I PowerPoint, Therefore I Am

A twist on Descartes' "cogito ergo sum".

This Microsoft product has revolutionized the business world. I believe it is the number one presentation software. For all the good ppt and pps files have done (pretty, powerful, relatively fast, transmittable, savable, retrievable, etc) they are also the root of a competence crisis in Asia.

PowerPoint is perhaps the predominant choice of conveying information at seminars, meetings, proposal/sales pitches, training sessions and knowledge databases. Everything we know is pretty much on some ppt file. Everything about our organisations are on some pps file. CEOs use them at investor roadshows. BD people use them sell the products and services, etc.. Managers used them to justify their existence. Unfortunately, people are using them as Cliffs Notes (Most American students will have used one!) or "Trusts for Dummies" (the highly successful Wiley publishing series).

I just had staff member bring printout of several trust presentations (by external lawyers and trust companies) to a technical meeting and was flipping through them to "demonstrate" her trust knowledge and support her assertions. I guess I should be grateful that she is resourceful but now I worry about her debilitating technical ability. No more First Principles, no more statute, no more case law, no more years of study. Nope, we have the answer in some bullet point. The title sums up the book. A sound bite conveying the content of a speech. I would be surprised if this was not becoming prevalent in all "technical" professions.

All we know about the Cayman STAR trusts comes from a 4 slides from Maples. Everything I know about US Grantor trust rules comes from the diagrams ppt Baker gave me. All you need to know about Singapore reserved power trusts are perfectly explained in that Asiaciti pps.

Perhaps we should have an IT policy where we ban certain ppt/pps files like we prevent access to web-based email or chat rooms.