TGIF – Power To The Point

As the week winds down, we wind down with some tidbits for your information, education, health, and enjoyment.

Quote of the Week: “Power corrupts, PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.”  Edward Tufte, Yale Emeritus Professor

Humor Break: Today’s humor comes with an assist from “Dilbert”

Pointy Hair Boss: “Asok, I need you to create a PowerPoint presentation that will save our department from being eliminated.  You must quantify the unquantifiable and that can only be done by a process I call ‘Lying’.”

Asok: “Lying is a process?”

Pointy Hair Boss: “It can be, if you use enough slides.”

Stat of the Week: 5 tips to making more effective slides!  I have preached about the evils of poor slides before PowerPoint was even invented.  Do people listen?  Maybe.  Do people “get it”? Nooooooooooooooo.  Now along comes Nancy Duarte and summaries in a 2 ½ minute video what it took me 10,000 hours to say.  The beauty of this short video is that it is a “two-for”.  Not only do you get 5 absolutely great tips to better slides, watch her presentation carefully.  That’s how you make an oral presentation!  Watch her eye contact, listen to her voice modulation, look at the hand and arm movements. Repeat as necessary.

Action Tip: If you make oral presentations, this is a must watch video!

Self-Development Corner: This week’s Coursera online university course offerings are more advanced, but have relevance to some of you: Building an Information Risk Management Toolkit (10 weeks, University of Washington); Information Security and Risk Management in Context (10 weeks, University of Washington); and Introduction to Computational Finance and Financial Econometrics (10 weeks, University of Washington).

Bill Bradley

Bill Bradley (mostly) retired after 35 years in organizational consulting, training and management development. During those years he worked internally with seven organizations and trained and consulted externally with more than 90 large and small businesses, government agencies, hospitals and schools.