Alf 0002 Death by Power Point PDF Internal Release 03 (3)

7/31/2019 Alf 0002 Death by Power Point PDF Internal Release 03 (3)

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Visit: http://occupymeeting.com
http://occupymeeting.com/http://occupymeeting.com/


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Written by Todd Barr, in collaboration with Venkatesh Rao

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DEATH BY POWERPOINT, RESURRECTION BY TABLET

The tablet stands ready to revitalize stupefying

corporate cultures everywhere. But only if you

choose to unleash it the right way.

Todd Barr .@tbarr

Alfresco
http://occupymeeting.com/http://occupymeeting.com/http://occupymeeting.com/http://occupymeeting.com/http://occupymeeting.com/http://occupymeeting.com/http://occupymeeting.com/http://occupymeeting.com/http://occupymeeting.com/http://occupymeeting.com/http://occupymeeting.com/http://occupymeeting.com/


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Copyright Alfresco Corporation 2012All rights reserved

PowerPoint is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation
http://occupymeeting.com/http://occupymeeting.com/http://occupymeeting.com/http://occupymeeting.com/


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For workplace revolutionaries everywhere.

Those brave souls who are grabbing tablets and escaping

death by PowerPoint across the world.

Those stealthy warriors who are back-channeling over IM,

twittering dissent, doodling creative ideas, and actually

choosing what to read via the good old browser.

Thank you. You are ushering in a culture of work that

actually works. Thank you for showing the rest of us the way.

This ebook is for you.
http://occupymeeting.com/http://occupymeeting.com/http://occupymeeting.com/http://occupymeeting.com/http://occupymeeting.com/http://occupymeeting.com/http://occupymeeting.com/http://occupymeeting.com/http://occupymeeting.com/http://occupymeeting.com/http://occupymeeting.com/


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CONTENTS

The Otherwise Engaged 6

The Tablet is Mightier than the Slide 8

From Pitch Cultures to Pitched Battles 10

Finished Business Seals Lips 12

The Makers in the Meeting 14

The Birth of the Studio 16

Cultures of Readiness 18

Content You Can Touch 20

The Journey Begins 21


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engagement studies, which claim that as many as 70% of the workers

are disengaged.

The word disengaged suggests a resentful and sullen attitude towards work.It frames the problem of management in parent-teenager terms. It prompts, in

managers, a desperate attempt to prod the sullen worker

into showing some signs, any signs of life.

It turns managers into incompetent and anxious amateur motivational speakers.

Not much, just wanted to make

something funny and cute


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The doodles we received for the Alfresco Doodle Contest reveal

humor, humanity, curiosity and restless seeking of brain fodder.

The doodle on the facing page is one of several that you willencounter through this book.

We believe the disengaged are not slouching in listless and sullen

passivity, waiting to be put out of their misery, as peers drone on

with the aid of unreadable slides.

These are people who are alive and well, and extremely engaged.

The problem is

They are not disengaged. Merely otherwise engaged.

And perhaps the most important battlefront for reclaiming

engagement is the business meeting. An infantilizing psychic

prison like no other, within which millions of completely

functional adults are trapped at any given time.

Weve all heard the starkly poignant term that describes their

condition: Death By PowerPoint.

The meeting doodle is a clue that can lead you to a thriving world

beneath the apparent bleakness.

desperate presenters, might it make sense to harness the power of

the doodle?

Can we catalyze and amplify the anarchic creativity latent in

doodles, and unleash it on problems that people are actually

interested in working on?

Majority of American Workers Not Engaged in their Jobs, Gallup,

October 28, 2011 http://www.gallup.com/poll/150383/majority-

american-workers-not-engaged-jobs.aspx

WE NEED A WEAPON FOR THIS.ENTER THE TABLET.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/150383/majority-american-workers-not-engaged-jobs.aspxhttp://www.gallup.com/poll/150383/majority-american-workers-not-engaged-jobs.aspxhttp://www.gallup.com/poll/150383/majority-american-workers-not-engaged-jobs.aspxhttp://www.gallup.com/poll/150383/majority-american-workers-not-engaged-jobs.aspx


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If youve ever been at a meeting where a participant looked up

some fact online in real time and corrected a speaker, youve

encountered the early signs of how the tablet is turning into a

If youve been at a talk where the speaker announced a hashtag and

projected the tweetstream live on a second screen, and improvised

in response to the feedback, youve seen the power of an active

audience armed only with a limited tool, the smartphone. The

tablet is a lot more than just a larger smartphone.

Complete and utter boredom


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Ordinary technologies conform to

existing realities. Disruptive

technologies reshape them. It is

already clear that tablets are

a disruptive technology on par

with others that have invaded the

workplace over the last century --

typewriters, photocopiers, personal

computers, email, laptops and

smartphones. The only questions thatremain are when and where

the revolution will start.

Our candidate? Meetings. Today,

PowerPoint rules. Tomorrow, the

tablet will.

data with data.

One is a weapon that allows one

person to force-feed processed

information to an audience desperate

to be otherwise engaged. A case

of many minds being held hostage

by one.

The other is a weapon that allows

an active and restless group to

go hunting and gathering in what

is increasingly a richly connected

landscape of data.

Why weapon? Why not tool?

As an ever-growing pantheon of

motivational speakers keep reminding

us, information work is not factory

work. It is creative-destruction in

a Darwinian economy of ideas.

Research shows that individuals

create best in solitude and isolation.

Committees and meetings do not

create. Their role is to serve as

mediums of dissent and contention.

Great meetings are gladiatorial

arenas where ideas conceived in

isolation can do battle. In this

war, data is the primary weapon.

The tablet can be the ubiquitous

window into the world of data.

serious assault on work cultures

By the time

the revolution is done, the landscape

of work will have been transformed.


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Pitch culture is about shooting down an

unarmed audience with information bullet

points. What if there were designatedvenues for pitched battles instead?

A pitched battle is a battle where both

sides choose a location and consciously

There is no

telling who might actually win. It is

an unpredictable event.

Computer-driven presentations are

only about a generation old. Digital

presentations did not really displacetransparencies until the late nineties,

when LCD projectors and laptops became

matured as a product (around 1997). Apple

release of Keynote.

Its the only character I know how to draw


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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PowerPoint


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The key to the death-by-PowerPoint

and polished forms that discourage

further input, rather than in the form

of working documents that naturallyinvite it.

Presentations are designed to shut

people up, rather than get them

talking.

The survey we conducted on tablet

use revealed that tablets are

favorite meeting and seminar devices.

The primary use? People consume

external content and do routine

internal communication.

When seated together in groups,

people naturally want to explore and

exchange new information, and talk

about it. They want to check out of

conversations they dont need, and

check back in when they can add or

derive some value.

This is not disrespect. It is

the most rational instinct in

the world.

It takes a uniquely gripping

performance of truly original ideas

a stimulating movie or a great TED

talk to compete with this natural

instinct and keep people quiet and

in their seats, content to merely

watch, listen and learn. Such silent

enthrallment is earned, not dictated.

Or it takes a lousy performance

working together with coercive normsaround expected behavior at work.

Real meetings, where things get done,

have shifted to water coolers, golf

courses and backrooms. Thanks to

PowerPoint, business meetings have

turned into a sort of theater of

record, an ongoing program of tepid

performances, designed for audiences

who have been coerced into their

seats.

What is the point of this theater?

To manage perceptions of empowerment

and collective decision-making.

For this function to be served, it

is critical that presentations be

polished enough to reduce discussion

to a few ritual remarks.

The polished slide deck is a

fait accompli that manages to

repercussions. The polish alone

underlines the futility of dissent.

Like the priest who announces before

a wedding, speak now, or forever

hold your peace, dissent is not

actually expected.


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What happens after such meetings? Slide decks are archived.

Defensive disclosure and plausible deniability aims have been met.

Cubicles

Coffeeshops

Meetings

Walking

Lunch Meeting

Seminaror Conference

Home

= Respondent


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When traditional corporations began

to adopt open, collaborative models,it was no more than lip-service.

What little autonomy was granted

to individuals was generally

inconsequential.

committees across America are models

governance.

The real moving-and-shaking continued

to happen in smaller cabals.

the last decade hit, a few executives

genuinely began wondering: could the

methods actually work and help solve

problems that backroom machinations

could not? Could such processes do

together?

Innovations like Googles 20% time

began to spread. They represented a

control on the one hand, and autonomy

and engagement on the other.

The culture that has started to take

root around such genuine autonomy

experiments is one of experimental

making.

This is no mere freedom to opine

This is primarily freedom to make.

Makers seek forgiveness when

necessary, not permission.

Empowerment in the sense of

permission is a meaningless word

to the maker.

Meaningful empowerment means

resources.

And makers have restless hands.

Hands that doodle under restraint

do a great deal more when left

unrestrained. If you yield control

to them, theres no telling where

you might end up.

But you can be assured of this:

wherever your unleashed makers take

you, it wont be into the bowels of

disengaged despair.

The meeting room has turned into a

maker studio. Even if only for 20%

of the time, in a small minority of

brave companies.

Most of what your internal maker

culture produces will be junk. That

is the nature of innovation. But it

will be better than listless memories

of useless meetings, languishing in

presentation repositories.


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Conference rooms are for captive audiences

and scripted theater. Makers work in studios.

They drift in and out of conversations, they

retreat to work alone or step out to try an

idea out on a peer.

But as our survey showed, tablets arebeautifully specialized personal consumption

to create.

In the relationship between the tablet and the

entire philosophy of work environments.

By separating consumption engaged

consumption-by-choice, not force-feeding and

making, the tablet allows us to optimize bothexperiences and manage their interplay with

far greater creativity. The tablet has freed

tool par excellence.

We seek such separation of functions naturally.

We have already seen it with a humbler piece

of work equipment: the chair.

Increasingly, people reserve creative work

that catalyze individual creativity within a

mildly stimulating, but non-intrusive social

atmosphere.

Workplace cubicles are increasingly for

Mindful, active consumption is for couches,

comfortable armchairs and boring meetings.


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Contention and debate are not for

We prefer to walk on golf courses,

stand by water coolers or gesticulate

passionately near whiteboards,

smudging ourselves with permanent

marker stains. When you really want

to disagree with a speaker, you jump

up from your chair and grab the

marker or laser pointer. You knock

In what sort of environment would all

this be normal behavior rather than

outright rudeness?

We are talking about the studio.

There is privacy and seclusion

for individual creativity, but

enough openness for serendipity

to leak in. There is room for

contention and collaboration.

Studios include arenas for

pitched battles.

We dont yet know how to create

studios for information work,

but were getting there.

Not all the pieces are in place

yet. As with the software-laptop-LCD

projector trifecta of presentation

technology, we need a similar

technology set built for making with

ideas. The laptop, which unchained

the maker from his cubicle, was the

Low

Communi

cation

MODE & INTENSITY of TABLET USAGE

Consumption

Creation

Medium High

= Respondent


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The VP frowns, a few people open

up their laptops again. There is a

sniggers and weak jokes.

gets underway. A couple of smart-

that projection issues will crop up.

The cost of meeting technology

fumbles is higher than you might

think. They promote:

A general atmosphere of lassitude

and low expectations

A ritualistic reinforcement of a

SNAFU culture

A general loss of momentum right at

the beginning of every conversation

Where do you never see such dynamics?Think mission-critical operations.

How would you react to these start-up

fumbles?

Your pilot announcing over the PA:

Sorry folks, looks like one of our

engines didnt start, dont mind the

A fellow soldier in a combat

situation saying, Oops, cant cover

you buddy, looks like I brought the

A chef youve hired for a party

announcing, Whoops, sorry about

the ugly food folks, I forgot to

sharpen my knife.

of tablet computing does more than

create a pleasant user experience.

allows you to lose your awareness of

devices and tools and focus on the

thinking. The tablet represents a

culture of operational readiness. It

is to the information worker what a

every time.

The gang of makers in a studio does

not fumble and stumble and allow

apparently trivial sources of friction

to drain momentum. Get it done

hangs in the air like electricity.

When two people are on their feet,

and grabbing markers from each other,

where do they turn when only data can

THE HANDYTABLET.


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As of this writing, the search phrase

death by PowerPoint returns over a

quarter million results.

So why do we persist with a work

culture that has so many obvious signs

of dysfunction?

Because we lack a credible

alternative. Dysfunctional can after

all, be better than non-functional.

Creating a culture of work that works

is not an easy task. It is not a

simple matter of banning PowerPoint

from meetings, issuing tablets to all,

beige furniture with colorful beanbag

chairs, tearing down cubicle walls and

These are just the tactics that are

available to you. Without a philosophy

to guide you towards thoughtful use,

they just add up to a lot of sound and

fury signifying nothing.

Some, like encouraging tablet use and

Others, such as colorful beanbag

chairs are likely to be of symbolic

value at best.

To drive true transformation and

install a profoundly positive work

culture with deep roots, executives

and managers must face up to a

choosing accomplishment over activity.

the tactical decisions become simple.

How do you get there?

We will not pretend that we have

answers, let alone a checklist or

recipe. If these challenges were that

easy, there would be no need for

leaders and managers.

Our hope is that we have gotten you

thinking. Transformational change is

not for lazy thinkers.

We hope you will take on the challenge

of transforming your meetings, and go

on from there to greater things. From

great meetings to engaged employees,

and from engaged employees to great

But we will be with you, every step of

the way.

We look forward to learning from you,

and we hope to help you learn from

others embarking on this journey.


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Documents

Alf 0002 Death by Power Point PDF Internal Release 03 (3)