>In a recent blog post, Harvard Business Review writer Peter Bregman calls PowerPoint the “#1 Killer of Meetings.”

I’m not sure if I agree it’s number one – I’ve been to any number of sucky meetings that didn’t involve PowerPoint – but it is definitely in the top five. I personally am on a one-woman campaign to eliminate it.

Why do we spend SO much time laboring over slides that still put people to sleep? No one really likes looking at other people’s presentations, so why do they inflict them on others?

Only twice in my life have I watched a PowerPoint presentation during which I thought, “Wow, this is really adding to the speaker’s message!” One was a keynote by Lawrence Lessig on creative commons; the other was a talk about water issues by Brock Dolman, director of Occidental Arts and Ecology Center‘s WATER Institute.

I find my students and audiences much more captivated by presentations in which I draw (on paper or a whiteboard) than those in which I’ve used PowerPoint.

Next time you have a presentation to give, spend the time you would have used fiddling slides on practicing your speaking, honing your message…or practicing your printing!