I wanted them to engage, to hash things out at the table, rather than show a bunch of slides. “People would confront a problem by creating a presentation. “I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking,” Jobs told biographer Walter Isaacson when describing meetings upon his return to Apple in 1997. Jobs's aversion to people using slides in meetings was well known inside Apple.

(In the 2nd edition of Presentation Zen, which just started shipping, I expand a bit more on Steve Jobs's ideas concerning presentations).Įven when I first started working at Apple in 2001, I overheard someone in my department say that you should never show up to a meeting with Steve Jobs with a deck of slides. This was a point that was made too by Steve Jobs in several of his interviews with biographer Walter Isaacson in his book called simply Steve Jobs.

I stressed early on in the first version of Presentation Zen four years ago-and ad nauseam on this website long before that-that PowerPoint (and other forms of multimedia projected on a screen) are not appropriate for every kind of presentation, or even for most kinds of presentations. Multimedia is great for presentations before large groups such as keynote addresses or conference presentations, but in meetings where you want to actively discuss issues or go over details in depth, slides-especially the snooze-inducing bullet-point variety, which are never a good idea-are almost always counter productive. One thing we need to constantly remind ourselves is that slides and other forms of projected visualization-no matter how 'cool' they may be-are not appropriate for every context.

Apple powerpoint presentation