The Hindu Business Line : Master of PowerPoint

Aloha and welcome back to another episode of the `only real advice' that can make you the brightest new manager in the business. Now I know that some of you think that all this is a farce and tongue-in-cheek and does not really work. Balderdash is what, I have been told, certain readers call it.

I know the type of manager who would say that. They work all day and then run off to the neighbourhood bookstore. There they scour the business section looking for books that can help `build' their career. You know the kind of book I'm talking about. They normally have suitcases and pens and eyeglasses on the cover, often in silhouette, and are titled a lot like Telugu movies . First a title and then, often interrupted by a colon, a punchline that often erupts with foolhardy enthusiasm and false promise. Something like this: `Six Sigma: One for every working day!' or `Total Employee Empowerment: A long word that sounds official!' That sort of thing.

These `academic' managers work hard and go very far in their careers right up to places like Port Blair or Changanassery as Area Sales Managers. There they languish, living on tiny bonuses and laughable expense accounts. Some say these types have wives and families. Those are baseless rumours.

The true young manager — the ambitious and fast growing one — reads this column and the oodles of gilded wisdom that emanates from every word. He then implements every valuable lesson in the office. And before you can say "But I thought we have a merit-based rewards system," our man has risen to the top and appears on business channels every fortnight saying things like: "Our company is all set to grow robustly and show consistent growth in profits and CEO bonuses."

So if you know what is good for you and your career listen carefully while today I reveal the secret of... drum roll... making the perfect PowerPoint presentation.

PowerPoint, like the President of the US and bird flu, has come in for a lot of bad press that is not entirely warranted. While it is true that several managers and organisations hide their incompetence behind elaborate slide shows, the young manager must understand that he is often full of it himself and needs the software to camouflage his intellectual shortcomings. Therefore, mastering this skill is an absolute must.

The ideal PowerPoint presentation begins with a complete and thorough understanding of content and audience. Or so the academic manager would want you to believe. What rubbish! What you really need to know is Font Size and Animation.

The cardinal truth of PowerPoint is this: `Anything in a large enough font and Times New Roman looks awesomely official'. For instance: "RISING CUSTOMER COMPLAINTS: WE ALREADY HAVE THEIR MONEY SO DO WE CARE?" would easily pass off on a slide as a genuine piece of corporate strategy. It could even make it to the official company t-shirt. It has a nice ring, no?

Anyways. By judicious use of font and size, one can make most admissions of guilt or incompetence a serious sounding slogan that the company could rally behind. And that is the first sign of a true leader: being able to turn personal failure into organisational triumph.

Of course, there are cases where it is genuinely difficult to cover up a faux pas even with brilliant use of fonts. The phrase: "SALES DROP 73 PER CENT - LOSSES AT ALL TIME HIGH" is a slightly tricky one to present and come out unscathed. This is where we bring in that other great asset within PowerPoint — animation.

For example, let us take the case of the phrase I just mentioned. First, one must make the words appear on the slide with one of those fun `swing and rotate' routines. Then make sure the font sizes have been adequately adjusted so that when animation is executed the audience sees the message as such: "SALES... AT ALL TIME... HIGH... LOSSES DROP... 73 PER CENT" As soon as the animation ends and the words are stable, gently slide in a little animation of a provocatively supine Shilpa Shetty across the bottom half of the slide.

In one fell swoop, the audience has grasped the message you want it to and then moved onto other more interesting things. Animation truly is a very powerful tool to help the young manager cope with minor hiccups in the workplace.

And that's not all. Oh no. There is more.

The keen managers amongst you would have noticed that mere font and animation do not ensure adequate camouflage. Any guesses why? Exactly. Printouts.

Hard copies of presentations are a total pain in the back-office and need a little shrewder handling. A most excellent way of doing this is using not just good fonts, but the right font colour as well. The above phrase, for instance, must be presented on the slide in a plethora of colours such that the words DROP, 73 PER CENT and LOSSES appear in a very pale yellow or pink. The paler the better. The rest may be typed out in bright purple or iris-burning electric blue. So while the phrase will appear just about legible on an LCD projection, the baddies are invisible on a printout. So even if Shilpa Shetty can't give you a hand, the printer definitely will.

Now managers are, after all, human beings and they are bound to make mistakes that are largish, like burning the factory down or crashing the SAP server globally. These things happen and really should not be allowed to affect your career as Facilities Manager or IT Engineer respectively. Here mere wizardry with the software may be insufficient. This is where we fall back on old favourite of this column: Teamwork.

Plan well. Make sure you are presenting the slides along with a friend. Insist that both of you prepare all the slides and decide on who will present what at the venue. Then connive to present the good part of the presentation. Then, just a few slides before you reveal the managerial faux pas play your card: "That was the overview of the sales and income growth we have achieved this year... Please, please no more applause... Vivek will now take us through his segment on the factory burning incident and the SAP crash issue. Vivek over to you... "

Really it is amazing what one can do with software these days. Just amazing, no?

(The writer, an alumnus of IIM-A, was a management consultant before quitting to work on a book and a full-time writing career)