OK, I promise to stop with the PowerPoint bashing Real Soon Now, but the situation is just so terrible that it’s hard to walk away.
In reading this thread from Tufte’s Q&A thing (sort of like his blog), he points to this post from the Arms and Influence blog, which quotes Thomas Ricks’ book Fiasco. Apparently the geniuses in the Bush Misadministration have taken to replacing direct orders and clear plans with PowerPoint Phluff, leaving the well meaning folks at the Pentagon struggling to make sense of it all. Check out, for example, this truly wondrous bit of Phluff that purports to explain how something as complex as the occupation phase of the current Iraq war was going to work:
Ah, right. I know exactly what to do now…
It’s worth repeating the conclusion from the Arms and Influence piece:
The Iraq disaster did not happen because someone in the JTF-IV planning group or the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) couldn’t write a good PowerPoint presentation. The problem was that anyone used PowerPoint to plan a war. Ricks is absolutely right in saying that only the most careless individual, in love with information technology for its own sake, would misuse technology in such an obvious fashion. Unfortunately, these are the people who planned and executed the Iraq war, and many of them are still prosecuting America’s wars.
BTW, Ricks give an excellent interview on The Daily Show recently. I suspect that Fiasco would be a very worthwhile (if quite depressing) read. After a little skimming I also was surprisingly impressed by the Arms and Influence blog (the title didn’t seem like my cup of tea). His description of flying on the day when the “liquids plot” broke in Britain is thoughtful and retains an impressive sense of perspective under difficult circumstances.
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