Making Rain

I loathe PowerPoint presentations. There’s just about nothing in business I more dread.

In this I seem to be in a minority. PowerPoint is acknowledged to be the most popular tool for creating slide show presentations and an essential sales tool for many of my entrepreneurial colleagues. From what I read in Microsoft documents on the Internet there are well over 300 million PowerPoint users in the world, including over 30 million per day and over a million going on right now. My guess is the majority of these are boring their listeners to death.

I don’t use PowerPoint (or any of its alternative cousins). Here’s why: I want people to listen to me, the wonderful me. Now, admittedly, my outsourced sales company, Corporate Rain International, lends itself to a more simple presentation than, say, a complex, rococo technology sale. My company is primarily about a bespoke service and quality of strategic sales execution into the C-suite. But, even when selling computer hardware, software or other technological wonderment, buyers hire who they know and like. Anything that clouds or vitiates the urgency of that personal selling relationship is counterproductive.

The simple truth is the more efficaciously naked you can be emotionally, the more compelling you become as a salesman. PowerPoint puts a layer between the salesman and the client that I prefer not to have. This makes selling a more personal and courageous, as well as compelling, act.

Of course, I don’t mean to be absurdly reductionist in my intuitive salesman’s dislike of PowerPoint. Obviously there are necessary moments for the graphic and visual. But, even when necessary, it should be kept simple, as should almost everything in sales.

In an article in Wired from 2003 (subtitled “Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.“), Edward Tufte comments about PowerPoint:

“Imagine a widely used and expensive prescription drug that promised to make us beautiful but didn’t. Instead the drug had frequent, serious side effects: It induced stupidity, turned everyone into bores, wasted time and degraded the quality and credibility of communication.”

That rather neatly sums up my sales instincts on the use of PowerPoint.

Last week (July 27 blog) I noted that there is growing scientific evidence that people who excessively multitask and watch busy multimedia presentations retain much less than those who take in information in a more sedate and focused manner. In my opinion, PowerPoint is another exemplar of this phenomenon.

Painter Hans Hofman in Search for the Real (1967) states, “The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.” Thanks, Hans.

I wanted to briefly follow up last week’s ruminations on the mind altering implications of new media technologies. As I noted at the end of last week’s post (July 20), my instinct is that if you try to do everything, you do nothing. I am frequently as much of a crazed multi-tasking fool as any other executive, as I rush through the hydra-headed challenges and crises of being the CEO of my own firm Corporate Rain International. Yet this flittery, fast-paced daily race often leaves me with the breathless sense that I am missing the bigger picture, of seeing the trees but not the forest.

Russell A. Poldrack, Director of the Imaging Research Center at the University of Texas, states:

“Our research shows that multitasking can have an insidious effect on learning, changing the brain systems that are involved so that even if one can learn while multitasking, the nature of that learning is altered to be less flexible.”

Or consider the work of Dr. Patricia Greenfield, a professor of developmental psychology at UCLA. She warns in a Science article last year that our growing use of the Internet, with all its advantages of speed and accessibility, seems to be weakening our “higher order cognitive processes [including] abstract vocabulary, mindfulness, reflection, inductive problem solving, critical thinking and imagination.”

Likewise, William Powers new book, Hamlet’s Blackberry, putatively argues convincingly that the distractions of manic connectivity can lead to a lack of productivity. Though I have not yet read his book, Mr. Powers apparently warns that an excess of digital activity reduces mental life to “a blizzard of snapshots” (WSJ review-David Harsanyi-June 30, 2010).

Nicholas Carr, in The Shallows (see last week’s post), begins his excellent book with a quote from HAL, the super computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey. HAL’s mind is being slowly erased at the end of the film and HAL plaintively says, “My mind is going. I can feel it.” Carr goes on to expound, “Over the last few years, I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory….Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” Well put.  Thank you, Nicholas.

I love P.T. Barnum. Yes, he was a bit of a scoundrel and a con man. But very wise and seminal and modern in his practical thinking about business.

One of Barnum’s maxims I recently came across appeared in his essay “The Art of Money Getting or Golden Rules for Money Making” (1880). Barnum says: “When a man’s undivided attention is centered on one object, his mind will constantly be suggesting improvements of value, which would escape him if his brain was occupied by a dozen different subjects at once.” Barnum’s advice is most applicable to my present inundation-of-new-media conundrum.

One of the reasons I write this business blog is simply to clear some contemplative time for myself each week. It helps me coalesce my anomic ideas into something coherent. In a sense, I don’t know what I think till I write it down.

On July 6th I posted about the value of lifestyle and life balance accommodations for my employees. As a boss and a creative entrepreneur, clearing open-ended, spacious time for quiet contemplation without agenda is crucial for my emotional health and life balance.

Which brings me to Nicholas Carr‘s new book, “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brain.” Mr. Carr’s book sounds the alarm about the discomfiting implications of our manic connectivity, our addictive cyber hyperactivity. Carr points to significant neuroscientific evidence suggesting that the Net, with it’s constant distractions and velocity, is turning us into “scattered and superficial thinkers.” Carr states in The Wall Street Journal: “Over the last few years, I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory.” He cites extensive science in support of his thesis.

People who read text studded with links, the studies show, comprehend less than those who read traditional linear text. People who watch busy multimedia presentations remember less than those who take in information in a more sedate and focused manner. People who are continually distracted by emails, alerts and other messages understand less than those who are able to concentrate. And people who juggle many tasks are less creative and less productive than those who do one thing at a time….Only when we pay deep attention to a new piece of information are we able to associate it “meaningfully and systematically with knowledge already well established in memory” writes the Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel.

I will admit to being instinctively a bit of a Luddite. I’m not a techie, though my company, Corporate Rain International, is a cutting-edge technology-driven company. I hire technologists. I hope my instinctive caveats about our accelerating cyber-phantasmagoria are unwarranted. I try not to let the fear of the unknown interfere with a practical business reality. However, for myself it is important not to compulsively try to connect with every magic of the Internet (tweeting, texting, friending, linking, etc.)

The Roman philosopher Seneca said succinctly, “To be everywhere is to be nowhere.” I must agree. Thank you, Seneca.

I’ve just finished Harlan Coben’s novel Caught. It’s lots of fun, as are most of Coben’s novels. This one has a particularly labyrinthine and rococo plot involving the disappearance of a beautiful teenage girl, a disastrous scavenger hunt at Princeton, a drunken driver, a vanished corpse, a planted GPS, etc. All making an enjoyable and entrancing thriller, if you’re looking for a good beach read.

I have enjoyed Mr. Coben for many years. (We both love musical comedy, for one thing.) His characters are silly, heroic, original, kinky and quite contemporary.  But one subplot jolted me and aroused my anxiety as a small business entrepreneur.  This subplot shows the Internet being used to totally ravage the reputation, business and careers of five accomplished men who were roommates in college. I was struck with a stomach-clenching fear as this subplot unfolded. Could this happen to me or my company Corporate Rain International?

I don’t know. But, to judge from Coben’s fiction and cyber conjecture, it’s not at all out of the realm of the possible for any small business owner to unfairly take a reputation hit from a concerted effort to besmirch. Or perhaps this is just entrepreneurial paranoia.

Ah well. It’s part of the small businessman’s job to worry each day about the hypothetical, as well as the real, even if it is from the phantasmagoric imagination of Harlan Coben. As Pierre Beaumarchais noted in The Barber of Seville (1775), “I would rather worry without need than live without heed.” Thank you, Pierre.