Morgan Stanley is part of a team of elite experts from Wall Street assembled in recent weeks by the Treasury to address the spreading financial turmoil. The group includes Ken Wilson, an influential investment banker who retired from Goldman Sachs to become the Treasury's point person in dealing with crises in the financial markets. W. Scott Frame, an expert on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, has been detailed from the Federal Reserve's Atlanta branch to supplement the Treasury's analysts.
The hiring of a prominent Wall Street firm for such a mission is unusual and underscores how seriously Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. is taking the possibility that the Treasury might have to provide assistance to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Paulson has repeatedly said that he did not expect to use the Treasury's emergency powers to keep the mortgage firms afloat.
Morgan Stanley delivered a PowerPoint presentation on July 28 about its capabilities in analyzing complex transactions, especially those that involve mortgage-backed securities of the kind Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac deal in.
As Edward Tufte writes in Conway's Law Meets PowerPoint:
The metaphor of PowerPoint is the metaphor of the software corporation itself. To describe a software house is to describe the PP cognitive style: a big bureaucracy engaged in computer programming (deep hierarchical structures, relentlessly sequential, nested, one-short-line-at-a-time) and in marketing (advocacy not analysis, more style than substance, misdirection, slogan thinking, fast pace, branding, exagerrated claims, marketplace ethics). That the PP cognitive style mimics a software house mimics aa software house exemplifies Conway's Law:
Any organization which designs a system... will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.
Why should the structure, activities, and values of a large commercial bureaucracy be a useful metaphor for our presentations? Are there worse metaphors? Voice-mail menu systems? Billboards? Television? Stalin?
The pushy PP style tends to set up a dominance relationship between speaker and audience, as the speaker makes power points with hierarchical bullets to passive followers. Such aggressive, stereotyped, over-managed presentations -- the Great Leader up on the pedestal -- are characteristic of hegemonic systems and of Conway's Law again in operation...
Read the whole thing.
And it worked so well in our last failed imperial venture, Iraq:
From Thomas Ricks' book Fiasco:
"[Army Lt. General David] McKiernan had another, smaller but nagging issue: He couldn't get Franks to issue clear orders that stated explicitly what he wanted done, how he wanted to do it, and why. Rather, Franks passed along PowerPoint briefing slides that he had shown to Rumsfeld: "It's quite frustrating the way this works, but the way we do things nowadays is combatant commanders brief their products in PowerPoint up in Washington to OSD and Secretary of Defense...In lieu of an order, or a frag [fragmentary order], or plan, you get a bunch of PowerPoint slides...[T]hat is frustrating, because nobody wants to plan against PowerPoint slides." That reliance on slides rather than formal written orders seemed to some military professionals to capture the essence of Rumsfeld's amateurish approach to war planning. "Here may be the clearest manifestation of OSD's contempt for the accumulated wisdom of the military profession and of the assumption among forward thinkers that technology-- above all information technology--has rendered obsolete the conventions traditionall governing the preparation and conduct of war," commented retired Army Col. Andrew Bacevich, a former commander of an armored cavalry regiment. "To imagine that PowerPoint slides can substitute for such means is really the height of recklessness." It was like telling an automobile mechanic to use a manufacturer's glossy sales brochure to figure out how to repair an engine."
This raises some of the same issues discussed in the report by members of the NASA Return to Flight Task Force in the contribution at the top of this thread.
Rescuing the financial system using PowerPoint as a cognitive style? What could go wrong?
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In defense of PowerPoint
PowerPoint was created by a small startup and ran on the noble Macintosh before it was acquired by the Evil Empire.
When it came out, I was a computer trainer at a firm with a lot of Mac clients, and I fell in love with the program at first click.
It used ingeniously simple metaphors to take a complex and undemocratic task -- creating "slides" for professional-looking presentations -- and put it in the hands of millions of people.
Its structure encouraged brevity and good organization.
That crisp presentation can and does often trump higher quality thinking can scarcely be laid at the feet of people who make good presentation tools.
Should we blame Strunk and White for helping generations of writers learn concision?
I'll Second That Defense
It's not the format, it's the substance. They used to lie and bullshit in briefing papers and handouts. If it weren't for PP, these guys would simply pay a company to produce slick color charts and graphs on nicely bound heavy paper. The only difference is that they'd be the only ones who could afford to produce such things. PP lets everyone dress up their bullshit in a professional manner. I for one am grateful. And not just because I have to give a presentation to more than 100 people in a couple of months (although I do and having a PP is a life saver, it helps keep their visual attention and prevents me from having to read long, boring statutes to them).
"Do what you feel in your heart to be right -- for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't. " - Eleanor Roosevelt
I think the defenses are missing the point
PowerPoint is great for giving people a high level, low detail presentation on some subject. So if you want an overview of some legal topic, a PP presentation might be great. But if someone is writing a legal brief (where a lot is on the line), do you want them to base it on a PP presentation, or might it be a good idea to read long, boring statutes?
The results of shaping the financial system or fighting wars based on PP presentations seem pretty obvious: the subprime crisis and Iraq, esp the first 12-18 months.
Do you want your brain surgeon to have actual knowledge of medicine, anatomy, and some surgical experience, or will you be happy if he's just seen a nicely done PP presentation? Because metaphorically, we seem to be increasingly substituting the latter for the former.
That's like saying tote bags are bad
because they won't hold as much as a tractor-trailer. PP, like most any tool can be well used or misused. Giving short-shrift to a topic that demands depth is user error.
Corruption predated PowerPoint
As someone old enough to have actually given a lecture using glass slides, and one who is not a great fan of computers or Bill Gates, I am also second to no one in my enthusiasm for PowerPoint. What used to take me weeks of frustration, buckets of midnight oil and a legion of deadline-hugging subcontractors to accomplish can now be done by me alone in a few hours, days at most - and the product is infinitely superior.
The time I used to spend on the technical demands of slide preparation can now be invested in additional research and presentation development, which I flatter myself into thinking means a better experience for both me and my audience. I know it is better for me.
PowerPoint is only a tool; like any tool, how it is used tells us a great deal about the user. Rumsfeld and Franks would have been equally foolish and incompetent if they had been wielding sticks to make marks in the sand.
A helpful but simplistic tool will always be misused
by management. Rumsfeld's demands as recounted in Fiasco are repeated across American businesses and government every day by the thousands. When the manager demands that every presentation be accompanied by a Powerpoint production (as I've seen in a number of organizations), workers end up focusing on the production. The consequences aren't as dire as Rumsfeld effected, but only because nothing else has the potential for direness as war. For the organization, the poor results are congruent.
And then there are presentations that make their own point.
Heh
I didn't even get the quote right :(