Oh, it has it's uses, but it's misuse is so rampant, that I firmly believe it is one of the greatest obstacles to Getting Things Done in the Western World today. (Alas, in those places where we would prefer nothing be what is done--Congress, for example--it does not seem to be used anyway. Hell, if they won't read the bill, what difference would Power Point presentation make?)
T.X. Hammes, COL USMC (ret.), author of the seminal book on "Fourth Generational Warfare" The Sling And The Stone (which I didn't care for, but that's beside the point**) has a new article on the subject:
Essay: Dumb-dumb bulletsH/T Opfor.
As a decision-making aid, PowerPoint is a poor tool
By T.X. Hammes
Every year, the services spend millions of dollars teaching our people how to think. We invest in everything from war colleges to noncommissioned officer schools. Our senior schools in particular expose our leaders to broad issues and historical insights in an attempt to expose the complex and interactive nature of many of the decisions they will make.
Unfortunately, as soon as they graduate, our people return to a world driven by a tool that is the antithesis of thinking: PowerPoint. Make no mistake, PowerPoint is not a neutral tool — it is actively hostile to thoughtful decision-making. It has fundamentally changed our culture by altering the expectations of who makes decisions, what decisions they make and how they make them. While this may seem to be a sweeping generalization, I think a brief examination of the impact of PowerPoint will support this statement.
The last point, how we make decisions, is the most obvious. Before PowerPoint, staffs prepared succinct two- or three-page summaries of key issues. The decision-maker would read a paper, have time to think it over and then convene a meeting with either the full staff or just the experts involved to discuss the key points of the paper. Of course, the staff involved in the discussion would also have read the paper and had time to prepare to discuss the issues. In contrast, today, a decision-maker sits through a 20-minute PowerPoint presentation followed by five minutes of discussion and then is expected to make a decision. Compounding the problem, often his staff will have received only a five-minute briefing from the action officer on the way to the presentation and thus will not be well-prepared to discuss the issues. This entire process clearly has a toxic effect on staff work and decision-making.
*The arsenal in India where hollowpoint bullets were developed was called Dum Dum. I'm pretty sure Col. Hammes' misspelling was deliberate...
**And may come down to my discomfort with his terminology, and possible timeline-confusion
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