When I was a scientist, I saw a similar level of degradation in work output for the group from PowerPoint. People would do experiments just to have something to present and talk about in the PowerPoint. I’d lose a whole day of research every time it was my day to present and I had to spend the day before making the PowerPoint. It has pros also, but the cons are severe. Goodhart’s Law rears its head over and over as society goes forward. Your target becomes a full PowerPoint instead of the real measure which is making good science and publishing good papers.
Reading through this, I see the problems have nothing to do with Powerpoint, and everything to do with organizational inefficiencies. Powerpoint is the scapegoat.
> America's military staff spend their time making, giving, and listening to PowerPoint presentations instead of, you know, preparing for war.
That is a presentation to the outside. Internally, PowerPoint gets almost zero use. Everything is document+appendix based. There are exceptions for things like org level meetings and announcements that are more of a broadcast medium but anything that is collaborative or at a smaller scale is done through a rather ridged standard document format.
Overall, there isn't a ban on use but it has a very limited use compared to many other companies.
Sales != Engineering. I occasionally built a PowerPoint if it was useful to. But the standard was information was conveyed in a written narrative. A PowerPoint is something you use when you’re talking in front of a large audience to have something happen every now and then to make your talking less boring. For a discussion you write a story. At least that’s how I did Amazon.
Business lore is full of ridiculous apocryphal tales journalists absolutely love running with because they make CEOs seem 'quirky' and 'outside-the-box'.
I remember one from the "The Everything Store" book where Bezos both insisted on his lieutenants writing memos to 'clarify thinking', while personally responding to emails by forwarding it to someone else with a "?" and nothing more.
