SHOWCASE PART 2

Spotlight Communicator:Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystems

Board Chairman

“We had 12.9 gigabytes of

PowerPoint slides on our

network. And I thought,

what a waste of corporate

productivity.”

According to Peter Drucker, management guru of the 20th century, “We are prone both

in academia and management to mistake the surface gloss of brilliance for the essence of performance.”1 While this vision-ary statement was made prior to the exploding technology revolu-tion, it offers a sober precaution for the use of current technology applications.

The very success of electronic presentations has inspired a back-lash of sorts. Some companies have declared electronic presentations as too formal for internal communica-tions; others have offered guidelines to limit the number of slides used in a presentation, or even dictated what

colors could or could not be used. Scott McNealy, then president of Sun Microsystems, went so far as to ban the use of PowerPoint by his 25,000 employees. McNealy’s reasoning for prohibiting slide usage was that Sun employees were spending too much time preparing slides, presum-ably at the expense of other kinds of preparation. While the ban was reportedly not enforced, it provided wide exposure to the problem with overuse and abuse of slide presenta-tions.2 Speaking of the ban, McNealy said, “we had 12.9 gigabytes of PowerPoint slides on our network. And I thought, what a waste of cor-porate productivity.”3 He attributes a rise in company profi tability to movement away from time spent on elaborate slide presentations.

A major argument against electronic presentations is that they divert attention of both the audience and speaker from the presenter’s message to what is essentially a series of pictures. The slide show, once peripheral to a presentation (visual aid), becomes the center focus. A good presentation will have the presenter as its major focus; visuals should be used sparingly and only to reinforce the speaker’s credibility. Another important point is that presenters should choose visuals

only after they have a fi rm idea of what they want to say.

McNealy may not be as vocally opposed to slide usage now that Sun offers its own presentation software product, Impress, as a component of its Star Offi ce free software download. But his philosophy that presentation software should be a medium and not the message has remained the same.

APPLYING WHAT YOU HAVE LEARNED:

1. Develop a list of suggestions for the appropriate use of an electronic slide presentation.

2. Read the following article avail-able that summarizes the advice of Edward Tufte when using a PowerPoint presentation to enhance your speaking:

Avoid the infl ictions of Power-Point. (2006, March). The Practical Accountant, 38(3), 16. Available from Business Source Complete database.

What advice can you add for effective use of PowerPoint?

3. Following directions from your instructor, electronically post your response to this statement: “No visual aid has ever been developed that will change a weak presenta-tion into an excellent one.”

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© 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.

Sources

1. Jayaraman, M. S. (1999, September 15). No point in power presentations. Computer Today, 7.

2. Ganzel, R. (2000, February). Power pointless. Presentations, 14(2), 53–58.

3. Quote du jour. (1997, June). Client Server Computing, 4(6), 8.

© 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.