Stowe Boyd on Guy Kawasaki on PowerPoint

Stowe Boyd comments mostly approvingly on Guy Kawasaki's recent post about his 10/20/30 rule of PowerPoint (10 slides, 20 minutes, 30 point font minimum), which the whole world seems to have commented on. I don't agree with the 10 part or the 30 part; come to think of it, I'm not so sure about the 20 part either.

Stowe thinks that the order and content of the slides should vary, and I agree. If people follow Guy's advice, Venture Capitalists, who are sick of 40-slide decks' worth of bullet points, will soon be sick of seeing ten slides with the same ten topics every time. (OK, that was the Marketing and Sales slide. Next will come the Competition slide. Snore.) Much more interesting is to let the story you're telling dictate the sequence of the slides. And maybe you'll need 8 slides to do it, or maybe 3, or less. A client of mine recently took a 20 page presentation and knocked it down to 1 page. Yes, just 1. And it turned out to be much more effective.

Have you every had anyone say to you "That presentation was great, but I wish you had more slides"? I didn't think so. Until you get that feedback, keep shortening the length of your presentations. And don't stop at 10 slides.

There is a reasonably credible theory about presentations that says that when you show a complex but well designed graphic or diagram and help your audience understand it, the effort they expend engages them more, and makes them more likely to be persuaded by your message. That's why I have a problem with a 30-point font - you can't show a complex graphic with 30-point font, at least not if you intend to annotate it or label it in any way.

As for the 20 minute limit - I suspect Guy's point here is to keep it short, and who can really quarrel with that. So I'll just stop here.