On Presentations

A presentation is something that is neither blessed to give nor to receive. Maybe that is just me because I am the chap who misplaces his tongue and can only make gurgling noises every time I get up on stage and loses his consciousness every time I sit in front of it. Going by the popularity of Presentations I must be in a minority (of one, perhaps!)

Hey! Now! Wait a minute! What are you thinking of? This is not the twentieth ugly painting or the eighty-fifth bouquet that you get on the day of your wedding that I am talking about, you know – those are presents and anyone who mistakes this one for that one must really hate presents or, maybe again that is just me.

Things were not bad too far back when these abominations were being made on thin films of plastic – apparently you only got a shellacking for a botched job but you really did not have to redo it due to paucity of time. Bill Gates messed it up for all of us with his noseyparker ways – I mean, who was really begging him to go and create that abomination – Power point? Now PPTs are all the rage and if the combined curses of all those who actually had to work on it really took effect, there would be a new version of Hell created especially to cater to the just desserts of Mr. Gates.

Thankfully, I did not suffer the misfortune of having to work on it because of my handwriting. What had my hand-writing got to do with it? You see, I started corporate life in the era of the so-called transparencies and presentations were hand-written on them with marker pens. Now, blessed with a hand-writing which even God would have needed a Rosetta stone to decipher, I was the last choice for making those presentations. When Mr. Gates popped in with his Power point, it did not strike my bosses – unlike you – that my handwriting had been rendered irrelevant to the decision and, thus, I escaped unscathed.

That meant that I was in the wonderful position of neither having to make a Presentation nor to give it and could truly enjoy the process of a Presentation being reviewed and modified. Ah! For an observer, that is truly fun.

CEO: Let us get on with the review of the PPT of our Annual Budget.

My Boss: Yes, Sir!

(First slide with the mandatory Company logo, second slide proudly proclaiming “Annual Budget….” go by unscathed. Third slide on production performance shows up)

CTO : I don’t think that this pie-chart looks great. Why don’t you shift to a bar-graph.

My Boss: Sir! A bar graph shows up the decline in production in three of our five units.

CTO : Don’t argue on irrelevancies. I think this pie-chart looks ugly. A bar chart will give a more pleasing effect.

CFO : (trying to support his section) Maybe you should change those colors on the pie-chart. For example, that purple there can be changed to sky-blue and…

CEO: I think a bar-chart is best. (trying to keep the CFO happy) Yes! You can dispense with the purple and use a sky-blue. Also, change the font to Arial. Now next slide.

And on and on and on! For three hours, it is great fun to see grown-ups wrangling about shapes, colors and fonts of texts till you are completely convinced that the actual facts and figures presented in the slides are the least relevant things in the whole PPT. The only time I actually regret having made a premature exit from the corporate world is when I think of all the fun I could have had out of the background image selection from the vast resources of the Internet.

By now, you may possibly have got the erroneous impression that making a PPT is dead easy. All that you need to do is to think of your prospective audience as a group of children playing with crayons and it is a piece of cake? You know scant little about children and how fickle their likes are.

The next time you bring in the PPT for a review, the CTO finds that pie-charts look better after all, Orange has acquired appeal in excess of the sky-blue and Calibri is the font of the millennium. Back to the drawing board, guys, and drown your sorrows by inventing a new curse for Mr.Gates!

What do you mean that, as the audience, you are not a child playing with crayons? If not, why do you have your eyes glued on the corporate equivalent of the idiot box instead of paying attention to that inviting snacks tray in front of you?

If you liked this you may like to check out the index of other posts of this genre or read a selection of similar posts.