Love it or hate it, PowerPoint does shape strategy making: Study

WASHINGTON - Like it or not, but Power Point-the computer software that presents business cases like a slide show-is indeed effective in shaping idea generation and build corporate strategies, says a researcher at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.

Many people call Power point a productivity killer. It’s even been recently criticized by a U.S. military General as “dangerous” for over-simplifying sophisticated problems of warfare.

But, Sarah Kaplan, a Rotman professor of strategic management who studies strategy making in uncertain environments, has said that the critiques of the software forget that it is an effective tool in strategy making.

“It’s easy to say that PowerPoint is taking over and that’s terrible … but what I observed is that the day-to-day use of PowerPoint is much more complex,” said Kaplan.

After an eight-month examination of strategy making at a telecommunications company, Kaplan found that PowerPoint was more than just an omnipresent tool.

It allowed for greater collaboration because more people had access to PowerPoint documents, it affected the parameters of the discussion (depending on what information was included, or excluded from the PowerPoint slides) and even shaped the influence individuals had in the strategy-building process (those with less facility using the technology lost status, those who possessed the “deck” of PowerPoint slides had greater power).

By studying the daily use of PowerPoint in strategy making, it was possible to see how meanings were negotiated through PowerPoint use, as a means for both collaborative efforts to generate ideas and cartographic efforts to divide up territories and pursue individual or group interests.

“This is not the first strategy-making technology. Before PowerPoint, there were 35mm slides and viewgraphs,” said Kaplan.

But because PowerPoint is easily available to anyone with access to a computer, it “has radically changed who can participate.

“It has the potential to democratise strategy-making.” (ANI)