The lazy man’s way to business success

Ah, the old Dutch way of thinking.

Also, make sure your historical knowledge is in the appropriate field, so you don’t spend the first ten minutes of a discussion about IP wondering what all this has to do with Internet Protocol.

I’d settle for “take an interest”. In anything.

I can always predict which of my students (most of whom are quite poorly educated) will do well. The ones who take an interest, taken an interest in anything, will do well. The ones who are always bored, and can’t see “the relevance” will not.

(*hrrrmmph* The Dutch got there first!)

My advice would be: never, ever use Powerpoint if you actually want to teach anybody about anything, or change anybody’s mind. Powerpoint does have one vital use: as a hypnotic device to convince people that ‘{some crazy shit I just made up} is the received wisdom on the topic and hence unchallengeable.’

A generalisation of this method, which I have used for several years, is to read about Country A, only (if at all) in the press of countries other than A. If it didn’t make the “International” section of a neighbouring country’s press, it isn’t worth knowing about.

Of course, in practice I earn my living in the hinterlands of academic science, but I did after all make the crucial mistake of acquiring a PhD in my mispent youth.

hmmm I see what you mean Eszter, but I think that’s a much more usual thing to do in an educational context than a business one. Also NB that most business Powerpoints are delivered in small meetings across a desk, rather than in a lecture theatre to a big audience, so you’d be less likely to adopt that strategy. I quite like Powerpoint slides as a way of going through the key points of a piece of research.

(although to be honest, I have a sneaking suspicion that the main purpose of powerpoint slides is to convey the message “see, I cared enough about this meeting to do some powerpoints for it”).

(although to be honest, I have a sneaking suspicion that the main purpose of powerpoint slides is to convey the message “see, I cared enough about this meeting to do some powerpoints for it”)

Or “Christ, I suppose they will expect me to do a sodding Powerpoint presentation for this one”.

Richard @18,

that’s nothing. A number of years ago some guys at a bank, responsible for preparing and sending to me a section of a listing prospectus, prepared the thing as an Excel file. That’s right: in addition to using Excel for the tables, they put the (vastly more voluminous) surrounding text into cells.

DSquared, got it, I wasn’t sure if you’d meant business context only.

The core of your post, btw, relates to an idea I’ve had for a long time (and may have already brought up elsewhere before on CT). I’ve long thought that people getting PhDs in social science areas should seriously consider living abroad for a while. It’s for reasons similar to the ones you state. What better way to shed taken-for-granted assumptions about how things work in any particular national context?

Eszter, did you click on dsquared’s link? I perceived dsquared’s ppt-remark as mainly a swipe at Petraeus. His use of question marks relates to the time frame for a military drawdown in Iraq. It somewhat subtracts from the matter-of-fact-like decisive appearance that Petraeus supposedly aims to project.

In fact, it’s already been compared to the famous three-phased Underpants Collection business plan of the Gnomes:

1) Collect Underpants
2) ?
3) Profit

I hate to break it to ya, sock puppet, but it wasn’t a gleam of romance in her eyes. Rather, it was the realization that her life-long insomia problem was finally solved :)

My advice to most new graduates would be you realise that a degree on its own doesn’t make you stand out from the crowd and that you’re unlikely to get a job in a field related to your degree subject unless you are rich enough to finance yourself through the internships, so prepare yourself for 8 months on the dole/doing shelf stacking or bar work before you get lucky and apply for the job nobody else did.

“I’d also add that ‘knowing something about a foreign country’ is not equivalent to ‘repeating what you just read in the Economist …”

damn.

@19 I have seen this to. The reason? Some people only ever bothered to learn how to use Excel, so they just use what they are comfortable with, rather than using the right tool for the job.

The ‘look at countries other than your own’ is not just a US thing. Here in Australia it amazes me how little people know of the ‘outside world’, especially considering how small we are in the grand scheme of things. I have had the pleasure of living in other countries, and will attest that it gives you a real edge over others. (And yes, I am usually this smug).

Well, this advice is fine, so far as it goes. But honestly? 1) Just plain read, 2) pay attention, and 3) don’t internalize external (and often intrinsic) conflicts. So few people do these two things with any regularity or consistency of effect that if you do them for the first couple of years of your career, and keep them up, you will have built up an insuperable advantage over your peers. If you do them for the first ten years of your career, you will look around and find yourself, if not a giant, at least larger-than-life.

Whether it’s been in writing or in business, the number of people who fell by the wayside by becoming ignorant, passive, and bitter far outnumbers the few who kept up, kept alert, and stayed focused on what they could do and minimized the damage from the things they couldn’t avoid. While luck has played a role, and not all of the latter group can be counted wild successes (myself included), everyone among my friends and acquaintances who’ve followed these principles is in some way successful.

There are few sights sweeter than the look on someone’s face after they’ve confidently proclaimed something to be impossible, only to be informed that they’ve been doing things that way in Australia for the last twenty years.

Although you would think that would be true, try arguing to an american (of certain stripes) that universal healthcare can work, and they still contend that it is completely impossible and would lead to a breakdown of the system in short order.

jh:

There’s no excuse to read The Economist, if you have the internet.

How true! Why read The Economist when you can read Crooked Timber instead.

(Yes, good fellows, that was sarcasm)

Personally, I’d say that for a liberal with anti-capitalist tendencies, there is no better single publication to read than The Economist. As long as one reads between the lines, it does a great job of focusing on important news around the world (rather than the latest comment so-and-so has made about the Iraq War). I’m not trying to criticize Crooked Timber here, I’m just saying that The Economist does a good job of doing what it does: finding stories that people with a direct interest in the international economy will find interesting.

I think everybody bar Eszter realises that I’m not saying that 100% of PowerPoint presentations are rubbish. It’s merely, in my experience, that something like 90% of them are….

As a reporting medium, I don’t like the way Powerpoint favours putting lots of graphics on the screen and only a certain amount of text. It’s okay when the PP presentation is a summary of a complex document, but all too often (including for due diligence) the document presented is simply a bound copy of the Powerpoint slides. There are just some issues that can only be properly grasped by sitting down with raw data as well as someone’s (possibly erroneous, almost certainly partial) interpretation of said data: and Powerpoint militates against including big chunks of data and in favour of setting up a nice series of slides showing arrows connecting various geometrical shapes containing large-print text boxes (often just slogans). A lot of amateur historians know that Churchill used to demand policy documents written on ‘one sheet of paper only’, or even one half sheet. What’s less well-known is that he used to demand huge reams of original data, for example the Enigman decrypts, and spend hours poring over them and asking stubborn questions both of the senior officers or civil servants sent to brief him and the juniors who actually understood the stuff.

As an instructional tool, I recently did a trauma medicine course- much of which was ‘death by PowerPoint’. The best single instructor we had came in, switched off the projector and said ‘people just stare at these damn slides and it hypnotises them. Take out your notebooks, pay attention, write down the key points only and if you don’t understand anything ask questions. And we’re going to be doing a lot of practice.’

Now none of these learning methods are actually ruled out by the use of PowerPoint, but one does find that PowerPoint based lessons are a dream for the lazy instructor and the lazy student: one just flips the ‘next’ button on a presentation she may or may not have written herself, the other just reads a screen and listens vaguely to a voice.

PowerPoint appears to make instruction effortless, which is not a good thing. And the reliance on graphics over text means that people don’t get detail- which may sometimes be un-necessary but is often vital, particularly if someone is trying to pull the wool over your eyes- and encourages people to accept over neat schemes of causation.

Brief DD reports in Powerpoint? Given the 119 page Word document needing from the German interpretation of English that’s just landed in my inbox, I wish…

A friend of the fiancée once received a CV headed with the words ‘The story so far…’

Funnily enough, the applicant wasn’t called for interview.

Ha, good quote:

How did The Economist get to such a vile state?

The horrible answer is, it’s always been this vile. If you go back to The Economist’s beginnings in Victorian England, you’ll find, for example, the magazine’s brave stand on the Great Irish Famine, the English-led genocide that left up to two million Irish dead. When a cry went up to stop the famine, The Economist countered, “It is no man’s business to provide for another. If left to the natural law of distribution, those who deserve more would obtain it.”

And speaking of Hitlers, in the mid-1930s, The Economist even found time to praise you-know-who: “Herr Hitler is showing encouraging signs of statesmanship.” Yes, they really did write that.

The first and last example of genuine wit that The Economist ever produced.

“They become smarter by osmosis simply by being in the imagined drawing room of The Economist‘s wit-slinging editorial offices.”

Oh. I thought he was talking about The Onion.