Steve Jobs: "People who know what they're talking about don't need PowerPoint"

One thing we need to constantly remind ourselves is that slides and other forms of projected visualization—no matter how "cool" they may be—are not appropriate for every context. Multimedia is great for presentations before large groups such as keynote addresses or conference presentations, but in meetings where you want to actively discuss issues or go over details in depth, slides—especially the snooze-inducing bulletpoint variety, which are never a good idea—are almost always counter productive. I stressed early on in the first version of Presentation Zen four years ago—and ad nauseam on this website long before that—that PowerPoint (and other forms of multimedia projected on a screen) are not appropriate for every kind of presentation, or even for most kinds of presentations. This was a point that was made too by Steve Jobs in several of his interviews with biographer Walter Isaacson in his book called simply Steve Jobs. (In the 2nd edition of Presentation Zen, which just started shipping, I expand a bit more on Steve Jobs's ideas concerning presentations).



"I wanted them to engage..."
Even when I first started working at Apple in 2001, I overheard someone in my department say that you should never show up to a meeting with Steve Jobs with a deck of slides. Jobs's aversion to people using slides in meetings was well known inside Apple. "I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking," Jobs told biographer Walter Isaacson when describing meetings upon his return to Apple in 1997. "People would confront a problem by creating a presentation. I wanted them to engage, to hash things out at the table, rather than show a bunch of slides. People who know what they're talking about don't need PowerPoint." Jobs preferred to use the whiteboard to explain his ideas and hash out things with people. Former Senior Vice President of the iPod Division at Apple Tony Fadell confirmed Jobs's disdain of slides. "Steve prefers to be in the moment, talking things through," Fadell says in Isaacson's book. "He once told me, 'If you need slides, it shows you don't know what you're talking about.'"

There is a difference between a keynote and ballroom style presentations (and TED and TEDx talks, Ignite presentations, Pecha Kucha and similar events, etc.) and a meeting around a conference table. Most productive meetings are a time for discussion and working things out, not simply going through a bunch of slides. Each case is different, of course, but in general consider saving the multimedia for the larger presentations, and never resort to using slideware and other forms of computer-generated visuals simply out of habit.