Category Archives: words

Powerpoint steps in context

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I often wonder at advice that people give about travelling because the act can vary so widely; the way I travel — what and how I pack my clothes, even — depends on the situation.  Travelling for work, for instance, is quite different than travelling for vacation.  Travelling with kids is completely different than travelling alone.  Vagabonding is different than a quick weekend getaway.  And so forth.

The same is true with presentations.  It’s hard, I think, to give good presentation advice without precisely specifying the context of your advice.  So, for instance, Seth Godin has a new posting on “Nine steps to Powerpoint magic,”

The first of his steps (not rules) is to not use Powerpoint at all.  But if you have to use Powerpoint, don’t use bullets.  And if you have to use bullets, make them one or two word bullets, max.  After all, Godin says, “Powerpoint is for ideas.”  He recommends using a remote and a microphone, and keeping the overall presentation time down to ten minutes if possible.

This may be good advice — I trust Godin — but for what?  I gather that he’s referring to public speaking events with dozens or hundreds of people in the audience, Steve Jobs product announcement style.  But the problem is that the rest of us, those not making big product announcements, use Powerpoint for completely different purposes.  Purposes for which these ‘steps’ are completely worthless.

Many years ago, as a young pup consultant, I was trained in a rigorous style of presentation development very different than Godin’s.  One of the cardinal rules was that the ‘deck’ should stand alone as a paper document.  Anyone should be able to pick it up and understand the story without any prior knowledge.  In fact, they should be able to read only the headlines and understand the story.  The headlines were the most important part of each slide and the content in the slide should support the headline.  The content of the slide could be data or charts or bullet points, depending on the requirements of the story.  Good decks were written headline-first; in older versions of Powerpoint it was easier to do this than it is today, but the vestigal functionality of writing in outline form still exists in the application today.  Ideally, you should start with a blank template, write out your whole deck in headlines, and then go back and fill in the detail on the page in support of the headlines.

My office had complicated rules about punctuation and capitalization but generally you were expected to write in complete sentences and if you were going to make a bulleted list it definitely had to have more than one, and preferably more than two, bullets in the list.  Single word bullet points weren’t even considered an option.  All these details were strictly enforced as drafts, paper drafts, were handed around the office.  It was common to get dozens of detailed line edits on a single version of a deck.  Why are the bullets ordered in this sequence?  What are the units on this graph?  What is the point of this table?  Why doesn’t it have a title?  Can you call out the important fact here? And so on.

The assumpion behind this style of presentation was that the deck would be read, as a document, by a small group of clients and consultants around a table and then passed around at the client site as the documentation of our recommendations.  No one ever thought to stand up with a microphone or a remote — these were black & white printed paper artifacts, to be reviewed in groups of a dozen or less.  I remember the first time I had to make a color presentation for a client, and how gaudy and tacky it felt.

Powerpoint, like any other tool, gets used for tasks for which it is distinctly ill-suited, and there are a lot of people using Powerpoint who do a terrible job with it.  But helping them do a better job with their tool requires an understanding of the context; what works for Seth Godin on stage in front of hundreds of people will not work for a small team dealing with a complex, intricate problem.

Walks in the woods, fictionally

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When I was in grad school, I went to a series of lectures by Umberto Eco; they were wide-ranging talks on literary theory but very entertaining despite what you might imagine, covering everything from the freemasons to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, to fables (Little Red Riding Hood) and the meaning of truth.  The lectures were eventually published as Six Walks in the Fictional Woods.

Eco also talked a bit about his own experiences as an author.  He described how paranoid readers of his fictional books would write to him and complain that so-and-so couldn’t have moved through the moonlit night in Paris because on the date in question there was only a sliver moon.  Notwithstanding the ‘fact’ that the ‘fact’ was ‘fiction.’

He also told a beautiful story — one I still remember, although I have trouble remembering my own mobile phone number — about visiting the planetarium at Santiago de Compostela (maybe it was in Coruna, but this is my memory).  The director as a gift to him had set the night sky to the way the stars appeared at his home on the night of his birth.

At one point in the lectures, he said that we could all accept that it was true that there were no armadillos in the lecture hall — the jewel box of Sanders Theater — but that that didn’t mean they couldn’t exist in a fictional lecture hall.  At that point he held up a fake armadillo, which doesn’t appear in the book.  So beware!

Something about my day today made me remember this.

Sarts

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Of contested provenance, the term sart refers to oasis-dwellers of Chinese and former Soviet Central Asia.  It’s the antonym of ‘nomad.’  At one time it might have had a connotation of “Persian-speaker” but that’s not the current sense of it.  Possibly also pejorative.  V.V. Barthold, the Gibbon of Turkestan, I think had much to say on this matter.  (Gibbon is the Barthold of Rome.)  Wikipedia notes that “the Muslim, Mongol-speaking Dongxiang people of Northwestern China call themselves Sarta or Santa. It is not clear if there is any connection between this term and the Sarts of Central Asia.”

Balls: Harvey, Booz, and Smiley

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Recently, a colleague of mine referred to “Harvey balls” when I knew he mean “Booz balls,” those quarter/half/three-quarter filled circles that graphically represent low to high scales.  If you need to show, say in a table, a set of values, you can use these Harvey/Booz balls instead of numbers; they make it easy to scan the table.  Consumer Reports uses them, for example.

Booz, or Harvey, balls

They’re a consulting staple, and I call them Booz balls because, I have always assumed, they were first used at Booz, Allen, Hamilton.

But why Harvey?

Wikipedia has the answer: Harvey Poppel, a Booz consultant, invented them, so you either honor the man (Harvey balls) or his employer (Booz balls.)

There’s even a very useful Harvey balls font, from a former Booz consultant of course, which gives you a lot of flexibility to use them in, say, Excel.  (For presentations, I think you’re still better off using a graphic.)  You have to be aware of how to use them, though, because in the example above the balls represent one to nine; five and above are variations on one to four, not actually higher values.

Your browser may not represent these properly, but there are also Unicode values for Booz/Harvey balls:

○ ◔ ◑ ◕ ●

Smiley face

Now — and this is really a large piece of awesomeness — you should be careful not to confuse Harvey (Poppel’s) balls with Harvey Ball, the inventor of the smiley face.

The standard history: sports

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So I have a theory, “the standard history” theory, which is that everything was invented, more or less, between 1880 and 1910.  By ‘everything’ I mean Italy, college fraternities, marriage ceremonies, dog breeds, sports, the city of Redlands, and so on.  Everything.  I’m serious.  More specifically, the usual way that we talk about the history of these things follows a standard pattern:

  1. Pre-history; fuzzy antiquity, including Egyptians, Native Americans, Picts, that sort of thing, in vague generalities.
  2. Invention: coming into focus for the first time between 1880 and 1910.
  3. All the rest: the familiar, reassuringly detailed, story from invention to the present.

This is not to say that there weren’t, for instance, dogs before 1880.  But the idea of dog breeds, in our sense of pure blood lines and AKC registration, dates from this period, so that the story of the cocker spaniel or the golden retriever follows my standard history pretty closely — and I chose those examples before checking to see if they fit the theory.  But if you still don’t believe me, go look at the AKC list of breeds and test it against some other examples.  The history of most breeds only comes into focus between 1880 and 1910; before then, they were just dogs, chasing rabbits or whatever.

Sports, too, follow this pattern, precisely.  For example, soccer, rugby, American football and others (Australian rules football, Gaelic football) are all modern variations of games which were played since time immemorial at English high schools (“public schools.”)  These local English games collectively are pre-history; the modern sports that we watch and play today all came about between 1880 and 1910.  After their invention, they follow the familiar story (Knute Rockne, AFL/NFL, Roger Staubach…)

You wouldn’t think, at first glance, that soccer and (American) football have much in common, but their differences are really only a century or so old.  The similarities are much clearer when you put them on a continuum with their relatives, from least to most violent:

  • soccer (association football)
  • Gaelic football
  • Australian rules football
  • rugby (union and league)
  • American football

Gaelic football, at least to the naive viewer, looks like nothing so much as a bunch of soccer goalies running around.  The ball is the same, there’s very little contact, the goals are similar, and so forth.  Gaelic football was codified by Michael Cusack and others in 1884 while the modern game of soccer is only a few years older (1848 – 1863, thus predating the standard history by a bit; pray forgive me dear reader.)

Australian rules football is similar enough to Gaelic football that the two national associations held interleague tournaments for many years.  The Irish are still angry about the 2006 “international rules” Gaelic/Australian rules match at Croke Park in Dublin and it doesn’t look like the series will continue, although top  Irish players (the Irish GAA is all-amateur) are being poached by the Aussies.

The Australian game is much more physical and looks — to me, at least — more like rugby without the scrums; the ball is a rugby ball, not a soccer ball.  Rugby itself, named after an English high school, is then transitive between the Australian game and the American game, which has seen probably the most innovation over time, including the forward pass and the reshaped ball to aid passing, the idea of downs and yardage, and the subsequently required body armor.  (Interestingly, there was a hybrid Australian-American game that developed during WWII but it never took off.)

You can see remnants in the rules and quirks of each game; American football came to emphasize touchdowns at the expense of the kicking game, which is now vestigal; punters today are wretched specialists, not heroes of the game.  But it used to be that you scored a touchdown in order to get a chance at a kick to score a point; the touchdown itself, like a mark in Australian rules, didn’t itself count for anything.  Over time, the balance shifted away from the kicked score to the touchdown, but we still have the odd ‘extra point’ in American football.  When I played soccer as a kid, I remember a rule, which I don’t think is enforced any more, that the goalie could only take four steps with the ball in his hands before having to bounce it, a rule that is central to Gaelic football.

Other sports besides the ‘football complex’ follow the standard history as well; tennis (handball/squash/real tennis/etc.) and baseball, for example.  Baseball has a much-discussed pre-history, including rounders and other games, a famous invented history (the myth of Abner Doubleday), and the subsequent modern history.  Undoubtedly, other sports, and much else besides, follows the same story, the standard history.