This is my first posting to the Communitelligence blog and so I’ll begin with the topic that I find the most amusing and the most maddening. We see it every year at PowerPoint Live, and just about every time I head into a company to train on PowerPoint or on presentation building in general.
- “PowerPoint is easy, I don’t need any help with it.”
- “How long have you been using it?” I respond.
- “I’ve been using it for almost 10 years, and I learned everything I needed to know in the first 15 minutes.”
Fifteen minutes. You can do a lot in 15 minutes, granted — Jerry Seinfeld can weave three stories into one sit-com in about 15 minutes, the Space Shuttle can reach orbit and return in about 15 minutes, and President Bush can probably mispronounce 15 words in 15 minutes. But can you learn how to create a presentation in 15 minutes?
It’s the biggest disconnect I know in corporate image management. Companies today spend tens of millions of dollars on their branding. They hire prestigious design firms to help them craft print advertisements that appear in the most visible publications.
And these same companies often send a sales rep with, you guessed it, 15 minutes of PowerPoint training out to make what is arguably the most important first impression of all: actual face-to-face contact.
How ironic that the curse that Microsoft’s engineers bestowed upon us is that they made their presentation software too easy to learn. There’s nothing inherently wrong with software whose basics can be learned in 15 minutes…unless you never go beyond those basics. And therein lies the rub:
Does the ability to create a few bullet slides make you a proficient PowerPoint user? And the more ominous question: Does this same ability imply that you are a competent presenter?
Laugh if you must at the folly of these notions, but they are played out thousands of times daily in companies across the world. And before long, you will find yourself in the audience witnessing the effect of 15-Minute Syndrome first-hand.
What can we do about it? My answer sounds like a commercial — send them to PowerPoint Live — so I’m more interested in your answers.
