A New York Times article on the overuse and misuse of PowerPoint by U.S. military leaders in Afghanistan caught our eye because it dramatizes what we’ve said about how PowerPoint can contribute to bad decisions on corporate strategy. The problems in the military are, of course, more important than those we’ve described, because the military is dealing in life and death while we’re just writing about dollars and cents–albeit lots of dollars and sense. But we’ll take lessons wherever we can find them.

PowerPoint can lead to oversimplification and lack of analysis. If someone is justifying an acquisition by saying there will be synergies and economies of scale, those ideas may make intuitive sense, and people viewing them as bulletpoints may just nod their heads and move on. If someone is forced to write a memo justifying the ideas, they’ll have to lay out the exact synergies they’re expecting–who will buy what, when, where and why–and it may become clear that the synergies are imaginary. Someone claiming economies of scale as a bulletpoint would have to explain why, to pick an example we’ve written about, any steel supplier would provide a better price when the buyer was going from a quarter of a percent of the steel supply to half a percent. That could be described as a doubling in size in a PowerPoint presentation, but a memo that had to go into detail might well reveal that no supplier would care about the change.

When we’ve talked to executives about PowerPoint, we’ve received some pushback. Many executives find it a useful tool in many circumstances. Fine. We still believe that it’s worth changing modes of communication from time to time, to get out of ruts. If you’re a PowerPoint culture, ban them for six months and see how the conversation changes.

If all your analysis has people hovering over spreadsheets, ban them for a while and see what happens. Spreadsheets, after all, have their own shortcomings. For all sorts of psychological reasons, people tend to use what’s in front of them as the basis for analysis and reason from there. As a result, people are tempted to just adjust the expectations in spreadsheets rather than ask fundamental questions about whether there is any truth to the numbers in front of them. We have one consulting client that built a business on an elaborate spreadsheet, prepared by a major consulting firm, and figured the numbers had to be in the right ballpark. When we stripped the spreadsheet down to its basic assumptions, though, it turned out that the analysts were assuming that our client would get 50% of a market, even though the market would be so fragmented that no company would get more than 10% share, and our client was unlikely to be the leading supplier. Once the client got past the original spreadsheet, it redesigned its strategy in a far more realistic way.

A commenter on a New York Times blog neatly summarizes what can get lost when PowerPoint is overused. He wrote that Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” would look like this in a military presentation:

- Narrator pauses horse
- Has miles to go
- Needs sleep

The writer then adds, “Obviously, PowerPoint doesn’t do such a good job communicating such nuanced data as poetry. And counterinsurgency is the Army equivalent of poetry.”

Strategy is the business equivalent of poetry. PowerPoint often doesn’t do the poetry justice.