Desperate Freelancer

I am on vacation for 2 weeks so blogging is a bit low these days. But I can't resist posting a video that someone sent me in the comments :

That's another example of what to do if you want to steal wallets while everybody is sleeping after your presentation.

Powerpoint is one of your everyday business life's favorite software. I say "your" because as a blogger I don't need it very much. Except when I have time to spend to read all the "funny" pps I recieve in my email. Sometimes I wonder where on earth are hidden all that creative people who make that pps stuff ? Come on, have you ever met someone who told you he made one of these .pps joke ? If you do, please let me know one, I have some questions to ask him/her.

I did not practice much of that wonderful microsoft tool, but there are few things I dug from my cubicle mates. And there are a lot more I understood from assisting to never-ending dull and brainsucking presentations.

1. You are not a movie maker when you use powerpoint

So please spare us with all that motion effects and co. You don't need to make a fireworks of your slideshow. You are not compelled to try to compete with Spielberg or the whole Pixar Studio. You will be ridiculous anyway.

We just want to see what your ideas are. Not to discover how familiar you are with the microsoft funny gadgets they put all over their softwares to make them cost more.

And if you don't have any idea, it's no use to hide this lack of thinking between perfects slide transitions and dazzling animations. You won't fool us for long.

2. Powerpoint is not fit to be your lecture notes

If you make all your speech text appear on the screen, it will have three consequences :

- Firstly, we will read it instead of listening to you. And we will read it faster than you can speak, so we will know by advance what you are going to say. So you will look stoopid because you will have nothing we can learn from you.

- Secondly, you will end reading your text instead of speaking to us. You would look like a boring teacher entangled in his course, with a monotonous voice and nothing interesting to say. So If you can't get to remember what is your presentation about, it's time to see a doctor about your mental retention problems.

- Thirdly, you will be compelled to use a very very tiny font. And everyone will get mad at you for barking his eyes.

3. Powerpoint is not for killing people

So why use bullets ? Bullet points are sometimes useful for listing information but not everything in life can be organised in bullet points. You don't need to

- shoot people with ideas one after another
- make them think your reasoning is just a sum of facts that follows in a linear way (till they die)
- show that you can list everything related to a subject in one slide (rather than really demonstrate where you want to go)

Capito ?

So please avoid what I have just done. You could be more clever than this to explain what you have in mind. (unless your mind is a bullet point one. If so, you can contact some fundamental research lab on brain structure, you will be very helpful to them)

4. Powerpoint is not made for making people hallucinate

You want to make a good presentation, defend something you believe in. Right. So why do you try to recreate an LSD experiment with all these acid and snazzy colors ? You believe you will have more people attention if they will like they are completely stoned ?

I guess you don't. Be kind to use "normal" background and color scheme, everybody will appreciate to have a moment of relief in this time of visual harrassement.

5. You are the one who's is going to talk

Quoting great people can be great if you have nothing to say. It can help to make the pill go easier.

Ok, sometimes a good quote is useful to illustrate what you mean, but don't switch the order. Quotes are not here to do the thinking for you.

6. Graphs are painful after lunch

Everyone will tell you that graphs could enlighten a powerpoint presentation because they are figurative. Well. It depends.

I have seen some ugly figures that could easily find their place in a postmodern art gallery.

If you absolutely want something that is close to a scheme, a graph or a table, do make it clear. Not everyone in the room is a electrophysician able to read evolutive and multiple connected datas in a blink.

The more simple it is, the less you will see people looking outside to check what the weather's like.

7. You can change the titles of your slide

Maybe you don't know but even if you used a ready-made summary from the microsoft assistant (shame on you), you can have meaningful titles. Yep. Wonderful isn't it ? Context, environnement, strategy, and so on, are exactly what are below in the slides, it's true. But I think people deserve better than just a description of the content. You can adress them a message through the title, so why avoid it ?

Well, if Joanne Kathleen Rowling had named all his works just "book", I guess she wouldn't have been so popular.

8. Powerpoint is not made to write books and you are not able to speak at the speed of light

Remember that it takes about 2 minutes per slide. Now recount all the slides you made and try to figure out how you could squash the 78 slides you made in a 15 minutes presentation.

So unless you and your audience are robots coming from a far way future and able to transmit and understand information at the speed of light, you should reconsider your work and shorten it a little bit.

9. Powerpoint is evil

It's not me who say so, but a professor emeritus of political science, computer science and statistics, and graphic design at Yale, Mr Edward R. Tufte. Somebody who knows what he is talking about.

You have to keep that belief in mind while you prepare your powerpoint. Try to make a presentation which will be the less evil it could be and your audience will thank you for that.

10. Focus on what is your objective

It should have been the first point, but I prefer let it be the last.

If you use powerpoint to knock people out (which can be very useful if you want them to agree to one of your cunning plans), just do the opposite of what I've just told out and you would do great.

If you don't, ask yourself why exactly are you going to stand in front of all these people ? What are you intending to say to them ? Has it real meaning for them ? and for you ?

And then throw away what doesn't match with this objective. Even if it's the whole presentation that you are throwing away.

Sometimes, the best powerpoint presentation is when you don't need to make a powerpoint presentation.

It has been 6 months since I discovered the office life. I am not sure I understood everything about how it is (or should be) working in a company. But I had great talks with the other freelancers (doing different jobs for different clients) that helped me a lot to plunge deeply into the subject. They gave me a huge panorama of the corporate world.

So I decided to gave you a little glimpse of what I did understand from the role of the various kind people that wander around in an office. Yeah, there are plenty of professions working together in the same place ( engineers, RH, management, accounting, ...) and I feel like trying to explain to everyone what all these people are doing all the day.

Have you ever noticed how it is sometimes difficult to explain what you do, I mean what you really do, to other people who don't belong to the same branch ? Well, that's my purpose : help everyone to understand the role and aim of each main job you can find in a normal and healthy firm.

Let's start with the marketing guys.

Please, before I begin, I must provide you with a quick warning : If you are working in the marketing field, don't be offended by what follows. It's just my perception of your job. I would be glad if you can correct me or give me more details.

And don't worry every kind of job will have its turn on the list. So, if you feel a bit spotted for now, don't forget you will have your revenge.

Ok.

The marketing professional has one of the most difficult job. His aim is to understand who the customer really is, what he really wants and then to build up something that will fit his desires.

In the first year he takes his functions, he generally realise it's simply impossible. There is no such thing as the "customer", the "target" nor the traditionnal housewife. You just have a bunch of people that buy your company's products. All are different, motivated by specific reasons (most of them absolutely incongruous) and trying to understand them as a group from some statistics some other guy gave you is a pure insanity. You'd better eat screwdivers than try to understand the customers.

As marketing men and women feel pretty conscious about their appearance and don't want to get bald before age, they quickly evacuate this question from their daily concern.

All the more quick that they fully grasp the real customer doesn't know what he wants. The guy has no particular desire.

So, the job of the marketing professional consists in convincing the head of the company that he got what is in the customers' mind and that red is the best color for the packaging.

The marketing guy provides figures and bogus psychological studies to establish their credibility, he spends time on making bombastic powerpoints with photos and animations, he works hard to appear to be persuasive.

It's an hard job for him to renew regularly his analysis and recommendations while the customer is not changing that much through years. You have to possess a wide wide imagination.

But the marketing professional has to do so. Because he desperately needs a budget.

Otherwise, he will have noting to do, and everyone will start asking themselves what his job really means to the company.

Once he has his budget, he could rest a bit. He could dream for a while on how he will spend all this money. Apart from his expensive personnal expenses accounts of course.

But not for long, because an harder job comes to him. He has to convince everyone to follow his vision, to do what he planned to do with his budget.

He has to convince reluctants engineers to build the irrealistic product he imagined. He has to convince the salesmen to sell it. He has to convince the people from the advertising agency to say something clever about it.

If he manages to do so, then he could be proud of him, turn his brand strategy into a "business case" and go show off in some kind of international marketing convention filled with young and desirable blonde marketing students.

Because, he knows he had done the hard part. The customer will be no big issue. He will buy the product. He has seen it four times on TV and that's all what counts.

Having a messy desk is a serious handicap to your promotion in your company's hierarchy. It's also a serious handicap to your effectiveness.

I you can't clean up your desk because you are too busy (or too lazy - please tell the truth once in your life !), you must be aware that you are going towards a lot of misunderstanding from your colleagues. They will interpret your shambles as a reflection of what's going on in your brain. Nobody could have the clear mind of Mr Langan, but though in office, you should pretend so.

As I am pretty neglectful as a person myself (don't forget I am the latine profile type of guy), I had had to fight against my temper to find issues to what my co-mates "the big junkyard next door" (Remember I share an open-space with other freelancers, and they are still able to put up with me, how unbelievable it may seems).

I did find solutions to clean my mess quickly and on a long term basis. Yes, simple ways to get your office clean exists.

Whatever you job is, here are a few rules that will help to have a neat, clear and tidy workplace :

1. If you have had a file for more than 6 months : throw it !
You company is moving fast, trying to make audacious plans for the future. They have no need for a records department.

2. If you don't know what a file is about : throw it !
It surely doesn't belong to you.

3. If nobody knows you have that file : throw it !
Nobody's looking for it anyway, so why bother ?

4. If something you have on your desk doesn't not look pretty much like a file : throw it !
You have no reason for keeping gadgets, pencils, memos, letters or striptease clubs' discount card. If it's not properly filed, it's no use.

5. If you find food remains in a file : throw it !
It's a sign you have been working too much on it. You can't be efficient on this anymore.

6. If you know exactly what's in a file : throw it !
You have everything in mind, so why burden yourself with the paper ?

7. If something remains on your desk after all that : give it to someone else.
Just find a good reason why Brian or Steve should have a look a this !