CONFERENCE season is on its way again, promising tepid canapés and Death by Powerpoint. The invitations to round tables, keynote speeches and “welcome cocktails” are starting to arrive: the Labour Party has already asked me for my driving licence, national insurance number, passport number and photo counter-signed in triplicate, because I am obviously even keener to peruse conference stalls sponsored by trade unions than I am to get into America.
Most of this is overpriced blather. Yet I still can’t help being flattered by invitations which suggest that I am a Thinking Person. I’m always looking for short cuts to enlightenment: maybe that “break-out session on emerging trends in the media industry” will finally fill that career-limiting hole in my knowledge? And my inner Puritan advises no pain, no gain: the seminar on “Where now for tax credits policy?” is bound to do me good.
The problem is, I never really get much out of conferences. I always seem to glaze over at the vital moment. When the speaker makes that key point that everyone else writes down I am yawning or dropping my pen or thinking about tomorrow’s meeting. Speakers often make their main point very, very quickly so that they can devote the other 39 minutes of the speech to important platitudes. When they refer back to the main point, just when my pen is poised to capture their words of wisdom, they say something like “so the new multi-manager is the key change driver in multinational productivity”, and I’m stuck. I can’t lean over to see what my neighbour has written because I am so antisocial that I always sit in the empty row. So I usually end up leaving the hall and making phone calls to try to look important.
Why such childishness comes over me in conference halls I do not know. But it may have something to do with my irritation at having to sit still while being told things that I have mostly neither asked to know, need to know nor want to know. This is apparently known as “Attention Spam”: speakers deliver verbal spam that you can’t delete as you would an e-mail, so you simply switch off.
The Powerpoint presentation has much to answer for. True, it does mean that the key point is usually staring you in the face. You can hardly miss it when it’s written on the screen, and again in the handout on your lap, and is then laboriously repeated by the speaker who simply reads out his slides word for word like a news anchor holding up the autocue. But it’s toe-curling.
If business executives had ever mastered the art of oratory, they forgot it the day that someone handed them a slide. I first gave talks in the days of overhead projectors, when at least the audience could enjoy my clumsy blunders as I tried to pick each slide in the right order, peel off the backing paper, put the slide the right way up on the box and then remember to leap away so that my shadow didn’t obliterate the screen.
Since I almost never succeeded, I did create a certain camaraderie with my kindly listeners. But Powerpoint is utterly arrogant. After a friend gave a Powerpoint presentation at his own wedding, tongue-in-cheek but not quite hilarious, I learnt to give speeches without slides.
Schoolchildren love it, though. After last week’s A-level results, companies fell over themselves to complain about pupils being poorly prepared for business life. But what about the deadening effect of Powerpoint on mental faculty? Most of the primary schools I visit show off the presentations that reduce volcanos, the life of the koala or the Olympics to three bullet points and a bar chart. How will a nation that thinks in no more than three bullet points ever conjure a narrative to move an audience?
At Davos — the ultimate conference — last year the writer Theodore Zeldin apparently gave warning that we are losing the art of conversation. We seem to talk more and more and listen less and less. The problem is that artificial settings distort conversation. The worst conferences are those that lock you away for three days in a remote location in a doomed attempt to force you to “bond” with your peers. One colleague recalls being so desperate for freedom at a conference in the Netherlands that he walked four miles to reach the nearest town. The highlight of the event had been a trip to see the windmills in Kinderdijk.
The best conferences are those that bring you up to date, introduce you to new ideas or new people. I’ve referred always back to my notes after seeing Gary Hamel or Tom Peters, who roam the audience spilling out ideas, or when I’ve met really interesting people in the interval.
Perhaps this is why an accountant I met last week has turned his annual conference into one giant coffee break. He calls it conference speed-dating: every 20 minutes you sit down with a different potential investor, supplier or partner. You don’t have to pretend to listen to speeches, and you don’t have to exchange business cards furtively in the lobby while everyone else is at the sponsored panel. Perhaps speed-dating is the future for conferences: we could compress the jargon and turn back into human beings again.
BlackBerry fools
TWO weeks ago I wrote about a friend who had forced her husband to bubble-wrap his BlackBerry and send it home from Tuscany because his constant e-mailing was ruining their holiday. I can now report that the (mainly male) addiction to these hand-held organisers is even worse than I first thought.
The huge numbers of responses I received were almost all sent from BlackBerries, almost all from men, and a third from men on holiday. Several complained that their wives had read the article and were making them drive through local villages trying to figure out the French/Spanish/Tobagan for bubble-wrap. One said his Geordie colleagues call it a “Gooseberry” because they feel left out if they come to London without it. I confidently predict that “BlackBerry thumb” will become this year’s must-have ailment for the high-powered. If you’re still on holiday, please enjoy the rioja and don’t feel the need to reply to this.
Battle lines
I THINK I may have found the next Philip Pullman. I rarely finish books now that I have small children, but this summer I found a novel that I was genuinely unable to put down. It is called The Children’s War, by Monique Charlesworth, and charts the experiences of two children, one in France and one in Germany, during the Second World War. It is fiction but not fanciful: the detailed research makes the story historically fascinating and the beautiful writing sweeps you from exquisite sadness to desperate hope. I wept from page 17 onwards, but I cannot wait for the next book. It is, apparently, the first of a trilogy that follows the two central characters. Not mystical like Pullman, but a book that similarly endures in the mind.
It’s not good to talk
THIS must be the first time that I have ever been delighted to be unable to get a seat on the Tube. There was a worryingly empty day after the al-Qaeda video, but now the passengers are back, regaled on my line by a man in a bowler hat who goes from carriage to carriage encouraging everyone to “talk to each other”. What? The most marvellous thing about the Underground is the respectful reticence of one’s fellow travellers.
Last week the station announcer said that Piccadilly Circus was shut because of “smouldering on the line”. Sounds dangerously intimate to me. Let’s keep a lid on it.
