WEDNESDAY A P R I L 19, 2006 SECTION CCOPYRIGHT 2006 / THE LOS ANGELES TIMES

Making a (Power)Point of Not Being Tiresome

By Claire HoffmanT i m e s S t a f f W r i t e r

P owerPoint is: • Bullet Points • A Mysterious Jumble of

Graphs and Charts • Utter Boredom

But Cliff Atkinson, who runs a one-man, Los Angeles-based company calledSociable Media, wants to change all that.

Atkinson published a book last yearcalled “Beyond Bullet Points” about howto combat “PowerPoint fatigue”: thedeadening sameness of Microsoft Corp.’scommonly used presentation software.The book caught the eye of W. MarkL a n i e r, a Houston-based trial lawyer.

What happened next sounds like anepisode of a ripped-from-the-headlinesT V crime drama. Lanier, who wassuing Merck & Co. on behalf of a manwho died while taking the painkillerVioxx, hired Atkinson as a consultantto help with his opening argument.

The resulting 253-slide presentationwas so mold-breaking — so the oppo-site of boring — that it was dubbed“CSI: PowerPoint.”

Reporters covering the trial singledout the slides, with one calling them“frighteningly powerful.” Jurors appar-ently agreed: They awarded the plain-tiff’s family $253 million, coinciden-tally $1 million per slide. (Merck isappealing that award.)

“I think Cliff turned PowerPoint in adirection that the Microsoft peoplenever dreamed of,” Lanier said. “Theidea that you could speak for 21⁄2 hoursand keep the jury’s attention seemedlike an impossible goal, but it worked.The jury was very tuned in.”

To Atkinson, a 41-year-old, MBA-wielding former Air Force officer whohas also dabbled in journalism, thatcame as no surprise. Since 2001, he has

made a living helping people unshacklethemselves from the tedium of piecharts. His secret, which he is happy toshare with anyone who asks: using thesame three-act storytelling structurethat screenwriters swear by.

“Hollywood has been communicatingusing words and pictures for 100 yearswithout text on the screen, so we need tolook at what they do,” he said recently ashe showed a visitor around his Miracle

Mile apartment, which doubles as hiso ffice, near Wilshire Boulevard.

In addition to compiling presentationsfor clients, including the Social SecurityAdministration, Bristol-Myers SquibbCo., Nestle Waters, dozens of triallawyers and even Microsoft, A t k i n s o noften hits the road to teach others how tomake PowerPoint less stupefying.

Atkinson also employs a storyboardartist and a screenwriting coach to help

Cliff Atkinson turnsordinary slides into amore engaging toolusing a three-act storytelling structure.

Myung J. Chun Los Angeles Times

MESSENGER: Sociable Media owner Cliff Atkinson studied how the mind works whenabsorbing images and narration simultaneously. He has been helping PowerPoint userssince 2001.

him hit the right dramatic beats. Thenhe throws a little science in the mix; hehas studied how the mind works whenabsorbing images and narration at thesame time.

Research has shown, for example,that an audience learns better when it isnot being exposed to duplicatedinformation. Atkinson pet peeve No. 1:that whole reading from a slide thing— bad idea.

When a black-and-white, Macintosh-only version of PowerPoint was intro-duced in 1987, it was hailed as a giantimprovement over the overhead pro-j e c t o r. Three years later, PowerPointbecame available for Windows and wasintegrated into the standardized buff e tof applications, including Word andExcel, that made up Microsoft Off i c e ,which is used by 400 million people.

For those who have managed toavoid it, PowerPoint provides users witha template to create slides. Featuresinclude a range of bullet points,animated text and even “Auto Content,”a fill-in-the-blank template that amountsto a PowerPoint for Dummies.

PowerPoint has its critics. EdwardR. Tufte, a Yale professor and aninternationally recognized designexpert, has written several essays onhow the application has negativelyaffected the way office workers think.The cover of one Tufte’s essays showsa photo of a parade of Communistsoldiers lined up beneath a statue ofStalin in Budapest, Hungary. To Tufte,PowerPoint is a dictatorship of ideas.

Atkinson has read Tufte and says heis inspired by his work. Still, he says, itis futile to rail against something that

is so fully integrated into the profes-sional culture.

“There is no organization that is goingto give up PowerPoint,” said A t k i n s o n ,who first encountered the program whileworking at a dot-com start-up in the1990s. Immediately, he saw it as “a toolthat is supposed to help us engage withone another, but it’s actually keeping usfrom communicating.”

Atkinson set out to solve the problemfive years ago and won immediate fans.

“The first time I followed hismethodology, it really took a leap offaith,” said Lucinda Rowley, publisherof Microsoft Press, which printedAtkinson’s book and has invited him tospeak to employees about ways ofthinking outside the traditional Power-Point box.

Rowley said Atkinson forced her todistill her message to an idea, to “focuson the message. It’s a little intimidatingthe first time because you feel like it’sso different. It’s not just a bunch ofboring words on the slide.”

The next step, per Atkinson, is tosketch out a diagram of how the actionwill develop during a presentation.Stick to simple images and smallamounts of information, he says, andarrange points in discrete sections oracts, so the audience can digest oneconcept at a time.

Finally, he preaches the power ofresolution. Summarize the crisis, theclimax and the conclusion, he says, ofthe message you’re trying to deliver.

Atkinson puts all this to use, ofcourse, when he gives PowerPointpresentations on how to improvePowerPoint presentations. Those who

have seen them say he is his own bestadvertisement for the method.

“I’m used to seeing people with theirheads down, taking notes,” said Ly n n eH e l l m e r, director of development forCalifornia State University, who invit-ed Atkinson to speak at the Fullertoncampus in February. When he took thestage, she said, “I watched our audienceof adults with their mouths open,because they are wanting to look at himand the screen. They were hypnotized.”

Lanier, the trial lawyer, went upagainst Merck again in another Vioxx-related lawsuit this month. He calledAtkinson, and they crafted another pre-sentation, this time to accompany theclosing argument. This one was dubbed“Desperate Executives.”

The slide show painted a picture ofMerck executives driven to negligentbehavior and reluctant to reveal theirproduct’s alleged risks. Images of high-ranking employees were juxtaposedwith allegedly incriminating memos.

Jurors awarded the plaintiff’s family$13.5 million. Merck plans to appeal.

Lanier still raves. “The visualimagery of Cliff’s presentation, withmy text, was compelling enough thatthe jury not only paid attention,” hesaid, “they remembered.”

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