Bill Gates Built the Deadliest Weapon in the U.S. Military

Photo By: Staff Sgt. Joseph Digirolamo. The appearance of U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) visual information does not imply or constitute DoD endorsement.

Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, unwittingly created a weapon of mass destruction for the U.S. military when his company created PowerPoint. It can be a useful tool for presentations, but within the U.S. military it has become a ubiquitous technology and communication format that structures much of what gets done, particularly for staff officers.

The proliferation of PowerPoint within the U.S. armed forces is nothing new, and its presence is no surprise to those of us who have served within it. But one could argue that its use is so pervasive that it even structures how people think and how they make decisions.

So in some ways, Microsoft PowerPoint is the deadliest weapon in the U.S. military’s arsenal. The question, though, is one of targeting: Toward whom is this weapon aimed?

While serving in Afghanistan during 2013, a friend and I pondered this. Fortunately, we were both in roles that somehow avoided being directly responsible for the production of specific PowerPoint slides on a regular basis, although we were frequent contributors to them. This particular friend and I both have young children, and we reflected upon how the use of meetings and PowerPoint often coincided in a cycle of dependency much like what is described in Laura Joffe Numeroff’s popular children’s book, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. 

So, in homage to that wonderful book, we wrote what follows.

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If You Give a General a Staff Meeting

Phenomenological Insights on Counterinsurgency, Afghanistan, Globalization, Technology and the Organizational Science of U.S. Military Operations in the Twenty-First Century

If you give a general a staff meeting, he’s going to ask for a PowerPoint presentation.

When your colonel finds out about the PowerPoint presentation, he’ll probably ask you for a copy to approve beforehand.

When the colonel gets your copy, he’ll ask for about 50 changes. Then he’ll change those changes a few dozen more times.

When the colonel approves the presentation, you might notice that it no longer resembles anything close to what the general supposedly wants. So you’ll prepare some back-up slides.

When you finish making the back-up slides, you’ll need to add pretty pictures and flow charts. You’ll start adding.

You might get carried away and add pretty pictures and flow charts on every single slide. You may even end up with a PowerPoint presentation that belongs in the United States Military Museum of PowerPoint Art!

When you’re done, you’ll probably have to rehearse the presentation with the colonel. You’ll have to fix the flow-chart colors and font on several slides to make him comfortable.

On the day of the presentation, you’ll arrive to the conference room one hour early. Just to be safe, you’ll have three dozen printed color copies for the 10 people planning to attend.

Upon seeing a pretty picture of a warzone project on the first slide, the general will probably ask you to arrange a visit there for him and his entourage. You feel your blood pressure increase by 33 points.

When you begin the presentation, the general will look confused and ask for the “bottom line.” You’ll quickly skip to your back-up slides. He’ll settle back in his chair, looking pleased, while the colonel feigns agreement.

When the meeting ends, the general will ask unrelated questions. Then he’ll pull out his notebook and pause for a moment to look at it.

Looking at his notebook will remind him that he wants an update on an obscure project so he can impress his fellow generals with strategic thoughts and reports of dramatic progress.

So … he’ll ask for a PowerPoint presentation.

And chances are if he asks you for a PowerPoint presentation, he’s going to want a staff meeting to go with it.

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Certainly, PowerPoint is a useful tool. I don’t mean to imply that it’s not. But it’s a tool that needs to be employed judiciously. The same goes for other technologies like e-mail and for the use of meetings themselves.

Does PowerPoint dominate your organization? Have you ever worked in an organization that had clear rules about how to use PowerPoint and how not to use it? What about meetings?

Find this thought provoking? Like and share!

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About Ben Baran
Ben Baran, Ph.D., is probably one of the few people in the world who is equally comfortable in a university classroom, a corporate boardroom and in full body armor carrying a U.S. government-issued M4 assault rifle. Visit: www.benbaran.com. 

How a Startup Revolutionized its Meetings

Some parts of life are easy to dislike. World hunger and terrorism come to mind.

For many people, so do workplace meetings.

But the startup Gild Collective—comprised of three cofounders, Jessie Deye, Kelsey Pytlik, and Rachel Bauer McCreary—has realized that meetings can not only be helpful, but they can be essential for driving alignment and productivity.

Gild Collective cofounders (from left): Rachel Bauer McCreary, Jessie Deye and Kelsey Pytlik

For the past five months, I’ve been following the Gild Collective team by asking them to complete a survey every single week. That survey has included ratings by the team across the 15 capabilities within The AGILE Model®, a recognized best-practice framework for nimble leaders, teams and organizations. It has also included a series of open-ended questions designed to help the three cofounders align their goals and activities, as well as ratings of their perceived levels of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA).

My thought upon starting these surveys was to provide the team with a weekly snapshot that they could use to guide their discussions and help them get on the proverbial same page.

Sometimes they did that, sometimes they didn’t.

But a few weeks ago, the team asked me to meet with them in person to discuss how they could better use their weekly snapshot to revolutionize their weekly meetings. I gladly obliged.

Our conversation seemed to me to last about 15 minutes, but when I looked at my watch, I noticed we’d been talking for almost two hours. During that time, we discussed:

• Why even have meetings, what problem should they solve?
• Prior experiences and lessons learned from attempting to have meetings
• How to use weekly survey feedback to improve as a team
• A template for their weekly meetings that would keep them on track and allow them to discuss items efficiently and effectively

The team has now had the chance to use this new approach a few times, and the results are highly positive. Their meetings have energy and purpose, creating alignment of priorities and goals along with necessary collaboration. I’m looking forward to continuing to work with the Gild Collective team as they hone their teamwork and communication through these meetings.

What might this mean for the rest of us? How can you revolutionize your weekly meetings? A few tips come to mind based upon my work with Gild Collective:

1. Obtain a shared understanding of WHY you are meeting. What problem are you trying to solve and what do people need to get out of the meeting?
2. Have a mechanism in place for making sure everyone prepares. This could be some sort of shared agenda creation, but with the Gild Collective team, this is the weekly survey I have them complete. I send it to them on Friday mornings, they complete it on Friday or Saturday and I send them their team report on Sunday or Monday. Then, they have time to read through it prior to meeting on Tuesday afternoons.
3. Create a template for your meeting structure. This will help you avoid getting in conversations that go nowhere—like going down a cul-de-sac.
4. Agree to hold each other accountable and keep a regular schedule. It’s important to note that I’m NOT advocating meeting just for meeting's sake. But when you have a senior-level team in a high-VUCA environment, weekly meetings are probably the bare minimum.
5. Periodically check in with each other about your meeting structure and process. Ensure that the meeting is still working well and solicit improvement suggestions.

For startups, this kind of meeting is particularly important for a few reasons.

First, the team is moving at high speed. Startup time is not the same as big-corporation time. What Gild Collective has done in five months is probably equivalent to about five years in many companies.

Second, teams of cofounders—whether they know it or not—are setting in place norms and routines that will ripple throughout their organizations when growth occurs. It’s best to be intentional about those norms and routines so that the culture you get is the one you want.

For any team wanting to get things done, having effective meetings is critical.

I don’t think it’s that everyone actually hates meetings. I think it’s that we hate bad meetings—those ones that waste time and generate more confusion than alignment.

What do you love or hate about meetings? Leave a comment below!

Find this thought provoking? Like and share!

Also: The Gild Collective team is really excited about its special holiday promotions. For those of you who are crafty or know someone crafty, check out www.gildcollective.com. They’re running a Black Friday through Cyber Monday promotion, so don’t delay!

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About Ben Baran
Ben Baran, Ph.D., is probably one of the few people in the world who is equally comfortable in a university classroom, a corporate boardroom and in full body armor carrying a U.S. government-issued M4 assault rifle. Visit: www.benbaran.com.