Death by PowerPoint

One of the biggest wastes of time in Corporate America is arguably the crushing boredom of endless PowerPoint presentations that make no point.

How it ever became acceptable for a person to get up in a dim room and bore twenty other people to death while wasting their time by stretching out what would have taken 10 minutes without slides to a full hour parade of slides crammed with needless details is something future sociologists will no doubt spend much time debating. But for right now, Death by PowerPoint is very real.

Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be that way. One of the best books written on the subject is Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds.

Creating better presentations with more impact doesn’t depend on delving deep into the nooks and crannies of PowerPoint or Keynote, but rather on rethinking the way you conceive of the presentation.

It wouldn’t be fair to either Reynolds or you to attempt to rip out his ideas from the context of the book—and his ideas do need a whole gorgeous book with plenty of examples to really come through—so I’m not going to do that here. Suffice it to say that if you create presentations, you must read this book. Yes, must.

Your future audiences will thank you.

If you need more convincing, Reynolds also operates a blog with the same name as the book which I also highly recommend.

Happy presenting.