Manufacturology

No bullets for Strategy’s strategist…

There’s no bul­let list like Stalin’s bul­let list!

Yes­ter­days post about McK­in­sey Quarterly’s inter­view with Richard Rumelt [D. Lovallo and L. Men­donca, “Strategy’s strate­gist: An inter­view with Richard Rumelt”, The McK­in­sey Quar­terly, nr.4, pp.56–67, 2007] left out one impor­tant point. The bul­let point.

In another post back in Jan­u­ary, I men­tioned that I’d read Edward Tufte’s “Visual dis­play of quan­ti­ta­tive infor­ma­tion” and “Visual Expla­na­tions”. These are great books on how to present quan­ti­ta­tive evi­dence in a clear and non-ambiguous way.

Tufte is also well known for his crit­i­cism of Microsoft Pow­er­point. He makes the (power)point that it lacks the qual­i­ties needed for pre­sent­ing evi­dence that requires reflec­tion and cog­ni­tive involve­ment from the audience.

Using bul­let points so much dri­ves out thinking.

Now I know that Richard Rumelt is also a fan of Edward Tufte, say­ing that: “If I had my way, small groups […] would be absolutely pro­hib­ited from doing Pow­er­Point pre­sen­ta­tions! Using bul­let points so much dri­ves out think­ing. One of the nice fea­tures about Pow­er­Point is how fast you can cre­ate a pre­sen­ta­tion. But that’s the trou­ble. Peo­ple end up with bul­let points that con­tra­dict one another, and no one notices! It’s sim­ply amazing.”

Myself I put pride in using as lit­tle text as pos­si­ble in my pre­sen­ta­tions. Pre­sen­ta­tions are meant to sup­port what you say, not to be read as an alter­na­tive ver­sion of what you say. And if you as a pre­sen­ter need key­words, use a paper note.

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