Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Should the first slide show the agenda?

Executive management is limiting us to 5 seconds per slide.  I'm going to need you to create a 720 slide presentation for me on our new product.

This comic, if you're a regular follower of Snarky, is based on a comment I made last week about forcing work presentations to follow the Ignite model and stick to no more than five seconds per Power Point Slide (from Isn't That What You Said About Our Testing Resources Last Year?).  I spend a lot of time reading about dystopias, and one of the general rules for writing your own dystopic literature is to take any basic fact about modern society and just go overboard with it until it's unhealthy.  Basically, subvert the religious mandate, don't do anything to excess.  So this comic is subverting the idea that 5 second slides might be healthy in a corporate environment.

If you're looking for a good dystopia, and you've already read The Handmaid's Tale, I just read Hugh Howey's Wool series.  Although in some respects it fails my litmus test, for instance, by having hope, it's a good series.  The first five books are pulled together in an omnibus edition.  You can read it on a Kindle for $5.99, which is about $.01 per page.  A good deal.  I'm not quite through Will McIntosh's Soft Apocalypse yet, but I'm already enjoying it very much.  And it definitely fits the extrapolation theme.  As does Albert Brooks' (yes, that Albert Brooks) 2030: The Real Story of What Happens to America.

Snrky: Executive management is limiting us to 5 seconds per slide.  I'm going to need you to create a 720 slide presentation for me on our new product.
Title: Should the first slide show the agenda?

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