You Don’t Have to Be a Powerpoint-Loving Executive

A contextual conversation is better than a predefined meeting.

April 20th, 1987, was the worst day in history for business. It wasn’t the day the stock market crashed either. It was when PowerPoint was invented and business conversations became deathly boring for anybody who is not the nominated presenter — although you’ve probably met a bored presenter.

Executives stopped carrying beautifully crafted leather suitcases and opted for the floppy, then the USB, and now the Cloud version of a PowerPoint deck.

***Looks up at the clouds in the sky with shame***

Rolling up to a meeting without a PowerPoint would seem unproductive. Executives adopted PowerPoint, and then PowerPoint-worshipping companies became the norm. Sunday Mass became Wednesday afternoon PowerPoint sessions with bulletproof coffee to keep one’s heart alive and beating.

Before the meeting, you sculpt the PowerPoint in a deck-editing ceremony.

Is the font right?

How're the margins?

How many slides? Too many you say? Screw you.

Once you’re in the meeting, PowerPoint-loving executives battle it out Game of Thrones style with their brightly coloured Gantt Charts. Eyes stare at the Gantt chart like it contains the meaning of life.

The PowerPoint is a statement: “My pie graph is better than your opinion.”

How accurate are the facts? Did the customer really say that or did you slant the stats to support your business case?

The pie chart never lies. Until it’s the festive season and the numbers come out. Nobody remembers the PowerPoint, though. It’s long gone and forgotten. It was the problem all along just nobody knew.

I was a PowerPoint-loving executive once. I drank the kool-aid and it tasted sweet. Then I met a sales guy that changed my career and subsequently how I thought about a business world dominated by slide decks.

A few years back, I needed a clever salesperson to present a PowerPoint for me that would hopefully lead to a sale that contributed to our sales targets. I expected a PowerPoint deck and got something else.

The meeting was scheduled with the client to be two hours long. It was an information session (value as they call it), followed by a sales pitch from this young salesperson that was supposed to win us the deal and pay for all our time — and the coffee and pastries on the board table that nobody ate.

To save his time, I told him he could roll up to the meeting for the last half-hour. He insisted on being there for the whole two hours, even though his presentation was right at the end.

The whole time he was in the meeting, he did something peculiar: he became interested in the topic of the meeting even though it had nothing to do with his product line. His fingers moved fast across his notebook and he wrote down lots of dot points.

As usual, the meeting abruptly came towards the two-hour limit. He hadn’t said a word. Everybody in the room decided to go for fifteen-minutes longer to give him time to speak. The moment he started his sales pitch, the customers started looking at their phone. With the emotional intelligence of a Simon Sinek-like leader, he edited the pitch. There was no PowerPoint.

He began editing what he was saying to be contextual to the topic of the meeting. He tied the rollout of his product to the theme of the meeting: how to make teams work more efficiently. The face of the customers in the room started looking up again away from their phones. They were interested again.

Instead of using PowerPoint, he had a conversation. He used the whiteboard and drew up conversation points. He engaged with the customers and got them to talk about what mattered to them.

Instead of staying with a fixed PowerPoint that didn’t allow him to pivot, he used his curiosity in the conversation and tied it back to his sales pitch.

Editing his sales pitch on the fly was only possible because he killed the idea of a static, fixed mindset PowerPoint.

The feedback I received after the meeting from the customers was incredibly positive. They liked his style and his sales message was delivered to them perfectly. Here’s how you can escape the problems of PowerPoint and communicate like a human again.

Have a conversation rather than view a PowerPoint

Since meeting this salesperson, I’ve begun experimenting with a new meeting theme. The goal now is to have a conversation based on a few dot points and then seek feedback along the way.

I found in my own meetings that a PowerPoint was the worst way to start a meeting. If you suffer from PowerPoint anxiety and need a safety net, one trick to try is to have the PowerPoint handy without putting it up. If you really, really need it like a drug, you can access it.

Less is more

You can literally have a slide for everything. You can cover every scenario for the meeting with another graph.

Too many slides result in information overload. Instead of getting meeting outcomes, you get executives that are fatigued and overwhelmed who are incapable of making a decision and don’t know why.

Without PowerPoint, you can go to the meeting with a little less. This leads to a focused conversation rather than one that has a pre-defined chunk of time taken up for the presentation of the holy PowerPoint.

Aim for a contextual conversation

As a meeting unfolds, so does the agenda and the priorities. The key theme I learned from this salesperson was that contextual conversations are everything.

Whenever you can be contextual in a meeting, you can be relevant and sell whatever the idea is that you’re looking to get traction on.

Blackout can be your friend

There are times where you can’t escape death by PowerPoint. You might have to bring up a diagram of some sort. It’s okay. No need to feel shame.

All you do is show the single slide, and then click the blackout button that blacks out the screen and focuses the attention back on you and the conversation you’re leading.

The world doesn’t need another PowerPoint presentation. Be the example of effective communication and rethink how you present and run meetings. An open mind that seeks to have a contextual conversation will get closer to a business outcome than a fixed mindset led by a PowerPoint deck.

Leave behind the PowerPoint-loving executive persona. Be yourself and lead a conversation the way a human would.

If you want to increase your productivity and learn some more valuable life hacks, then join my private mailing list on timdenning.net