[ On Bullet Points, Shuttle Explosions & Loving the Paragraph ]

“Executives don’t read.” That’s what we’ve been told, again and again. “They don’t have time.” “What’s the gist?” And worst of all: “Can you put it in bullet points?”

We know of one consulting firm that doesn’t even use word processing programs anymore. They do everything – everything – in PowerPoint.

We think that’s a shame. We use bullet points ourselves – in everything from office emails to the work we produce – but it’s difficult to fathom an entire workweek composed of nothing but. Besides the horrific image of flavorless slide after flavorless slide, we think it’s just bad communication...and bad business.

What gets lost with bullet points? Story. Nuance. Shading. Bullets fragment ideas and concepts. Bullets can emphasize or de-emphasize the wrong information. They masquerade as facts, when they are, in fact, just points.

Growing up, you learned to read critically. When an argument is fishy, something feels out of place. But when you read a PowerPoint slide, you have nothing against which to judge what you’re being told. What happens if the person who wrote that slide is misinformed? If they’re leaving something out? If they have an agenda?

Or what if they’re just bad at organizing? We learn to privilege information at the top and left of the page. So what happens when someone delivers a dire warning – say, about a shuttle explosion – in the bottom right?

In 2003, the space shuttle Columbia was damaged during takeoff by a falling piece of foam. Upon re-entry, it disintegrated, costing seven astronauts their lives. Later, The New York Times learned that a significant danger sign – the foam chunk that initially struck the shuttle was 640 times larger than anything NASA had tested for – had been flagged by engineers during a review of the initial damage. Yale professor and design information expert Edward Tufte pointed out that this crucial information was buried at the bottom of a cluttered PowerPoint slide. The alarm was there, but went unnoticed. Three years later, the shuttle program is only now getting back on its feet.

Chances are, the use of bullets isn’t going to cost your company what it cost NASA. But it could mean the difference between landing a client and losing one, or between being a step ahead of the market and being behind. So we hope the next time someone hands you a bulleted list, you don’t take it at face value. Ask to see the research. Take the time to have someone walk you through the analysis.

But it’s the larger assumption about upper-management attention spans we’d like to tackle, too. Maybe it’s true that you only read bullets. But maybe you haven’t had reason to read more.

We’d like to give you that reason. We’d like to give you a break from bullet points. We want to give you something to think about over your morning coffee – with content, conversation, and yes, even whole paragraphs. So we’ll be sending more of these short missives. We believe you have five minutes to pause, read, and reflect, and that as a smart business person, you’re hungry for the chance to do so.

www.cornerstonemtm.com