PowerPoint has taken a lot of flak recently, especially from the US military, for its overuse at presentations and its failure to help communicate complex topics. Now for the good story from researcher Sarah Kaplan, of the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.

In a recently published study, she decided to take a deeper look into how PowerPoint is mobilised in a company's strategy by doing an ethnographic study of one organisation. She acknowledges that PowerPoint has come to dominate corporate life in general and strategy-making in particular. She treats PowerPoint as a technology embedded in the process of what she calls strategic "knowledge production" in an organisation.

In her paper, she says that these practices are part of the epistemic or knowledge culture of the organisation. PowerPoint encourages collaboration and "enabled the difficult task of collaborating to negotiate meaning in an uncertain environment, creating spaces for discussion, making recombinations possible, allowing for adjustments as ideas evolved and providing access to a wide range of actors".

Whew. It seems as if she needs PowerPoint to simplify her ideas! In fact, Kaplan admits PowerPoint was not the initial focus of her research at the Advanced Technologies Group (ATG) of CommCorp. Her interest in the telecommunications equipment manufacturer was to examine the day-to-day activities of how management makes strategy in depth.

However, PowerPoint's use in developing strategy was "so pervasive in every aspect of the daily activities of CommCorp managers that I came to regard it as an essential part of the epistemic machinery that made up the expert practice of strategy-making inside the organisation", she says.

This to me sounds like an own goal, in the sense of undermining her thesis that PowerPoint can be a positive factor. After all, the dependence of managers on PowerPoint such that it takes over their strategic thinking is exactly the kind of criticism the US army has levelled against the technology.

It is exactly because of our ability to use technology as a means to shortcut the thinking process that led Scott McNealy, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems, to ban the use of PowerPoint in his company in the mid-1990s. As Kaplan quotes: "We had 12.9 gigabytes of PowerPoint slides on our network. And I thought, 'What a huge waste of corporate productivity.'

"So we banned it. And we've had three unbelievable record-breaking fiscal quarters since we banned PowerPoint. Now, I would argue that every company in the world, if it would just ban PowerPoint, would see their earnings skyrocket. Employees would stand around going, 'What do I do? Guess I've got to go to work'."

Initially, Kaplan noted that many of the criticisms of the managers she studied were consistent with McNealy's slam of the software. PowerPoint's central role was particularly evident in situations when managers in new positions of responsibility had to navigate decision-making procedures. One had failed to master PowerPoint and so was stymied in his ability to move the project forward. As he explained: "Now people have the idea that, 'I am not going to be able to present my ideas, unless I use PowerPoint'."

The episode demonstrates that the lack of expert use of PowerPoint de-legitimated an actor and his efforts, she notes. "By implication, using PowerPoint signified managerial professionalism. The use of PowerPoint itself produced the legitimacy actors needed in order to influence the outcomes of the strategy-making process."

Thus, a bad manager who knows PowerPoint has more leverage in a company compared to a good manager who does not know how to use PowerPoint, I conclude from this incident.

Preparation for meetings by the team focused on getting the PowerPoint slides together. Many said they felt that the decision-making process was focused on the PowerPoint deck rather than the ideas contained within it. She quotes a project leader as suggesting that the substantial changes made to a PowerPoint project proposal over a period of several months aimed to "get it in the format. The actual content of the program did not change. It was just the charts, you know."

Others complained of some discussions where people were allowed to use up to eight slides on a particular topic that did not further the goal of a meeting.

PowerPoint was a dominant communication genre in the discursive practice of strategy making, she says, and did not serve simply as a vehicle for communication but rather played a central part in the machinery of knowledge production. Progress was measured in slides. Time was measured in slides. Strategic discussions could not take place if the slides to support them were not available or correctly formatted.

Despite the problems, PowerPoint also helped the decision-making process by allowing the team to collaborate more easily, she says, when looking at the positive side. Slides were discussed and passed around by email, and changed. PowerPoint also provided "materiality to strategic ideas", she says.

When strategy is being formulated, the ideas are not real in the sense that implementation has not yet taken place. With PowerPoint it became easier to visualise the consequences of a particular strategy proposal. Secondly, PowerPoint helped in channelling individual knowledge into the strategy-making process, enabling coordination and collaboration.

"PowerPoint documents worked as repositories for information and tools for organising thinking as well as spaces for collaborative work among people from different functional areas, from different offices or with different viewpoints," she concludes.

So there you have it. Tame the beast and it could provide a useful means of communication, and not just a fig leaf to cover a lack of thought.

You can download the 40-page study at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1569762. It's worth a read given that it gives a more balanced view of the role of PowerPoint in a company.

Send any comments to elamin.ahmed@gmail.com.