Experts Agree

Experts Agree: Power Corrupts, and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.

Actually, kidding aside, the first link is to an amazing NY Tiimes op-ed, The Rich Are More Oblivious Than You and Me, that talks about how just as rich people get inured to expensive things and think so much less of breaking them, so too powerful people come to think much less of the feelings and needs of others:

getting power causes people to focus so keenly on the potential rewards, like money, sex, public acclaim or an extra chocolate-chip cookie — not necessarily in that order, or frankly, any order at all, but preferably all at once — that they become oblivious to the people around them.

Indeed, the people around them may abet this process, since they are often subordinates intent on keeping the boss happy. So for the boss, it starts to look like a world in which the traffic lights are always green (and damn the pedestrians). Professor Keltner and his fellow researchers describe it as an instance of “approach/inhibition theory” in action: As power increases, it fires up the behavioral approach system and shuts down behavioral inhibition.

Strangely, this article never once mentions George W. Bush.

The second link is to an Australian study that suggests that using Powerpoint (and the like) makes it harder for audiences to absorb facts:

“It is effective to speak to a diagram, because it presents information in a different form. But it is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind and decreases your ability to understand what is being presented.”

I believe it.