[Sigia-l] Smackdown: Edward Tufte vs. Don Norman

[Listera]

Karl Fast:

> That would be evidence that I had thought it through.

Indeed. Let me illustrate this with an example: the elevator pitch.

You put in 12-hour days for months in hopes of getting a startup off the
ground. Comes time to solicit external funding. You approach venture
capitalists. What they want from you is a one-paragraph description of your
venture. Because they have to parse through hundreds of these pitches, they
just don't have the time. If they like that then comes a 5-minute
presentation. Your hopes and the livelihood of your entire team ride in
those 5 short minutes and 5 short PowerPoint slides. If that fails, often
there's no tomorrow, there's no second chance to "explain" finer details.

Naturally, this distills your own understanding of your project like nothing
else. You have to think through every possible angle, every technical,
operational and financial ramification. You have to anticipate all potential
questions. You have to review potential shortcomings and prepare to address
them.

Having gone through this both in terms of getting funding as well as
evaluating startup pitches, there's absolutely no question in my mind that
the one-paragraph, 5-slide, 5-minute distillation should be a mandatory step
for *any* project. Like college admissions or speed dating, it focuses your
mind like nothing else.

Now, you may have gone through something like that in your mind but there's
no way for your CEO to know that unless you *risk* condensing it as a
proverbial 5-slide PowerPoint presentation. That exposes you. There's no
conjecturing on the part of your CEO: whether you did a good job or not, he
now knows that you have gone through the pain of distilling your thoughts
and you're ready to risk exposure.

This is the equivalent of "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I
wrote a long one." The one-bullet PowerPoint of this post:

    * CEO wants the short letter

Ziya
Nullius in Verba