Rameez Nooruddin

“Peo­ple who know what they are talk­ing about don’t need PowerPoint.”

— Steve Jobs quoted in Wal­ter Isaacson’s mem­oir Steve Jobs.

This quote has become fairly pop­u­lar after it was fea­tured in a post by Pre­sen­ta­tionZen. If you think there is rea­son enough to ban slide decks alto­gether, I’d say no.

I too, like most white-collared work­ers, have been sub­jected to one too many sleep-inducing pre­sen­ta­tions with wordy slide decks that never seemed to end. But are we right in blam­ing Pow­er­Point? Isn’t it just a tool that is harm­ful when it falls into the wrong hands? Shouldn’t we be blam­ing poor pre­sen­ters instead?

The hypocrisy of Steve’s state­ment is evi­dent when you real­ize that he loved using slides:

“We had one rule that really both­ered him: We never allowed slides, which were his main pre­sen­ta­tion tool.

One year, about an hour before his appear­ance, I was informed that he was back­stage prepar­ing dozens of slides, even though I had reminded him a week ear­lier of the no-slides pol­icy. I asked two of his top aides to tell him he couldn’t use the slides, but they each said they couldn’t do it, that I had to. So, I went back­stage and told him the slides were out. Famously prickly, he could have stormed out, refused to go on. And he did try to argue with me.”

— Walt Moss­berg in The Steve Jobs I Knew

Yes, the very same per­son who appears to be blam­ing slide decks was irri­tated when he was not allowed to use them.

Of course, there is a dif­fer­ence between Steve’s slide deck and the com­mon office meet­ing slide deck. Steve’s were always beau­ti­ful and often nar­rated a story. A suc­cess­ful pre­sen­ta­tion is noth­ing but a story well told. And slides can help you in the sto­ry­telling process if you use it right.

By blam­ing “Pow­er­Point”, Steve is just pok­ing fun at a prod­uct devel­oped by Apple’s com­peti­tor, Microsoft. He could just as well have men­tioned Keynote (or sim­ply ‘slides’) but he didn’t. He phrased his words in a way that peo­ple would iden­tify with and, at the same time, show Apple’s com­peti­tors in a poor light.

That was the genius of Steve Jobs. And every­one fell for it.