BUSINESS MEETING HUMOR VS. POWERPOINT PURGATORY

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A prescient article  in the New York Times back in 1999 warned of the adverse effect of PowerPoint presentations on effective communication. If they only knew how bad it would get in the years to come!

Before PowerPoint presenters actually had to - GASP! - write speeches! This meant thinking about what you wanted to say before opening your mouth. If a presenter - say at a major corporation - enjoyed the luxury of visuals, the speech would have to be written weeks before it was presented to give the photographers and artists time to storyboard it and create the visuals.

This didn't make all speeches great, but at least they stood a fighting chance. For one thing they were timed out. A person reading from a script isn't likely to blab on way past their alotted time limit.

Today presenters sit down at their laptop the day before and bang out a rough outline  in PowerPoint - words on slides - and call it a speech. The first time they actually hear it is when they read their outline off the slide along with the audience.

In our line of work we sit through a lot of meetings and lately a lot of factors have come together to turn them into PowerPoint Purgatories - truely hellish punishment.

Bad PowerPoint is one factor. But tight budgets cut back on rehearsal time. Speakers come in to the ballroom on rehearsal day, quickly look through their slides on the screen and move on to their next appointment. Skimpy budgets also often mean longer sessions. Instead of two or three morning general sessions with afternoon breakouts and even - is this dating me? - free time, general sessions can run from 8 in the morning until 6 at night, then a half hour break and right into the dinner program.

The need for business meeting comedy in today's sales meetings or employee meetings is acute. Imagine the relief the audience feels after two 40 minute bouts with speakers reading from overcrowded PowerPoint type slides when Willie Sellmore pops onto the screen to interact with presenters and comment on the proceedings.

A three minute comedy routine is enough to re-energize the audience and elevate their powers of concentration for the next presentation.

Without this comic relief, the program can be much more tedius, and much less effective.