A Department of Defense PowerPoint slide explaining political, social and military interactions in Afghanistan. View this graphic in more detail.
Recently, I heard news of U.S. Army Col. Lawrence Sellin’s dismissal from his duties as a staff officer at the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan. Sellin was sacked for his highly critical United Press International (UPI) column, which lamented the state of staff functions — among which was the use of Microsoft PowerPoint — at ISAF HQ. He knew what he was doing when he submitted his column to UPI, opening with the preface, “Throughout my career I have been known to walk that fine line between good taste and unemployment. I see no reason to change that now.”
Sellin was indeed sent home for his action, which is a clear violation of NATO regulations regarding the proper vetting of material to be submitted to the press. The reserve colonel, who holds a Ph.D., apparently spent much of his time — when not soldiering in the last decade — thinking about the role of IT in decision making for IBM.
His viewpoint on how technology can be leveraged in crises is a strong indicator of why his PowerPoint rant eventually emerged from Afghanistan. Sellin understands that technology is not a panacea and that organizations are mighty difficult beasts to steer.
“While the application of the latest technology solutions are critical enablers to provide interoperability of information systems for cross-border disaster relief management, technology alone is not enough. It takes change in process, practice, organization and culture to fully achieve this goal.”
As an academic and a policy wonk, I have sat through quite a number of briefings and talks enabled by PowerPoint, not all of them good. From my graduate studies, I can still clearly remember the Arthur Andersen consulting challenge brief in which the Andersen consultants read verbatim item after item from aesthetically immaculate slide decks. That experience told me I wasn’t very interested in a career with Andersen. “PowerPoint monkey” is a term our undergraduates use quite derisively in describing what they don’t want to become in corporate America. Andersen’s brief was Exhibit A.
We start early on this path. A friend of mine here in town recently informed me that his fifth-grader will be putting together her first PowerPoint presentation assignment this year. It reminded me of a quip from Electronic Frontier Foundation legal director Cindy Cohn‘s talk here at Rice a while back. “Power corrupts,” she said, “but PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.”
This is not to beat up on Microsoft for PowerPoint, however, as they just wrote the application. PowerPoint became popular for a reason. People generally hate public speaking and organizations seem to like meetings. PowerPoint gives speakers an easy way to be reminded of their notes and keep on track. Sellin wasn’t angry at PowerPoint in particular (although the organizational canon constructed on how it is used can be patently absurd), he was frustrated with a bureaucratic process that wasted his time. On that note, we should consult the sage Dean Acheson, who opined,
“I soon discovered that the greater part of a day in Old State was devoted to meetings. Where the boundaries of jurisdiction were fuzzy or overlapping, meetings became inevitable … These meetings gave the illusion of action, but often frustrated it by attempting to reconcile the irreconcilable. What was most often needed was not compromise but decision.”
As the wise Mr. Gump oft repeated, “And that’s all I have to say about that.”
Christopher Bronk is the Baker Institute fellow in information technology policy. He previously served as a career diplomat with the United States Department of State on assignments both overseas and in Washington, D.C.