Teaching Business Communication

After a visit to Saint Petersburg, my friend Marc Parisel sent me a picture of a delightful set of signs—a perfect reminder of the intrinsic limitations of visual representations. Essentially, pictures are always ambiguous and condemned to be concrete.

On 24 June 2011, Business Insiders featured this display as their chart of the day—a page that even made LinkedIn Today (“the most shared news on LinkedIn,” they say). I discuss it on this blog as my own chart of the day, but for very different reasons: this graphical display exemplifies several shortcomings typical of the charts produced these days.

There is nothing wrong with using lists (with or without bullets), unless of course anything about the list is wrong, as is too often the case on presentation slides… and in commercial advertising. A bullet list at a Shell gas station in California exhibits everything that can go wrong.

I have mixed feelings about this Microsoft SlideFest. Certainly, I salute any initiative that helps presenters create better slides; today’s average slideshow is so awful that every little tip helps. At the same time, I have my doubts about both the approach
adopted for the SlideFest and the examples of improved slides.

As if giving an oral presentation was not challenging enough, speakers must face one additional obstacle: suboptimal rooms. Whether recent or older, in conference centers or on campuses, rooms are seldom designed or set up in a way that encourages
effective speaking.

A short article from The Economist claims that “making something hard to read means it is more likely to be remembered”. Being someone who goes to great lengths to make every piece of text easy to read, I had reasons to be distressed. Alas, the only bad news to me was how the article exemplifies yet again all that is wrong with empirical research into learning and communication.

Pictures can have literal, metaphorical, or conventional meaning. This picture, taken in a light-rail station in Seattle, exemplifies some of the issues with a picture’s “literalness” (or lack thereof). Must I interpret it as meaning “you must use the table microphone”?

Santiago de Chile’s Metro gets a little more crowded every year, not just with the many travelers converging on it as a result of the Transantiago grand plan, but also with warning messages. Are warning signs necessary? If so, are they reaching their purpose? Too often, I feel the warnings are not there to protect the users from physical harm but to protect the companies from litigation.

Representing quantitative information meaningfully raises two fundamental questions: how are the data encoded visually, and how is this encoding perceived—quantitatively, that is—by the audience? As a rule, encoding a quantitative variable by the size of a circle is ineffective, for at least two reasons.

Several participants of past workshops on oral presentations pointed me to an April 26 article from the New York Times, boldly titled “We have met the enemy and he is PowerPoint.” The article does trigger two observations in my mind.