Occupy Wall Street has given voice to long-simmering resentments in our economy. But there is yet another dystopia that is giving rise to a rebellion, and strangely enough, it’s against elite software.

American business culture expects its white collared millions to use slides when they speak to groups. But many business presenters are beginning to lift their voices against the tyranny of PowerPoint. Crushed under the monopolistic power of the nearly ubiquitous Microsoft slide-maker, brave cubicle denizens have been heard to complain of their inability to utter a word on the public stages of corporate Amerika without filtering their thoughts through the sieve of slide designs and pre-fab layouts. As you might expect, the movement lacks central leadership, is disorganized, and lacks specific demands and messaging, but it is growing.

Let’s first look at what is good about PowerPoint. What does it bring to the meeting? Before a meeting it allows attendees to review presentation material, and after the meeting, those unable to attend can read the slides.

It rids us of the need to pay recording secretaries to jot in short hand the powerful points made by the speakers at the meetings, and then pay them again to circulate their apt summaries to attendees. It also stores information in a familiar format to refresh our memories, and thus allows us to reflect on the drift of the conversations in which we found ourselves engaged.

PowerPoint is also good because it provides a visual to focus the eyes of the listener while he or she is listening. People learn more when they simultaneously see images and hear spoken words (a fact proven by educational psychologists.) However, few business presenters use creative images on their PowerPoint slides, which may be one cause of their antipathy to the software: many corporate cultures have micro PowerPoint cultures based on the traditional bullet point model.

Senior executives want it done the way they did it in the past (a lethal number of bullet points), and thus newly minted MBAs cling to the same format, lest they be thought fringey by their superiors. We must also acknowledge that few business leaders are great writers, or skilled essayists, and I haven’t met too many MBAs capable of marshalling the language and sending it into battle. So bullet points, despite their lack of nuance and subtlety, seem to suffice for the guys and gals making the big decisions in the executive suites.

But the resentment, felt and expressed by a growing number of highly accomplished people, is real, even though it’s hard to measure the actual cost of using PowerPoint. So let’s do a little math. We know that American workers deliver an estimated 30 million PowerPoint presentations per day.

Let’s assume that the average length of a presentation is 30 minutes, the average audience size is four people, the average salary of those in attendance is $35K, and that one-quarter of the presentations are entirely useless, all of which are conservative estimates.

The cost to our economy is $250 million per day, and about $100 billion per year. And that’s just for those in the audience. What about all of us who struggle to create the presentations?

PowerPoint represents a staggering burden on our economy, and a troubling medium for speakers and audiences alike. It can give the illusion of competence, the illusion of simplicity, and the illusion of understanding.

It has also excused the great majority of our leaders from learning to use language as an incisive tool of leadership.

It is not all bad. PowerPoint can save us money, and store information. But as a tool, it is over-used and frequently abused by those who do too much public speaking and not enough private thinking.

Keep your ears open. The low grumble you hear in the halls may soon swell to a chorus, a cacophony, a crescendo of complaints. PowerPoint may soon be demonized as a tool of the devil, an instrument of dystopia, the destroyer of Western Civilization that wastes time, wastes money, makes us look and sound like idiots, and prevents us from flourishing in a state of high dudgeon when calling our listeners to action.

Sims Wyeth & Co. provides public speaking courses, executive speech coaching, presentation skills training, voice and speech training, speech writing, and courses that address stage fright, body language, presentation strategy, and effective use of PowerPoint, all of which contribute to greater executive presence and personal impact.

Adam Bryant, author of the weekly “Corner Office” column in The New York Times, has compiled 70 interviews with CEOs and come up with five X-factors that contribute to great leadership.

You can find them all here, but I want to share one of them as it relates to this blog: A simple mind-set.

A Simple Mind-Set

There is a stubborn disconnect in many companies. Most senior executives want the same thing from people who present to them: be concise, get to the point, make it simple. Yet few people can deliver the simplicity that many bosses want. Instead, they mistakenly assume that the bosses will be impressed by a long PowerPoint presentation that shows how diligently they researched a topic, or that they will win over their superiors by talking more, not less.

Few things seem to get C.E.O’s riled up more than lengthy PowerPoint presentations. It’s not the software they dislike; that’s just a tool. What irks them is the unfocused thinking that leads to an overlong slide presentation. There is wide agreement it’s a problem: “death by PowerPoint” has become a cliche.

If so many executives in positions of authority are clear about what they want, why can’t they get the people who report to them to lose the “Power” part of their presentations and simply get to the “Point”?

There are a few likely explanations. A lot of people have trouble being concise. Next time you’re in a meeting, ask somebody to give you the 10-word summary of his or her idea. Some people can do a quick bit of mental jujitsu, and they’ll summarize an idea with a “Here’s what’s important…” or “The bottom line is… .” Others will have trouble identifying the core point.

Another possible explanation is that a lag exists in the business world. There was a time when simply having certain information was a competitive advantage. Now, in the Internet era, most people have easy access to the same information. That puts a greater premium on the ability to synthesize, to connect dots in new ways and to ask simple, smart questions that lead to untapped opportunities.

“I’d love to teach a course called ‘The Idea,’” said Dany Levy, the founder of DailyCandy.com. “Which is, basically, so you want to start a company, how’s it going to work? Let’s figure it out: just a very practical plan, but not a business plan, because I feel like business plans now feel weighty and outdated. It seems, back in the day, that the longer your business plan was, the more promising it was going to be. And now, the shorter your business plan is, the more succinct and to the point it is, the better. You want people to get why your business is going to work pretty quickly.”

Steven A. Ballmer, the C.E.O. of Microsoft, said he understood the impulse in presentations to share all the underlying research that led to a conclusion. But he changed the way he runs meetings to get to the conclusion first.

“The mode of Microsoft meetings used to be: You come with something we haven’t seen in a slide deck or presentation,” he said. “You deliver the presentation. You probably take what I will call ‘the long and winding road.’ You take the listener through your path of discovery and exploration, and you arrive at a conclusion.

“I decided that’s not what I want to do anymore. I don’t think it’s efficient. So most meetings nowadays, you send me the materials and I read them in advance. And I can come in and say: ‘I’ve got the following four questions. Please don’t present the deck.’ That lets us go, whether they’ve organized it that way or not, to their reccommendation. And if I have questions about the long and winding road and the data and the supporting evidence, I can ask them. But it gives us greater focus.”

Sims Wyeth & Co. provides public speaking courses, executive speech coaching, presentation skills training, voice and speech training, speech writing, and courses that address stage fright, body language, presentation strategy, and effective use of PowerPoint, all of which contribute to greater executive presence and personal impact.

Michael Alley has investigated an alternative to the default PowerPoint slide layout, which he terms the “assertion-evidence design.”

This approach employs succinct sentence headlines (sentences that make an assertion) at the top of the slide.  Under it, in the main section of the slide, there would appear a visual representation of evidence, such as a picture or a graph.

In multiple experiments, Alley has found that students viewing presentations following this design were better able to recall the main assertion of slides than were those students viewing presentations employing phrase headlines and bulleted text.

An example of a phrase headline would be, “Product safety,” a phrase that contains no information of value and no point of view. 

If the author of such a slide were to use Alley’s “assertion-evidence design,” the headline might read, “Product safety is competitive.”  That is, the sentence would make an assertion, or a point, and then the viewer would be able to glance down to review the evidence on display that supports the assertion.

McKinsey and Co.,  a leading consulting firm, has used this methodology for years, if not decades, as have other reputable institutions, including the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory.  

Any presenter whose job is to create clarity out of complexity will benefit from using Alley’s “assertion-evidence design.” 

Sims Wyeth & Co. provides public speaking courses, executive speech coaching, presentation skills training, voice and speech training, speech writing, and courses that address stage fright, body language, presentation strategy, and effective use of PowerPoint, all of which contribute to greater executive presence and personal impact.  Sign up for our presentation tips and learn more about us at http://www.simswyeth.com/.