all, writing is thinking.

It’s a crutch that makes us lazy. If you can get away with a few bullet points, why bother with all that extra thinking work? It’s a lot faster to write up some bullets without having to worry about those pesky transitions that tie ideas together. Throw in some nice effects, a few pictures, charts and…voila! You’re good to go. Yes, you are good to go and bore the hell out your colleagues or clients – the very people on whom your success depends.

There are enough graphics to be dangerous. PowerPoint’s greatest attribute is also its worst crime against the critical, thoughtful exchange of ideas. It has a wealth of animated effects, transitions, template designs, charting and graphic tools that will turn a neophyte into a bad graphic designer. Graphs and images, when used to support your main idea, are invaluable. The pitfall lies when users get carried away and use too many images or images that don’t necessarily reinforce their idea. So the slides become a distraction from the main point.

It’s one and done. A great presentation may take hours or even weeks to create. It might include copywriting, branded graphics, pictures and video that reinforce the message, as well as input from the company’s top executives – making it a very powerful piece of communications.This is the kind of content that, when unleashed across the company, can up everyone’s game. But after the meeting, this deck gets lost in a folder or some long email chain, to die a lonely death in obscurity. If someone in the company wants to reuse any of that content, then she will spend hours hunting and pecking around the network, opening, scrolling, then closing the wrong files. And if she is lucky enough to stumble upon the right deck, then she will scroll, copy and paste into a new deck. Repeat that seemingly innocuous process several times, and before you know it, there are 20-plus PowerPoint files open on your desktop and you’re afraid to close them lest you lose something important. Which file was that? Not sure, so you just save as version 27, which just so happens to be the same as version 25. But no one has the time or energy to read through all those decks that are basically the same. A gross waste of time, money and space — both mental space and network space.

These presentations become lost assets. Who loses assets? Businesses that fail, that’s who! Who uses their assets wisely? Businesses that succeed. Presentations are often overlooked assets, a wellspring of knowledge just waiting to be tapped. Exploiting your presentation assets in a methodical way will improve everyone’s performance.

Introducing: The Discipline of Presentation Management

The new discipline of presentation management can have an enormous impact on a company.

Presentation management takes presentations from one-and-done, single files and turns them into enterprise assets deployed intelligently throughout your organization.

Presentation management is a combination of technology and strategic thinking about presentations. We’re writing this book because we have been building and rebuilding presentation technologies since the mid-1990s, and we’ve helped companies understand how to use it to change their thinking about presentations and manage that content as they would any valuable asset. We’ll dive deeper into these topics in the following chapters, but briefly, presentation management works like this: A company decides that it wants to use its presentation content over and over again, rather than waste time and money re-creating slides that already exist but no one can seem to find. So the company engages a presentation management service to store and track these files and slides.

When employees need to create a new presentation, they log into the service, do a quick search for the specific content they need, and preview their options from a variety of formats, including PowerPoint, video, images and PDFs. Then they just select the slides needed for the new deck. It’s like shopping online: You log in, browse for stuff, and click on what you want. Except instead of putting stuff into a shopping cart, they are moving slides or other files into a slide tray that gets saved as a new presentation, which they can then use in their next meeting.

On the back end, the company has a record of who used which slides and videos, just as Amazon knows that you bought shampoo and a book last week. That’s presentation management in its simplest form. But most large enterprises take the discipline further and develop a more strategic approach to presentations.

U.S. Bank is one example. The fifth-largest bank in the U.S. had challenges with its presentations that should sound familiar to any big corporation. Each department was its own presentation silo. There was no consistent branding across the decks made by people in different units, and the corporate marketing team had little control over who presented what to whom. Employees making their own decks were presenting products that didn’t exist anymore, or using variations of the brand that had long since been retired. On top of that, it was taking their employees a good five hours each to create their presentations. They were looking through a SharePoint site and network folders, opening and scrolling through random decks to copy and paste slides into a new, patchwork deck. Some decks had different backgrounds; others just had bad or old information. So countless employees wasted piles of time creating inaccurate, noncompliant (which in banking means risking the rage of regulators) slides.

Their presentation process, or lack thereof, was too rogue for a 150-yearold institution with about half a trillion dollars in assets. So U.S. Bank implemented a presentation management strategy to provide better branded content to its teams — and take outdated content out of circulation so no one could present the wrong information ever again.

To do that, the bank contracted with us at Shufflrr to provide a cloud presentation solution. Just giving employees the ability to find the right slides and drag and drop them into presentations cut down the time required to create presentations from five hours to five minutes, U.S.Bank executive Scott Welvaert tells us. Shufflrr also comes with a variety of controls, such as permissions, updates and metrics. Corporate marketing can give access to those people who are qualified to use and present certain content. Each division can control its content for its team.If someone needs to cross-sell a product from another division, that person can easily be given access. Corporate administrators can push out updated content, which ensures that old material gets retired and every slide is up to date.

Finally, thanks to reporting and metrics, corporate marketing can see what content gets used most often and by whom. U.S. Bank finally got real data about its content and how or whether it resonates with customers or others who are on the receiving end of presentations.

It’s important to note that U.S. Bank’s presentation management solution was not just a tool with some cool features that let it arrange and control content. Adopting the technology also forced the bank’s leadership team to think about presentations in a different way. Marketing could create a corporate encyclopedia of U.S. Bank content sourced from the experts in each division, for use by the entire U.S. Bank team. It was a top-down approach that still gives individuals autonomy and flexibility to do their particular job, and do it well.

The result: U.S. Bank corporate finally had control over the brand and product message, while employees had a faster, easier way to create presentations. Presentation management is a win-win for all sides of the enterprise.

That is the competitive advantage of presentation management. It unleashes all of the great knowledge within your company’s presentations. By employing an intelligent presentation management strategy, you are giving everyone in your company the ability to talk intelligently about any aspect of the business at any time, whether or not it is their particular area of expertise. Everyone becomes as knowledgeable and articulate as the CEO. (And we’ll talk more about that later.) But that’s only part of the equation. By employing a presentation management strategy, you are also mitigating risk and increasing productivity.

Why Presentation Management is Important Now

Three different waves of change are merging to profoundly affect how corporations operate. The first is the flood of Millennials into the workforce, and how that generation consumes media and technology.The second is decentralization of corporate hierarchy. The third is the arrival of artificial intelligence, or AI. Though seemingly disparate, these three elements are converging like different cold and warm fronts to combine into the perfect storm. Presentation management will help your company navigate that storm.

Millennials in the Workforce

Millennials – the generation born from 1981 to 1997 — will make up 75 percent of the workforce by 2025, and they are bringing their media and tech habits into the workplace. Millennials grew up digital. They are the first generation raised with mobile phones and social media. They live through their devices. Not only do they socialize with friends through apps and Instagram, but they watch TV on iPads, order food online, and send texts and email on their phones. Not surprisingly, they are also multitaskers with several browser windows open on their laptops along with a messaging app, and a smartphone chiming away with constant alerts. Their eyes and thoughts are accustomed to moving from one screen and idea to the next and then back again. They spend three or more hours a day looking at their phones, accustomed to instant gratification. And those same habits carry over to their professional lives.

Presentation management meshes slides and decks with this Millennial mentality. A typical PowerPoint deck is linear — slide one, slide two, slide three. It is a preplanned deck – and, so, a preplanned talk — with little room for spontaneous discussion. Millennials like to get information in an interactive, multi-threaded way. Presentation management makes presenting more interactive. From a Millennial standpoint, they’re thinking, “I have a question about your product, and I’d like it answered now, without having to sit through 30 more slides until you get to it.” Presentation management encourages a fluid exchange of ideas – with supporting visuals — during a meeting. It lets the presentation follow the conversation – a massively important point that we’ll dive into later.

Corporate Decentralization

Corporate structure and culture has been profoundly changing for years.Corporations are shifting from a hierarchical structure, to a decentralized, more autonomous workforce. Jamie Dimon, CEO of the largest American bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co., stated in a public letter, “Bureaucracy is a disease. Bureaucracy drives out good people, slows down decision making, kills innovation and is often the petri dish of bad politics.” The corner office has gone the way of flannel suits and wingtips. Iconic American companies are moving from suburban areas to city centers. In 2017, General Electric sold its sprawling Fairfield, Conn., campus and moved its headquarters to Boston. In 2018 McDonald’s moved from Oak Brook, Ill., into downtown Chicago. Companies are moving into dynamic urban areas because that’s where college graduates want to live.

At the same time, working remotely has moved from a perk to an expectation. It is estimated that there has been a 115 percent increase in telecommuting over the last 10 years, and 43 percent of the U.S.workforce works remotely, according to the 2017 study State of Telecommuting in the U.S. Employee Workforce by Global Workplace Analytics. Being tethered to a cubicle is not necessarily the most productive way to get the job done. Workers complain of distractions in the office from things as simple as watercooler chitchat to colleagues walking by and asking for things. Long commutes waste time and pile on stress – the time and energy could be better spent focused on a task. In addition, workers want more flexibility in their schedules so they can balance career and family life. Ubiquitous wireless connectivity makes remote work productive.

Presentation management transcends geography. Whether your company still requires everyone to report into the office or encourages a mobile workforce with lots of flex time, presentation management gives workers high-level content to promote their company and their company’s products from anywhere, at any time. Employees can give a presentation over coffee at Starbucks using a phone, or at a podium in a boardroom equipped with giant screens. It gives presenters the flexibility to adjust their message to whatever the client or prospect demands at any given moment, while ensuring the corporate brand and message stay true.

The Rise of Artificial Intelligence

AI is creating new opportunities for business — and for presentations.Today, companies use AI to analyze data, identify market trends and predict the consumer’s next step. A Google search is AI in a primitive form.

AI is starting to make emotional connections for consumers. Let’s compare apples and oranges. Categorically, they are both fruit, round, grow on trees, and are available for sale in the produce section. But they are not the same. They look and taste different. Alex uses oranges for fresh juice every morning to get her full day supply of vitamin C, whereas she uses apples for baking pies. Come to think of it, our grandmother made the best apple pie in the entire world. Our grandmother was the most wonderful woman in our entire world, and she always made us feel safe and loved when she tucked us in at night. There is a real difference in how Alex interprets, experiences and interacts with these two kinds of fruit. She associates apples with our grandmother and feelings of love and security, but she sees oranges as just a source of nutrition. AI is increasingly able to make these connections for us – to connect the apple to our grandma to a feeling of being safe and loved. As AI advances, it will recognize these associations and make suggestions accordingly.

From a business presentation standpoint, the same process applies, but with slides. AI in presentation management can recognize patterns in your presentations. Those patterns could be related to the slides you view, present, rank, search for, and any other activity related to slide usage. We call it Predictive Slides TM , and it should be a key piece of any presentation management strategy.

The concept works like this:

Let’s say you are preparing for a meeting with a client, and you choose 15 slides from your library of 500. The AI behind Predictive Slides can already have some idea of who you are meeting with and what will be discussed.

During that meeting, you find out your client is interested in a different product than anticipated, and the client wants more detailed information. All are positive “buy” signs. So you want to seize this opportunity and present the information the client needs.

Predictive slides can take cues from your actions and slide choices much the way Google takes cues from your searches – and can surface the right slides at the right time. Instead of having to search for slides about that other product, predictive slides will make the connection, saving the presenter time hunting and scrolling through a 500-slide library.

When this happens in real time, the meeting becomes more productive.You give clients the information they want. It makes you and your company look smarter, which makes the client more likely to buy.

How Presentation Management Empowers Presenters

When we talk about presenters in this book, we are referring to people who want to drive action. In business, this is often the salesperson, but it really can be any leader in the company. Leaders at all levels, from middle management to the C-suite, need to motivate people to act. And whether that “act” means getting someone to buy the company’s products, invest capital in the company, contribute great ideas to a project, or learn something new and therefore become a better, more productive employee, presentation management strategy will raise everyone’s ability to present better, to act better. Presentation management is empowering because it increases productivity and confidence.

Productivity

As U.S. Bank’s Scott Welvaert said, the time required to put together presentations after implementing a presentation management solution dropped from five hours to five minutes. In its most basic form, presentation management empowers presenters to easily find and reuse compliant content for their specific meeting. So the tedious hours employees would have spent searching around the network for existing content or writing and designing content even when that’s not their skill set, become a simple keyword search. Type in a few words, find the right slide and drag and drop it into a new presentation. The four hours and 55 minutes saved can be better spent learning more about a particular client and building new relationships with new clients. The presenters have more time to actually conduct their business.

Presentation management gives the marketing and compliance departments – who typically create content — an effective means to distribute their work, ensure its use and reuse, and track slides and files to see what’s resonating in the field. The company can control content to ensure that everyone is using the right, up-to-date content with the proper brand standards, messaging and disclosure statements. Those departments no longer lose days derailed by last-minute requests, “Hey, can you help me find that slide? I have a meeting in 20 minutes and I need some data on product AA.”

Confidence

A smart presentation management strategy ensures a content repository that is accessible on the fly. Wherever you are, whomever you are with, it gives you quick access to critical company information. You are empowered to speak intelligently, and correctly, about any aspect of your company’s business. All good salespeople prepare for meetings, of course. They study their client’s business and study the company’s products to ensure that they are offering – presenting — the best solution for that client. But clients throw curve balls. There’s always that one question, “Our problem isn’t so much about AA but really about BB.”Even if you’ve spent weeks researching AA for this meeting, with presentation management, you can switch gears and discuss BB with that client. All the BB content is accessible. So as a speaker, you don’t have to miss a beat.

With that arsenal of company information supporting you, you don’t have to bluff or give that meeting-killer response, “I’ll get back to you on that later.” You can instead lead a deep, interactive discussion with your client. When the client asks a question, whether you were prepared for it or not, you can still answer correctly and intelligently. Question and answer leads to more discussion, more active participation from the client. When the client is talking, you are learning more about her business. What you home in on from her feedback, you can then turn into a better solution, and tell a better story about how you can help them – a story that sells.

So now you’ve spent less time creating a riveting and compliant presentation that actually encourages deeper discussion with your client.Through this process, you’ve built more credibility and trust. Clients who trust you buy from you. Colleagues who trust you work harder for and with you.

Who in your company communicates instinctively, naturally? The CEO.CEOs can field any question about any aspect of the business, right off the cuff. They are charismatic, natural storytellers who motivate those around them, whether they are customers, investors or employees. Their knowledge affords them credibility. Their stories inspire. That’s why they get named as CEOs!

A well-executed presentation management strategy helps everyone at the company speak with the dexterity of the CEO. It combines the detailed information needed to inform, with the storytelling needed to inspire and the flexibility to present anywhere, anytime, with anyone – just like a skilled CEO.

Chapter 1 – Takeaways

1. Presentations are made to communicate important ideas and motivate people to act. The actions could be to make a purchase, learn something new, or participate in a project. They are created to move someone to do something.
2. Most companies have a mess of PowerPoint and other files tangled on their networks. Embedded in these files is great information, but no one can find it. Presentations are a grossly wasted resource.
3. Presentation management takes one-and-done files and transforms them into enterprise assets.
4. Presentation management empowers presenters by giving them more confidence and making them more productive.
5. Visual communications are more powerful than words alone. We respond to pictures, especially pictures that depict emotion.