“About six months ago, a group of physicists in the U.S. working on the Large Hadron Collider addressed a problem they’ve been having for a while: Whenever they had meetings, everyone stuck to the prepared slides, and couldn’t really answer questions that weren’t immediately relevant to what was on the screen,” Alan Yu reports for NPR. “The point of the forum is to start discussions, so the physicists banned PowerPoint — from then on, they could only use a board and a marker.”
MacDailyNews Take: Just like Steve Jobs. Jobs used Keynote for keynotes and a whiteboard and marker (which he owned, by the way) for most everything else.
“‘The use of the PowerPoint slides was acting as a straitjacket to discussion,’ says Andrew Askew, an assistant professor of physics at Florida State University and one of the organizers of the forum at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois,” Yu reports. “The physicists are far from the only people moving away from PowerPoint style presentations: The CEOs of Amazon and LinkedIn have eliminated the presentations from meetings. In his recently published memoir, former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates calls PowerPoint slides ‘the bane of my existence in Pentagon meetings; it was as though no one could talk without them.’ Gates writes that as CIA director, he banned slides except for maps and charts, but could not do so as Secretary of Defense. Gen. James Mattis, former commander of the U.S. Central Command, has said that ‘PowerPoint makes us stupid.’ Maj. Gen. H.R. McMaster banned PowerPoint presentations when he led a successful mission in Iraq, and he compared it to an internal threat.”
“But this isn’t just an issue for academics, says Richard Russell, a special adviser to U.S. Central Command who also teaches at the University of Central Florida and National Defense University,” Yu reports. “‘There are real-world consequences for this, and so it’s not a purely academic, ivory tower concern,’ Russell says. He also points to a report from the board at NASA charged with investigating the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster of 2003. The board argued that NASA had become too reliant on presenting technical information with PowerPoint rather than reports.”
Read more in the full article here.
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