Ban PowerPoint in 3 easy steps. I dare you.

Time to get that monkey off your back.

Physicists, Generals and CEOs agree, slides tend to restrict dialogue and participation in meetings. Audiences can easily go on autopilot with the knowledge that the guy or gal at the head of the table with the clicker is taking over. To avoid this at LinkedIn, our CEO Jeff Weiner has for a long time promoted meetings without slides, but with a pre-send of any pertinent briefs prior to getting together.

When we do this, it forces more dialogue amongst our cross-functional teams, and helps teams communicate and build relationships in the workplace around ideas and points of view. Banning PowerPoint from our internal meetings is challenging us all to put more thought behind how to say what we mean simply, and efficiently.

Easy for me to say, coming from a Silicon Valley tech company where ‘breaking the rules’ is in our DNA, right? What about the 8 out of 10 sales professionals (source: my gut) who rely on PowerPoint to deliver crucial background information on sales calls? For some very successful sales leaders, a presentation remains the primary way they demonstrate a depth of services, educate around success stories, and show prospects how important they are; that we’ve ‘done our homework.’

Let’s shatter that nightmarish urban work myth with 3 ways to ban bad PowerPoint:

PowerPoints don't kill meetings, people do."

-M. Neumeier

1. Less is more: Marty Neumeier is the author of ‘The Designful Company,’ a guide to corporate branding and culture design. His '8th lever for change' is ‘ban PowerPoint,’ which I blatantly stole from in my title (sorry Marty, but buy his book it's phenom). He proposes three golden rules to make less more with visual aids in presentations:

• Edit to the bone – push for no more than 10 words per slide
• Use pictures – provides a needed break from words on a slide and prompts imaginative thinking and engagement
• Keep it moving – keep to one idea per slide so you can move quickly through snackable concepts

(and if there is any doubt that Marty knows what he’s talking about, one of his slide presentations for the book ‘The Brand Gap’ has been viewed online more than 3 million times).

2. One-sheeters rule: Of late I have been experimenting with visually packaging dense information into scannable dashboards for clients and prospects. It’s working wonderfully. Sometimes I plot multiple project initiatives against critical X/Y axes of risk and reward. Other times I plot projects that have ‘heat dots’ of green/yellow/red to convey the health of a workstream. Brief, one-sentence descriptions of the project and it's status are not always simple to draft, but with some time dedicated to efficiency, they keep the diagram clear and add context.

I've noticed one-pagers work best when sent on to your prospect in advance, and propose it as a ‘dynamic agenda’ that can be used to drive the face-to-face or phone discussion.

3. Be a storyteller: You’re the pitch, you’re the meeting, not your slides. Know your story cold, and know what makes it personalized to your prospect without needing slides or documents to show them. This is of critical importance to reduce the dependency on static content, and increase the chances of two-way dialogue. All that time you spent on 30 slides for your meeting? Spend it on learning your lines!

These methods have continuously helped me move away from a dependence on static slides, into a world of flexibility and versatility that I know my audience has appreciated.

So let’s not ‘ban’ PowerPoint altogether like these guys, rather let’s re-imagine how to use it in pitches. I'm always eager to learn what works for others, so take advantage below and do share with us all how you've re-imagined presentations in your professional role.

EDIT: Big thanks to Hannah Green Goldberg my friend and co-worker who found this terrific image to close out the post! (as credited, courtesy Scott Adams)