Steve Jobs and PowerPoint

Members of the SlideStacks team recently finished reading the Steve Jobs biography in which, on several occasions, Jobs lambastes the use of PowerPoint during meetings.  The Presentation Zen blog recently posted this blog entry (and cute visual, see below) to illustrate Mr. Jobs' disdain for slides.

As Jobs' states, it was his experience that "people would confront a problem by creating a presentation. I wanted them to engage, to hash things out at the table, rather than show a bunch of slides."  In other words, he preferred that people interact and converse, not just produce information for consumption. It was also his view that conversation, argument, and discussion were necessary to deeper understanding.  Although Jobs chooses to bash PowerPoint (not an uncommon opinion), my view is that usually when a presentation falls flat, to use a sports metaphor, it's the golfer, not the clubs, that is to blame.


It's our philosophy here at SlideStacks to put the conversation first in a presentation, but contrary to Mr. Jobs, we don't take the binary view that PowerPoint is bad or that people who use it don't know what they are talking about.  Rather, we believe that there is a time and a place for slides and visuals and that successful integration of conversation and supporting materials requires the presenter to understand the audience and the purpose of the presentation.  We also believe that people who know what they are talking about feel comfortable to go 'off script' to keep the audience engaged, but that PowerPoint makes that improvisation difficult.  This last point is a key reason we are building SlideStacks - we want to empower those that know their stuff (and there are a lot of you out there) to use dialog to connect, inform, and influence your audience with effective and timely use of supporting materials without constraint.

Marc