We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/world/27powerpoint.html
We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
Published: April 26, 2010



WASHINGTON — Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti.
“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter.
The slide has since bounced around the Internet as an example of a military tool that has spun out of control. Like an insurgency, PowerPoint has crept into the daily lives of military commanders and reached the level of near obsession. The amount of time expended on PowerPoint, the Microsoft presentation program of computer-generated charts, graphs and bullet points, has made it a running joke in the Pentagon and in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.
“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”
In General McMaster’s view, PowerPoint’s worst offense is not a chart like the spaghetti graphic, which was first uncovered by NBC’s Richard Engel, but rigid lists of bullet points (in, say, a presentation on a conflict’s causes) that take no account of interconnected political, economic and ethnic forces. “If you divorce war from all of that, it becomes a targeting exercise,” General McMaster said.
Commanders say that behind all the PowerPoint jokes are serious concerns that the program stifles discussion, critical thinking and thoughtful decision-making. Not least, it ties up junior officers — referred to as PowerPoint Rangers — in the daily preparation of slides, be it for a Joint Staff meeting in Washington or for a platoon leader’s pre-mission combat briefing in a remote pocket of Afghanistan.
Last year when a military Web site, Company Command, asked an Army platoon leader in Iraq, Lt. Sam Nuxoll, how he spent most of his time, he responded, “Making PowerPoint slides.” When pressed, he said he was serious.
“I have to make a storyboard complete with digital pictures, diagrams and text summaries on just about anything that happens,” Lieutenant Nuxoll told the Web site. “Conduct a key leader engagement? Make a storyboard. Award a microgrant? Make a storyboard.”
Despite such tales, “death by PowerPoint,” the phrase used to described the numbing sensation that accompanies a 30-slide briefing, seems here to stay. The program, which first went on sale in 1987 and was acquired by Microsoft soon afterward, is deeply embedded in a military culture that has come to rely on PowerPoint’s hierarchical ordering of a confused world.
“There’s a lot of PowerPoint backlash, but I don’t see it going away anytime soon,” said Capt. Crispin Burke, an Army operations officer at Fort Drum, N.Y., who under the name Starbuck wrote an essay about PowerPoint on the Web site Small Wars Journal that cited Lieutenant Nuxoll’s comment.
In a daytime telephone conversation, he estimated that he spent an hour each day making PowerPoint slides. In an initial e-mail message responding to the request for an interview, he wrote, “I would be free tonight, but unfortunately, I work kind of late (sadly enough, making PPT slides).”
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates reviews printed-out PowerPoint slides at his morning staff meeting, although he insists on getting them the night before so he can read ahead and cut back the briefing time.
Gen. David H. Petraeus, who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and says that sitting through some PowerPoint briefings is “just agony,” nonetheless likes the program for the display of maps and statistics showing trends. He has also conducted more than a few PowerPoint presentations himself.
General McChrystal gets two PowerPoint briefings in Kabul per day, plus three more during the week. General Mattis, despite his dim view of the program, said a third of his briefings are by PowerPoint.
Richard C. Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, was given PowerPoint briefings during a trip to Afghanistan last summer at each of three stops — Kandahar, Mazar-i-Sharif and Bagram Air Base. At a fourth stop, Herat, the Italian forces there not only provided Mr. Holbrooke with a PowerPoint briefing, but accompanied it with swelling orchestral music.
President Obama was shown PowerPoint slides, mostly maps and charts, in the White House Situation Room during the Afghan strategy review last fall.
Commanders say that the slides impart less information than a five-page paper can hold, and that they relieve the briefer of the need to polish writing to convey an analytic, persuasive point. Imagine lawyers presenting arguments before the Supreme Court in slides instead of legal briefs.
Captain Burke’s essay in the Small Wars Journal also cited a widely read attack on PowerPoint in Armed Forces Journal last summer by Thomas X. Hammes, a retired Marine colonel, whose title, “Dumb-Dumb Bullets,” underscored criticism of fuzzy bullet points; “accelerate the introduction of new weapons,” for instance, does not actually say who should do so.
No one is suggesting that PowerPoint is to blame for mistakes in the current wars, but the program did become notorious during the prelude to the invasion of Iraq. As recounted in the book “Fiasco” by Thomas E. Ricks (Penguin Press, 2006), Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan, who led the allied ground forces in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, grew frustrated when he could not get Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the commander at the time of American forces in the Persian Gulf region, to issue orders that stated explicitly how he wanted the invasion conducted, and why. Instead, General Franks just passed on to General McKiernan the vague PowerPoint slides that he had already shown to Donald H. Rumsfeld, the defense secretary at the time.
Senior officers say the program does come in handy when the goal is not imparting information, as in briefings for reporters.
The news media sessions often last 25 minutes, with 5 minutes left at the end for questions from anyone still awake. Those types of PowerPoint presentations, Dr. Hammes said, are known as “hypnotizing chickens.”
Helene Cooper contributed reporting.

The St. Petersburg Times - Top Stories - University Dean Fired, Disputes Official Version

The St. Petersburg Times - Top Stories - University Dean Fired, Disputes Official Version

The St. Petersburg Times

Marina Shishkina, the dean of the journalism faculty of St. Petersburg State University, was fired this month by the university’s rector, Nikolai Kropachev.

During the past year, Shishkina had made statements critical of Kropachev, challenging what she described as “the authoritarian style of managing one of Russia’s oldest and most prestigious universities.”

According to the official version, voiced by Mikhail Kudilinsky, the university’s deputy rector for legal issues, Shishkina lost her job for “failing to perform her duties and violating the university’s charter.” A date for the election of a new dean will be set in the near future and held within the next two months, Kudilinsky added.

Anatoly Puyu, the first deputy dean of the journalism faculty, has been appointed acting dean until the election takes place.

Shishkina’s troubles began in September last year, when the Dzerzhinsky district court began reviewing cases against Shishkina and her husband Sergei Petrov, the former dean of the medical faculty.

Both cases were filed by the university’s president, Lyudmila Verbitskaya, who alleges that Petrov and Shishkina have made libelous statements discrediting one of Russia’s oldest and most respected academic institutions.

The investigators also allege that Shishkina embezzled university funds and abused her position. The investigation claims that at least half a million rubles ($17,000) have been misappropriated. Shishkina says that the prosecutors are trying to frame her, and that the real reasons behind the prosecution are entirely political.

Petrov began the conflict by publishing a revealing and critical interview on a popular web site, in which he accused the school’s management of authoritarian rule, rigid attitudes and the suppression of alternative opinions. Shishkina supported her husband’s crusade with a series of interviews in the media, in which she drew a sobering picture of what she described as the university’s “murky and non-transparent decision-making process” and “the oppressive rule of rector Nikolai Kropachev, who hides behind the facade of fighting corruption and instead uses all the administrative tools available to him to assert his personal power.”

Shishkina alleged that, having replaced Lyudmila Verbitskaya as the university’s rector in May 2008, Kropachev adopted a practice of launching vendettas against anyone who criticized his policies. The journalism dean said an atmosphere of fear and intimidation now reigns at the university, and that she and her husband are paying the price for being among the very few who dared to offer resistance.

The dismissed dean said the embezzlement charges were concocted using a bureaucratic trick. She insisted the journalism faculty has a transparent system of financial management.

“I was getting a salary of 80,000 rubles ($2,700); that figure was never a secret,” she said.”The investigators argue that I did not have the right to sign payslips for extra-budgetary earnings for myself and my staff — which is not true. This practice is legal and fully transparent and it existed for many years with no complaints — until I dared to tell the truth about the autocracy that reigns at the school.”

In December 2009, in the wake of the investigation, which has so far led nowhere, Shishkina was suspended from her job.

Shishkina said she had only found out about her dismissal from the media, and that she was considering taking the case to court.

In addition to her position as the journalism faculty dean, Shishkina was also deputy head of the university’s trade union. “I have met with the union’s representatives and discovered that Kropachev did not get their approval before firing me,” Shishkina said.

In order to illustrate her accusations of Kropachev acting like an authoritarian leader, Shishkina often mentioned in interviews the fact that the university’s rector had secured the right to personally dismiss any member of university staff, including faculty deans, despite the fact that the position of dean is an elected post.

“Now my own dismissal is a compelling enough illustration of the feudal principals of running the university that flourish under Kropachev,” Shishkina said, adding that she had not had a chance to discuss the situation with Kropachev face-to-face, though she would very much have liked to.