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Archives for 2010

The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint

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Edward Tufte’s The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within is a fantastic — and humorous — article on the abuse of PowerPoint. I highly recommend checking it out.

In it he talks about how PowerPoint is commonly misused, how to use PowerPoint right, how to avoid the boring use of bullet points, and how bad PowerPoint deserves part of the blame for the Challenger space shuttle disaster back in 1985.

The one problem is that the article is not available online for free. However, an abbreviated version called PowerPoint is Evil appeared in Wired a few years ago. It’s worth checking out; and if you’re interested, you can obtain the entire article at Amazon.

Leadership: Applying Beliefs to Real-World Situations

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That’s what a good leader does, because good leaders are governed by a set of guiding principles and core ideas. In his book Leadership, Rudy Giuliani makes this point well in regard to his own leadership:

Great leaders lead by ideas. Ideology is enormously important when running any large organization.

….

My goal as a leader was to apply my beliefs and philosophy to real-world situations. As mayor, I insisted that everyone on my staff should concentrate on the core purpose of whichever agency or division we oversaw.

In politics, even more than in business, the reply to queries is far too often “Because we’ve always done it this way.” My goal was to move the agenda forward with every action, to back strong beliefs with specific plans of action.

Applying Strengths to Leadership

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For an overview of what it looks like to apply strengths-based thinking to leadership, I recommend:

Strengths-Based Leadership

It’s a quick read and goes to the core. It covers the three primary keys in applying strengths thinking to leadership:

  1. Knowing your strengths and investing in others’ strengths.
  2. Getting people with the right strengths on your team.
  3. Understanding and meeting the four basic needs of those who look to you for leadership.

Tom Peters: Work on Your Writing!

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A good word from Tom Peters:

(How does this harmonize with my linking last week to Penelope Trunk’s post on not making a big deal out of typos on blogs? Peters is addressing a larger and more macro issue — he’s not talking about typos. However, eliminating typos would be a sub-set, for sure, of good writing.

Further, Trunk wasn’t saying that lots of typos are good or that we shouldn’t care about them at all; her point in general was that in the medium of blogging and the press for time that comes from it being avocational for most, an occasional typo isn’t such a big deal.)

HT: BNET

Conclusions Should Not Summarize Arguments

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From a recent book by Harvard Business Press:

The conclusion [in a presentation] should not summarize your arguments; rather, it should appeal to the audience for its understanding, its action, and its approval — whatever it is you want the audience to do or think.

So don’t fall into the trap of telling your audience what you’ve already said. Summing it up is a surefire way to kill any enthusiasm your presentation may have generated. So forget about a summary; instead, tell your audience what it should think or do.

Data Supporting the Importance of Being Strength-Based

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From Strengths-Based Leadership, summarizing the findings of a Gallup study:

In the worklplace, when an organization’s leadership fails to focus on individuals’ strengths, the odds of an employee being engaged are a dismal 1 in 11 (9%). But when an organization’s leadership focuses on the strengths of its employees, the odds soar to almost 3 in 4 (73%).

So that means when leaders focus on and invest in their employees’ strengths, the odds of each person being engaged goes up eightfold.

…This increase in engagement translates into substantial gains for the organization’s bottom line and each employee’s well-being.