What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Powerpoint,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images…
It’s 2:41AM. I’m working on the HP case competition. No end is in sight, but I’m setting a firm deadline of 3:30AM, a slippage of my previous firm deadline of 3AM, which was a slippage of my original firm deadline of 2AM. We present in the morning, and I can’t imagine that anything I come up with after 3:00 will pass muster in the light of day. I’ve given up hope of claiming the $2,000 prize, and will be content to walk away with my dignity intact and maybe one of those nifty USB memory keychains.
It’s been at least two years since I was last forced to use Microsoft Powerpoint, a program that feeds on hopelessness and taps into a secret wellspring of despair. Business school has so far been relatively free of the sort of noxious business jargon that causes me to grind my rear molars into powder. I hear the words “leverage” and “synergy” more than I would otherwise prefer, and “incentivize” and “impactful” are never far from students’ lips. These are minor crimes, I suppose, not felonies, punishable with a stern warning and a small fine.
But this. Oh, how I loathe Powerpoint and all that it represents. How I loathe the little box diagrams, the 2x2 grids, the pictures made of shaded polygons, the swooping arrows, the clip art, chevrons, bulleted lists, pie charts, and animated text.
My mind should be focused on HP’s strategy for selling more XXX into the YYY market (sorry, signed an NDA), but I instead am brooding over the fragmentation of thought and the tragedy of meaninglessness, which inevitably lead me to wonder what kind of Powerpoint presentation T.S. Eliot would have churned out had he been locked for a few weeks in an airless room with a half dozen McKinsey consultants…
