Working for a large multinational corporation means many things, but one which was new to me when I first joined Ogilvy was the 'culture of the deck'. Presentations were no longer simple arguments to be shared face to face but instead powerpoint files ('the deck') to be reviewed, reviewed again and then sent around the world for the (countless) end-user's endless delictation.
What amazed me is just how mind-numbingly bad 99.9% of these decks are. Sure, there may be good ideas buried deep within them but they are, almost without fail, lost in amongst the tide of bullet points, indentations and that strange kind of language that is neither proper English nor thematic, but some kind of parallel universe where the word "the" has mysteriously been banned.
The leading statistician Edward Tufte has written several leading books on the visualisation of information. His paper "The Cognitive Theory of Powerpoint" blames the ubiquitous Microsoft application for everything from disrupted sleep patterns to the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster.
Tufte's contention is not that all visual stimulus is bad, just that Powerpoint in particular encourages us to create bad visual stimulus. So what would Edward Tufte say is the best chart in the world? That's where the map at the top of this blog comes in.
It was created 100 years before Powerpoint ever found its ways onto our computer screens and helps explain Naploean's ill fated march to Moscow in the 19th century. It plots the complex relationship between advance and retreat, geography, temperature and time in one beautiful page and is the perfect example of two of his principles: a high data ink ratio (the proportion of ink on the page that's used on the actual display of data) and the use of constant scale.
I would simply argue it's a truly inspiring way of presenting complex arguments in a way which even non-experts on the Napoleonic wars can not just understand but be fascinated by.
So next time you're looking at that co-variance anaylsis between weighted distribution and snowfall in Southern China, give a moments thought to Napoleon before firing up the ppt.
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