Have you ever been FIRED from your job for not being great at something which is as stupid and useless as my articles here 🙂 Today i am here to give you some great career advise.

Something, which is a killer of CREATIVITY. Trust me, a lot of us have been there…….People in corporate culture believe in doing all sorts of useless things whether they like it or not. Be it like occupying airtime in meetings by giving illogical logics or be it about paraphrasing what their boss saying or just nodding their heads in affirmation with everyone without even knowing what the other person is even talking about.

So, there is some important career advise which has a love / hate relationship with everyone in corporate culture. It may be your best friend or worst enemy but there is no way you can ignore it. No I am not talking about office politics, I am talking about very own the POWERPOINT PRESENTATIONS (PPT).

People give all sorts of logics in justifying PPTs like it clears your thinking process, it clears your thoughts and gives them direction and what not but guess what..AMAZON which is known to be one the most INNOVATIVE companies of current times has BANNED presentations in their meetings. I have never seen any of the director or great producers or people in film making doing any presentations to the client. They are more comfortable visualizing and narrating the scenes with emotions than putting it on paper or slides.

My take on this, its a waste of time, always was, always will be. Whatever we can communicate in a single page memo or an email or a phone call, people make 100 slides presentations around it. There are so many great business that were built without using a single slide. Business has a simple rule, “Know your consumer, understand what he wants and talk to him in a language he understands in a simple yet impactful manner”. Rest is all Gas..

How Great Companies Work

Do you know that the great consulting companies like McKinsey etc have a separate department that creates ppts. Their consultants meet with clients, take notes and send those notes to their teams which specialists in creating presentations.

In one such incident during one of my previous assignments, I asked a young McKinsey consultant who just giving a presentation to my MD who already had more than 30 yrs of work experience and was a well known name in the industry…What do you do for which you get paid so much. To which he replied, we tell you what your business is and how to run it. It is like one of my favorite jokes..Some 20yr old executive (so called wealth manager of some financial institution) riding in UBER Pool coming to a 50yr old billionaire telling him how to make money.

One recent thing someone told me recently about presentations is, this is an art of storytelling. I call it BS of the highest order. Storytelling is a rare art, not everyone is caable of doing it. Moreover, its not done in ppt, its done in a humanly manner possible, via conversations.

Concept of Presentations

When we see a movie, it impacts our senses, it makes us laugh, cry and feel things. It touches our heart and mind via various emotions. Imagine someone showing you presentation slides for 3 hours rather than showing a movie. Will you cry or laugh or will it give you goosebumps? How would you feel. Moreover, when you show something data driven, it has no scope of story telling, you just present data, figures, facts and come to a conclusion. Leave the customer with clear cut action items and do no BS.

So, I think this concept of making presentations came from all these highly paid people sitting at the top of the corporate pyramid having a hard time justifying their big fat salaries, wanting to be felt important. This is an important career advise.

Because, truely speaking at the very top of the pyramid, you technically are doing nothing in terms of execution. What you are responsible for is, driving the organisation in the right direction. Building the right culture there, nurture your people and invest in them. Because long back someone very senior to me told me that your competitors can take your clients, your business, your money, your employees but the only thing they can never take from your organisation is its CULTURE.

That’s the next topic.

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