The CarriersEdge Podcast | Episode #89
Mark: Hello. Welcome to episode eighty nine of The CarriersEdge podcast. I'm Mark Murrell.
Jane: And I'm Jane Jazrawy. Wasn't I supposed to open this one?
Mark: No. You do even numbers.
Jane: Oh Okay.
Mark: Yes. Here we are perpetual hosts of the podcast. Yes. Doing our last podcast episode from the old studio before we move. To the new facilities.
Yes. We are moving at the end of this month, and we'll be packing down our studio right after this podcast. Studio such as it is, collection of boards and towels that make up Jane's vocal booth.
Jane: It is It is a wondrous thing. We should probably take a picture of it.
Mark: We have. We took pictures when we did a, we did an internal spotlight for staff on behind the scenes of a podcast and took pictures. To show everybody the luxury that
Jane: We have a door and some foam and yeah. And I'm trapped here and it's cold.
Mark: I know. It's cold. Things I won't miss.
Jane: And because we haven't got a really great setup, we're actually we have doors as well, Mark is in a room and I'm outside the room by the stairs. Which makes it seem like
Mark: You're not fully invited in.
Jane: Yeah. So we realized that we were bleeding onto each other especially when I laugh. So we have to be separated by a door. So I'm peering at you through, like, the one paint like, at their French doors with the things in between the cross cross hatches. And so I'm looking at you through the second to front top left window.
Mark: Yeah. But you've never been allowed in the main studio. Yes. You're always outside. You're like you're not main cast.
You're just a guest.
Jane: That's right. And, well, it's because you have to handle the turning on and turning off things.
Mark: Yeah. I have to press the buttons
Jane: It's a technical term for what you do. I don't even I can't see, like, once you reach your handout, then I don't know what you're doing
Mark: I press the button to start recording, and then about every ten minutes or so, I have to jiggle the mouse so it doesn't go to sleep.
Jane: But it will we are excited about our our move. The big move as we have started calling it because we are moving from Newmarket Ontario, which is about I don't know, an hour depending on traffic north of Toronto and
Mark: Should be twenty minutes.
Jane: Yeah. But it's almost never twenty minutes anymore. Ever. It might be twenty minutes from
Mark: Top end. Yeah.
Jane: Yeah. From Stival Road. But anyway, we are going to Victoria, Canada, BC Canada. We are going to be living on the island.
Mark: Moving out to the island, go to the ocean.
Jane: That is correct.
Mark: Think of it.
Jane: Yes. And we are driving out there, and that will be an adventure.
Mark: Yes. So I don't know how we're gonna do the next episode of our podcast because we'll be on the road for it. So it may be from some motel somewhere on the prairies. We'll see.
Jane: Yeah. And it may not be very good quality. So we'll see.
Mark: Yeah. We'll see what we can do.
Jane: Yeah. We'll see. But that has been the generally and what I've been doing over the last month or so is shredding paper and cleaning out the basement. Which is where most of our life has been has been stored for the last twenty years that we've been in this house.
Mark: Yeah. So big excitement.
Jane: It is.
Mark: And, yes, coming close.
Jane: That doesn't mean that Ontario is going to see the last of us because we're gonna be back here in June. We're gonna be Yeah. We're gonna be back here.
Mark: Two weeks after we get moved out there, we're back here for a staff meeting.
Jane: Yeah. And our kids live here. So
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: We are not going to be far away. No. Except we are gonna be far away.
Mark: We're not gonna be gone for long, I guess. Any stretch.
Jane: Yeah. But you all probably don't wanna hear about our move.
Mark: And you have been busy doing a lot of purging, and we talked about that on the last episode because you were just digging into it at the time. But this week, you have started to come back from all of that and you took some time out and did a webinar. I did. On PowerPoint. So this I am
Jane: Okay. First of all, I was amazed at how long I've actually been using PowerPoint.
Mark: Well, before you get to that, I've done this webinar on best practices in PowerPoint. This was one of the original series of webinar topics that we put together. So like twenty fifteen Mhmm. I first put this together.
Jane: And you've been doing the same one.
Mark: But every nine months, I've been doing this since then. Still all works. And it's still all stuff that is relevant based on the horror show that I see at most presentations, but I couldn't be there because of another event that I'm gonna talk about later. So I asked you to step in.
Jane: Yes.
Mark: And being who you are, you are not going to do mine. You're going to do your own and took it in a completely new direction. And I think a big chunk of that stuff didn't actually make it in or may not have all made it in, so I wanna have a chance to go through it here. So well, you were talking about some really interesting stuff when you were prepping it that I didn't think all of that got into the content. So
Jane: Oh, when I actually did the webinar?
Mark: Yes.
Jane: Oh, shoot.
Mark: Well, so now go ahead. You were saying you're surprised at how long you've been using PowerPoint?
Jane: We've been using PowerPoint for forty years. Forty years. Yeah.
Mark: id exist in eighty three?
Jane: No. No. No. Oh, wait. Then it's thirty years.
Mark: Right.
Jane: Are you sure? Wait.
Mark: Forty years is eighty three. Don't think you were using it either.
Jane: Ninety three, two thousand three, two thirteen, two twenty three. Oh, you're right. Okay. So thirty years. It was launched in nineteen eighty seven, I think.
Mhmm. And I didn't start using it until, like, the mid nineties. Ninety three and ninety four when I started working for something.
Mark: But it was six years old only.
Jane: Yeah. And it was yeah. It was pretty new. Yeah. It was everything was really new.
Photoshop was really new. PowerPoint, like Microsoft had Word in Excel, but they didn't have PowerPoint. They didn't make it. They made Word in Excel, but they didn't make PowerPoint. They bought they bought the company.
It was a company called Forethought that Apple actually gave them some funding because they really liked the idea of the presentation and it was called Presenter at very beginning. But when they got released, Microsoft kinda pounced on it and bought the company, and therefore bought the product, which is what Microsoft does. And what a lot of companies do if they have the money and they wanna they like a product or a competitor or something like Facebook and Twitter well, not Twitter, but Facebook has done it. Other big tech companies have done that, just buy a company so that they have the technology.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: And it looks well, it looks in nineteen ninety four, ninety five, when I first started using it, it looked like the interface looks different, but it pretty much the same. It's the same. You can do the same things with PowerPoint then that you can do now. And what the most interesting thing that I kind of realized is that PowerPoint wants you to do things that are not good for presentations.
Mark: Shocker.
Jane: I know it's so weird. It's presentation software, but They developed it. I mean, it was developed in the nineties or in the eighties.
Mark: Right.
Jane: In the eighties, we didn't know what online presentations were going to end up at. And what I think is really bizarre about PowerPoint is it really hasn't changed anything. Mhmm. And So the way that you build a presentation is pretty much exactly the same way. The only thing that PowerPoint has done is given you tools to do it faster
Mark: and add more animation and crazy font.
Jane: Yeah. But you can do that faster now and you can add more garbage. Like, there's just so much garbage that PowerPoint is like, hey, you wanna add this? Hey, you wanna add this? It's like, no.
Mhmm. I want a white screen. And they don't like that. They do not like you having white.
Mark: They want some crazy ass colors.
Jane: No. They they absolutely no. They don't wanna crazy. They don't want crazy colors. They want you to I think Okay.
I'm gonna step back. I think part of the problem is when PowerPoint first was launched. It was quite ugly.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: So when you created a presentation and it is it is the same. You get you launched PowerPoint in nineteen ninety four and you launch it in twenty twenty three and you open it and you get the same blank presentation. It's exact it Not exactly the same. It's slightly there's slight changes. The font was Times New Roman back then, and now it's Calibri.
So it would thank God that they finally stopped using Times New Roman. Times New Roman was god awful. So when you used PowerPoint back then, everybody pretty much knew that PowerPoint wasn't giving you anything, any help. You could create shapes, you could create colors, you could, you know, you could do all these things, but if you wanted something that was you had to know how to design things. Like, you had to have an eye.
Like, you couldn't just you basically use clipart because that's all they provided for you. If you didn't have a graphic background, then clip art and the screen beans and all that stuff was your it's kind of what you had. Well, going back to ninety four, Those were ugly. Like, it wasn't it wasn't nice. It wanted you to the default colors were this really nasty blue and yellow and red.
It was very bright and it wasn't Like, it was Yucky. Now, PowerPoint has much nicer colors. The default color is a nice blue. There is more options to insert things. There's a whole lot there's a whole whack of things where you can design diagrams and things like that.
But the problem is, is that it just wants to point you to, here, put this color on. Here, put this design on. Here, do this. Do this. Do this.
And and the issue is that for a lot of your slides, you don't want that. I mean, that's not what you're slide is about, and one of the things that you have to think about with PowerPoint is what do you wanna say? What exactly is it that you're saying? Are you And my whole presentation was really kind of anti bullet point because bullet points are They are not helping you. They're not engaging your audience.
They're basically you've created your script. So you when PowerPoint the strength of PowerPoint is that it's easy for you to create a presentation, the end. That's the strength of PowerPoint. It doesn't help you be a better presenter. It helps you put things on a slide.
And in nineteen ninety four and two thousand or two twenty twenty three, it really wants you to put bullets on those slides.
Mark: Yeah. Well, that's the default. It opens with a slide that's ready for bullets.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: And bullets in the top left. So if you don't have a ton of bullets if you only have a sparse amount of text, you've got this little block of content in the top left of the slide and the rest is just sitting there empty.
Jane: Yeah. It's just I mean, my go to is a blank slide. I might use the title slide if I'm being lazy, but I don't like, you know, I don't like the fact that they force you into a subtitle? Like
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: How did you have to go and and rearrange these things? And really, you know, a blank slide is what you should be starting with. You should not be starting with bullets. Yeah. Because that just makes you think, oh, I have you know, I'll just create some bullets and then I'll do bullet, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And then everybody is asleep after ten minutes and they're not engaged.
Mark: I saw one recently that I think was fabulous in its awfulness because the whole slide was filled with text and it was multicolored. It was blue and orange, text alternating, and it was all caps, and it was so dense that it was like just a long statement. It wasn't bullet points. It was like a paragraph of text on the screen, all in caps, and alternating colors. It was like this person shouting all of these statements at you, and it was so hard to read.
Jane: Did when you read it, when you finally figured it out, did it add anything to the presentation?
Mark: No. It could have been two words.
Jane: Yeah. And this is the thing, is that people don't realize that you don't need you don't need to read things on a slide. The slide is there for graphic enhancement. Like, it's photos, pictures, screenshots, like, you know, put you can use your words the whole idea of someone talking is that they're going to be telling you a story or talking about something that they know about, that you don't know about, and the graphic that is sitting behind you shouldn't be competing with what you're saying. It should be enhancing what you're saying.
Oh my god. I wish I'd said this in the in the webinar, because that is pretty much what you want PowerPoint to do, or that's what you want your presentation or your graphic or, you know, how you interact with people. So one of the things that I was doing is saying, this is how you can also interact with people. Mhmm. You you don't need to just use bullet points.
You can do all these other things.
Mark: I often tell people what I'm doing or what I used to do that webinar. Think about it like a newscaster. You're the presenter talking and the newscaster is not gonna have a slide up. There's just a ton of bullet points or ton of text. It's going to be an image It might be b roll footage, you know, in behind what they're saying.
It might even just be a couple of words, but it is going to be very much underscoring what they're actually saying.
Jane: Yeah. I kinda said the same thing in a different way where I was saying you don't have to it's like a default. When people, you know, people speak or do a seminar or a webinar or whatever, everything is like the default is go to PowerPoint and fill it up with your notes. Yeah. And then present those notes as bullet points on a slide.
Mark: Well, that's also the well, first mistakes people make as they start in PowerPoint.
Jane: Yeah. Because PowerPoint is easy to use and it tells you this is what you should do because this is how this is how you do presentations, but it's really good presentations often have no PowerPoint at all.
Mark: You said something when you were prepping it about how In your research, you found that PowerPoint kind of forces you to do a linear presentation where before PowerPoint presentations weren't linear the same way.
Jane: Yeah. PowerPoint well, it's the bullet points. Right? So you start your presentation and you do your, you know, you write your notes. And their bullet points on a PowerPoint slide.
Before PowerPoint where people and it's funny because people talk about doing using PowerPoint for meetings, we never do. And I don't think that's a thing in trucking. But when you use PowerPoint for meetings, you kind of stifle discussion. You you know, people it just becomes wait for the bullet points to be over, and then, you know, are there any questions? So the linear part of it is that everybody's just waiting for the bullet points to be over.
And you don't say something and then have a discussion about it and then say something else and have a discussion about it. You just say, here's my here's my list. And that linear and I didn't say that because I was really I really was hammering home that bullet points are terrible. And it's hard not to do bullet points. It really is.
Like, it you when you do your notes, and I still think, you know, right your presentation outside of PowerPoint and then that whole one third planet and write it out and then put it in PowerPoint is like you're finishing touch. That's kind of the two thirds is just work on your slides. But you should already know what you're saying. Bola points are fine, but they're for you. They're not for your audience.
So PowerPoint is doing things for you as the creator of the presentation. It's not helping your audience, your job, is to help the audience figure out what things need to, you know, or what they're expected to do, or or what they're expected to know. The other thing that I had as an example, a famous PowerPoint slide, and I didn't realize it was famous, but it is famous in some circles. That was apparently the cause of the Columbia disaster where it exploded on reentry. And it was because they did do tests on the components of the shuttle, but the test data was kind of Well, it's hard to know what the test data was looking at the slide.
There's this one PowerPoint slide that talks about the results of some testing, some simulations. And the important parts are the problem is is that PowerPoint lets you indent your bullets And so you indent and you because you're doing, like, sub bullets and you're thinking sub bullets, this is part of this main idea, and this is part of this main idea. But if you go into the supplements, then you get smaller text. And so as you're creating your thought process, Then you do it in PowerPoint, you do it in bullets, because that's how you create your thought process. But as you know and many people have heard me say, it's backwards.
So you're doing your thought process and you come to your conclusion at the bottom of your slide in the smallest text.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: But is that is that what you want your audience? To do? Like, it
Mark: shouldn't be the least important thing.
Jane: No. Your conclusion should be the top of your slide. The most important thing because that is your point. Mhmm. Your conclusion is your point.
Don't it's not you don't need to, you know, reveal it. At the end after you do a long explanation, you want to lead with your lead. And so if the power this particular PowerPoint slide hadn't started in that thought process. Then they would have said, you know, these tiles are going to get destroyed if If there's severe tile damage can occur, if that had been the title, then there may have been some discussion about more discussion about what was happening with those tiles and, you know, whatever happen you know, whether the engineers were saying, and maybe challenge or Columbia wouldn't have exploded.
Mark: Wow.
Jane: And so they talk about that and they talk about how awful this PowerPoint slide was. And in fact, the military started banning PowerPoint because it was just so filled with bullets because all of these people are creating presentations for meetings and briefings and stuff like that. They're just writing bullet points
Mark: for themselves. Yeah. And if the bullets are for you, why is it on the screen for the audience?
Jane: Well, this is exactly it. And coming back to what you were saying about the different colors, in that PowerPoint slide.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: I think that they were trying to do some design stuff that just went that was just a nonstarter. But And I can see the idea, but nobody ever tells you, look at your slides.
Mark: Well, the design would have been great if they had just boiled it down to, like
Jane: Two words.
Mark: Yeah. Two words per bullet or something like that or just very sparse stuff.
Jane: Oh, what is it gonna say?
Mark: Color.
Jane: Oh, color. Cute.
Mark: Insert crickets ends here.
Jane: Yeah. Sorry. I I lost it, but there is something about Trying to build the the Columbia oh, anyway.
Mark: I'm fascinated by that. So whoever made that slide is responsible for destroying a space shuttle and killing people.
Jane: I think
Mark: That's a legacy.
Jane: That was a group. I think
Mark: Somebody made that slide.
Jane: Yeah. But at the same time
Mark: Bad slides can kill people.
Jane: It was Boeing and NASA. You think that these are all really super smart people. And what it really points out is that PowerPoint bullets are very sleep inducing. Oh, I also wanna talk about commoditizing chickens. And you don't want to you can't.
You can't pay attention to people's bullets. You can't. It's so boring. It's just so boring. Well,
Mark: you just scan through them and then you're done.
Jane: Yeah. You've already read them. And, you know, by the time someone has gotten to point number three, And at one point, I was trying, you know, this whole thing about animating each of the bullets as I go and things like that. That's just also garbage.
Mark: I was I was at a presentation not that long ago where the the deck was all bullets. And on one slide, I think they went down to the fourth level bullet. Like, third level bullet is a no no. There are specific cases where I've seen people do a second level and it can be useful if you're showing categories of things, but only if you got very little text on there. And like the third level, oh, no.
This one went on into the unknown, uncharted territory of the fourth bullet, never go to the fourth level.
Jane: But the thing is as PowerPoint helps you by resizing all your tax,
Mark: makes it easy. It it it got a font and a bullet style for that fourth level.
Jane: And No. No. No.
Mark: Well, that's why the first rule of my version of this webinar. I said there's three guiding principles to follow. Oh, I think the maybe it's not the the first one, but one of them was Microsoft is not your friend. Microsoft will do the opposite of what makes a good presentation.
Jane: Because I don't think that Microsoft actually includes designer are not presenters in their design. Mhmm. Like, they don't talk to the people who are really, really good presenters probably because the presenters would say, well, yeah, I don't use PowerPoint.
Mark: Yeah. I just use a blank slide and put a picture on it.
Jane: But for training, I think my thinking, and this is what a lot of people use it for Zoom meetings and training and stuff like that, is that making people take notes is a thing that will keep them engaged. If you don't give them the PowerPoint, then they won't go and do something else.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: You know, when I did this PowerPoint this thing about PowerPoint, I said, I'm not gonna I'm not gonna give you bullets from my agenda. I'm just gonna tell you they are right now. And if you wanna know, you wanna remember, then you'll write it down and then you'll note.
Mark: That process of writing it down. Yeah.
Jane: That process of writing it down apparently changes your brain a little bit so that it actually sticks in your memory. But so many times, I go into a webinar, see that it's death by PowerPoint. And there's a reason that people say death by PowerPoint. I mean, it is bullets. Yep.
And then I tune out. And I often, like, halfway through the presentation, I'm like, yeah, I'm not listening to this. I'm gonna go and get the recording. Yeah. And that's fine.
But if you are doing training, then that's not a great thing. You want to engage your audience. So you want to at least establish some sort of two way communication with your audience if you're doing training. So I was trying to do that. I was trying to make people talk me.
And Yeah. That's really tough on a webinar where everybody expects
Mark: People are conditioned. Since COVID, people have been conditioned to do webinars in particular because there's so many webinars. Now everybody just goes in, listens to them while they're doing something else and sort of has some kind of background listening for some interesting tidbit, not expecting a whole lot, not expecting to be engaged, not expecting to have to participate, and I think that's something that people have to understand when they're putting a session together is what are the expectations of the audience. Now doing a webinar is very different than doing a training session in classroom. Where a lot of people use a PowerPoint.
And there, you absolutely can keep people engaged. Do you expect them to be engaged and participate to painting, but you have to give them something meaningful and like something meaningful to grab onto, which is where the writing notes is good because all of those people that need to be doing something with their hands in order to listen, it gives them something to do with their hands.
Jane: The other thing that I think is really good to keep people engaged as interviews. So one of the things that I was talking about is podcasts. And everybody listens to podcasts for information. Like, that's a that's a pretty pretty common thing now, but podcasts don't have PowerPoint. Yeah.
So how are you learning anything?
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: Like, how is this happening? And the just having a conversation can be a lot more engaging. Even though you're not participating in the conversation, you're listening to people talk to each other as a conversation and you can ask questions if you want to. So I was kind of challenging people to, you know, what about do do this. Or here's a poll.
Do a poll. At least do, you know, have a poll. And then, you know, you can do these things with Zoom. You can do this with Zoom.
Mark: Speaking of which, talk about what you did because you did a weird thing that I didn't even know was possible.
Jane: I think it's a new feature in Zoom where you can actually put yourself as a virtual speaker in front of your slides.
Mark: Was it a plugin or something? Or is it
Jane: just built into it? It's built in a Zoom, and I've not seen it where you go into your advanced sharing where you can do a part of the screen. It's share your size slides as a virtual background and you upload your slides. So you have to it it kinda you remove some of the features of PowerPoint, so there is a little bit of a because there it's just a image behind you.
Mark: It's a trade off there that you're sharing your screen.
Jane: Yeah. Mhmm. You're sharing your screen and you can flip through the slides, but you can't do anything interactive with your slides per se. So I showed that, but then I had to do a poll that I needed to be able to click on the slide. Like, I needed to be able to click and It was it's called poll everywhere, and I think is a really cool little polling thing that I might use in staff meetings and stuff like that as well.
But I couldn't have virtual slides and use that. So I was doing some finicky going back and forth between different slide presentations to make everything happened at once. So, normally, you would choose one or the other. You wouldn't be trying to flip back and forth, so I may have been over standing myself a little bit in that one. But I wanted to show different things that you can do.
And that, you know, having your head in front of the slide a bigger and you can resize your head as well. That's really cool. The idea of doing the polls. Now the Zoom polls are okay. But they're not very I couldn't do very much with it.
So that's why I went to this other polling tool that's free freemium. So, you know, you can do some stuff with it. And then, you know, you can use short answer questions in Zoom now. Mhmm. So that's another thing that you can do on a Zoom meeting.
The other thing that I was talking about in the webinar is do you need a PowerPoint presentation do you need to be talking in front of a room or do you need the slide at all? Like, is it a thing? So I found it's not hard to find crap on the Internet. So I found a presentation that was actually from writer and it was hours of service and hours of service is pretty commonly. Done.
So I found a slide with an ice where it took me maybe seven minutes to find this and that was mostly waiting for things to load. And this slide had three bullets basically saying where hours of service came from and why they're important. And what was interesting is the second point was the most important one. And instead of just making it the first point, I don't know why they why they made it red. Mhmm.
So they had three and it wasn't like a style thing where it's like bullet one is black, bullet two is red, bullet gray is black. It was this particular slide, the second bullet, which I could see, was their major point. They did it second. And I was quite amazed by this. Like, why would you do that?
And plus, the entire it was why hours of service regulations will That is something that you don't need to stand in front of a room and say with your PowerPoint slides.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: You don't need, like, every slide.
Mark: Use a time.
Jane: It's not. And as a matter of fact, the whole regulatory thing. All those regulations and how they work and blah, blah, blah, that that's online. You should not never be standing in front of a room saying, so here's what the hours of service regulations are four and you have three or four types of duty status depending on how you wanna group them. And, you know, you have this many hours that you can do and you have this many hours you to take off.
Now, let that be online. You don't need to talk about that. That is just such a waste of your time. Even if you uploaded PowerPoint, and made people go through that on their own, that's a better use of your time. And then when you want to talk about hours of service, talk about your company's use of hours of service.
Like, talk about what your internal the internal processes are. Like, what kinds of tricky things? What what customers are gonna give you a pain in the neck. And when should you go off duty as opposed to beyond duty at at a particular customer and blah blah blah blah blah. Like, that is a way better a way better use of time.
And drivers are gonna be more engaged because they're gonna be like, okay, this is how I do my job. Up.
Mark: Yeah. This is what I need to know. Yeah. You're not gonna be tuning out because they've heard the history of HOS twenty times already.
Jane: Yeah. And don't care. Yeah. Like, they really don't care. I mean, you have to in a training, like, for generic training, you kinda have to you have to have some time dedicated to that.
Mhmm. But you don't need to do it for orientation Mhmm. Because people should have already taken the course.
Mark: Yeah. They should already be up to speed on that so you can focus on the things that matter.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. Well, I wanted to have a recap of that webinar and we've covered about half of your content actually or half of the time. That you spent on that webinar, so that's good.
So go check out the recording everybody.
Jane: Yes. Go check out the recording and see all the fancy things. There's also a handout, and I was talking about how handouts are, you know. If you have a lot of links and instructions and stuff like that, give people a handout. That's what I used to do all the time.
And I had a whole bunch of I have a whole bunch of links. There's a handout And if you want it and can't find it, then you can ask support support at harriersedge dot com. And they can get it for you, but there's you can do this virtual slide thing. You can do it in Teams, I believe. And actually, PowerPoint has a way that you can put yourself in the camera on top of your slides.
So if you're sharing your slides, you can be in your slides. So they call it remember what they call it, but it's in the document. So there are like a whole bunch of people are doing the same thing.
Mark: Cool. Alright. Excellent.
Jane: Well, your information about what you should put on a slide is also really good. But I think if my main point is minimal. Like, just don't. If you're gonna eat, oh, I also was saying, like, if you're gonna use a picture Please don't. Please don't know that.
I'm not saying that please don't use a picture, but please don't stretch it. The distortion Yeah. The distortion. Considering we all have these amazing tools in our cell phones, a phone can take an amazing much better picture than people could do with decent cameras fifteen years ago. Like, the resolution that you can get on a picture that you can just upload to PowerPoint and make your make your presentation just so much nicer people like looking at pictures.
Do put a picture on a slide if you want to show something. Okay. I'll stop talking about it now.
Mark: Yeah. We should probably move on to some other things, but I'm like, you gotta be thinking, you know, you're saying, well, all of these things that people wanna do in PowerPoint and, you know, your summary is just don't. So it's like the anti Nike. Just don't. Whatever you're thinking about content or crazy amount of text or clip art or whatever garbage, Just don't.
Jane: Yeah. Create your presentation. Put all your bullets there, but don't show them to anybody. Yeah. It's it's notes.
Mhmm. It's in my notes. That's what bullet points are are your notes. So if you want to have them, I would do them in word because it's better. And then you can print them out and you can organize them a little bit better.
But think about your, you know, your first five bullets that you really wanted to put on that slide and think, okay. Well, what can I what can I do as one thing that people can look at that will get the same thing across? And if you're in front of a room and you're teaching hours of service, then get people to fill out a logbook. They don't need to see PowerPoint on how to fill out a logbook. You got logbooks right there.
You got your you got your ELDs right there,
Mark: like Do it.
Jane: Use that. Or if you wanna talk about winter driving, and you have a simulator, then what do you do in PowerPoint for? Or or have access to to something where people can practice or backing. That's another thing where people have all these PowerPoint slides of of how to, you know, how to do backing when, really, you will need a video. And speaking of video, I was going to tell you about the name of the PowerPoint present or the name of the webinars, PowerPoint, inside PowerPoint, or how to hypnotize a chicken.
Mark: Yes. Tell us about the hypnotizing chickens and we'll move on.
Jane: Okay. This goes back to the military thing and general Mattis who had a lot of fame in the Trump administration because they were stuff going on there. But anyway, in twenty ten, he said famously that PowerPoint makes you stupid. And it was all about these bullets. And then he said that he went on later because people asked him about it, and he said, I can't remember what exactly he said.
But he basically it was down along the line of the bullets are, you know, the bullets don't tell you anything. Everybody's asleep at the switch until, you know, you get to the, you know, any questions slide. And the only thing that is good for is for when you want to say nothing to the press. So when the media comes calling and has all of these questions for whatever military thing that they wanna try and get scoop on. Then you just bamboozle them with bullet points and you wait for the, you know, the any questions slide at the end and they never have them.
And he said, and it's it's just like hypnotizing chickens. And then I was like, hey, wait a minute. Can you hypnotize a chicken? Glad to look that up. And you can and I have a video of it where you basically hold a chicken and draw a line from it's like, you know, relatively around from where its beak is and make the chicken watch it and draw a line in the sand or the dirt going out.
And it will hypnotize them. You have to sometimes try it a couple of I
Mark: mean, no. It's hypnotized as, like, fall down when you let go or something. Fall to sleep.
Jane: Well, you should be holding on to it, but it goes very still. Right. And then if you put it down gently on the ground, it just stays there. And apparently, it just sits there. For, like, a few minutes.
I don't know how long it lasts, but this is that's how you do it. And and, I guess, general matters you know. And I can totally see it's Bola Point. Bola Point. Bola Point.
You know the line of Bola Point's in the news people are just like, yeah.
Mark: I'm just thinking about the person who thought, can we hypnotize a chicken? Let's try a bunch of things. How many did they have to try before they got to? Let's draw a line in the sand. Like that's
Jane: That was an accident. I'm positive. That was an accident. There's no you know, I can
Mark: I somebody's trying to get their chicken to walk in a street line and turn it on the line? Dude, here's where I want you to go, and then the chicken is just catatonic after.
Jane: Yeah. I think it seems like something that people have known forever. And it's not a it's only people who are non agricultural people that like us who are like, whoa, I've never heard of that. But that's the other thing and you you tell me that I have a special gift for this. Is that, you know, that's people call that going down a rabbit hole.
Mark: You're definitely down a rabbit hole. You're talking about hypnotizing chickens in a webinar about PowerPoint.
Jane: But it relates.
Mark: I see how you got there. But on the surface, they seem to have no connection.
Jane: But I think hopefully people remember nothing else from that webinar, they remember the hypnotizing chickens because and they will think twice before blah blah blah blah blah blah.
Mark: Yeah. Don't hypnotize chickens.
Jane: Don't hypnotize the chickens. Yes. You know, don't hypnotize your class. Don't hypnotize your if you have to do a presentation, try and think of what you wanna say, and then have a creative way of saying it.
Mark: Yeah. There's gonna be a lot of weird sound bites coming out of this episode. If that's hissing chickens, just don't.
Jane: You know what? If when I go and look at PowerPoint presentations and the people who are who are speakers and who would who do this for a living? It they do the same thing. They say the same stuff. They do not put bullet points on their slides
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: Unless there's a very you know, unless they're doing something specific. But, you know, there's a reason for it. It's not just bullets. But, you know, I looked up a couple of them and it's like, yeah. You know, don't use a little bit, like, don't use the PowerPoint default because Microsoft is not good at that.
Like, Microsoft doesn't know how to use its own tools. It's crazy.
Mark: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Their presentations are awful. That was my examples when I was doing it, I had a an example of Bill Gates doing a presentation, and I felt bad for him because it was awful what was behind him on the screen. And you compare that to the Steve Jobs style where it's one nice color and maybe one image or it might be two words or might just be nothing.
Jane: Yeah. Steve Jobs was I mean, his presentations were all about him. It was, you know, I'm I'm in control of this information, and I'm gonna give to. And that's what a really strong presenter does. This takes control of the information and says, okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna give this to you and you're gonna like it.
And when people are unhappy about being in that position or or awkward and they don't know what really what they're saying and they feel like they need a script. That's when you get that. And Bill Gates hated being front and center, and he should have just gave it gave it to somebody else. And who did like it because nobody's engaged by someone who's feeling uncomfortable in front of a room. Mhmm.
Yeah. Unless you learn unless you learn how to be in front of a room. Which is what you did.
Mark: You, yeah, fumble through some things and find something that works and then stick with that Mhmm. Every single time. Yes. And my better solution is just to have you do it.
Jane: Well, there's that. But you at the beginning, I couldn't. And you and you did. And you know, now you're really good presenter.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: You may not like it, but you do it really well. Mhmm. And you know, it's not your it's not your wheelhouse, but Yeah. You know, like you learned to do like, both of us have learned to do a lot of things that we really didn't wanna ever do, but, you know, had to do. Mhmm.
Anybody who's run a small business or created a company or created any kind of organization knows that year. Jeff Cook and bottle washer. Right?
Mark: Mhmm. Oh, yeah. Yep. So we don't have a lot of time left but I will talk very quickly about one other thing that I never thought I would be doing that I do a fair bit now and that is going to trade shows. So
Jane: Also something that is not really, you know, what you thought? Oh, yay. I wanna go to trade shows, like What
Mark: do you think? Oh, trade shows are great. Oh, business travel is great.
Jane: Until you do fifteen. Yeah.
Mark: Yes. And once again, your rule was proven correct, which is I think it is getting to the point where it is being established as Jane's law that doesn't matter where you're going. It's a whole day to get there. Doesn't matter how long the flight is. It's an entire day.
There's no such thing as fly somewhere in the morning. Do a presentation and fly somewhere back or something like, you know, no, the flight is delayed. You get crap at the airport to deal with. There's gonna be other headaches It's a day on either end. So I went to Orlando for the National Private Truck Council's Annual Convention or Conference or whenever they call a conference and exhibition, their big annual event, first time there.
And of course, even though it's a three hour flight, it was eight or nine hours occupied. Because, of course, it was delayed. And then there's other hassles that come along the way and God forbid you check a bag because that adds another forty five minutes Mhmm. To it. So the event itself was actually quite good.
I got the final attendance list today. Looks like just under thirteen hundred people registered. I don't think there was that many there.
Jane: It didn't sound like there was that many there.
Mark: It's hard to know in the exhibit hall is a huge exhibit hall. So next to ATA's event, it's the biggest exhibit hall, I think, I've seen in the industry. Yeah. So very big that way. Less on the education sessions, but they did have some really good sessions.
And there's a couple of things.
Jane: Some bad PowerPoint.
Mark: Some of them were bad. I just said they had a couple of good there was some there was one of them that at the end of it, somebody asked me what I thought, and I said, that was terrible and they were like, yeah, that was one of the worst ones I've been to in ages. So there was some that weren't great, but there was some that were actually really good. And one thing that they do that I really like is nobody when they're presenting is allowed to mention any vendor names. You talk about You can talk about your telematics provider, but you can't say the name.
Jane: You
Mark: can talk about your dashcam provider or any of the other things which is a really cool way of kind of leveling the playing field. Like, nobody's really getting plugs and nobody's nobody is uneven that way. So I really like that.
Jane: Yeah. I know other associations have tried to do that, and it Basically, they don't enforce it very well. So
Mark: These guys enforce it. They start on time, and on time, they enforce
Jane: That's right.
Mark: Their rules, another kind of two other things that were sort of distinct about them. One, media aren't allowed into any of the breakout sessions, which is kind of weird. Usually, at these events, you have media there and that's part of the The value of the whole thing is that the media's there and you get stories afterwards, but media aren't allowed. So I think it's because all the presenters are the private fleet representatives, and so many of those private fleets are essentially giant public companies you can't have people in the media saying all kinds of stuff that could be a problem Right. For the company later on.
So so that was different, and they also have no vendors doing presentations. It's all the fleet members. I don't know that that's really the best idea. I I can see why they do it. Problem is with these breakout sessions when vendors do it.
Jane: It's a sales.
Mark: The vendors don't send somebody who's a real expert on that subject matter, they send a sales or marketing person who just can't stop themselves from pitching endlessly. And if the industry would figure out how to not always be pitching every single moment that their mouth is moving, it would be way better. So I understand why these guys have gone the direction they have and said no vendor speaking only fleet member because they don't want the pitch. And then you don't mention a a vendor name. It's a very generic.
It is just focused on the content. Whatever best practices they're talking about, whatever ideas they're sharing. And there's some really good ones. There's a good session on change management, which That's not the subject that you're seeing very often.
Jane: No. That is unusual subject.
Mark: Two fairly large fleets talking about how they did communication and did change management around some implementations and had a good horror story about the thing they did wrong, which was great. Those things are always really interesting. The failures are just as entertaining and sometimes more more insightful than the than the victories. So that was good. Another good session on reducing driver in cab risk scores, which is really about how to use the telematics and camera devices to improve driver performance.
And it's all about coaching. It was interesting to see that all of the fleets there are using cameras purely for well, certainly to cover their butts in court cases for exoneration. But outside of that almost exclusively for coaching. Nobody's using it for punitive measures. So and somebody in the audience who was a vendor pointed out that on the for hire side, it is definitely being used for punitive things.
But on the private fleet sides, nobody's really
Jane: used it. A vendor.
Mark: It was a platform science.
Jane: Oh, you know?
Mark: Who were there who were talking about it. On the on the for hire side, they're seeing people doing more punitive stuff coming out of the camera, which I thought was a interesting subject that I'd like to dig into.
Jane: Well, in best fleets, you see a lot of the the fleets using it. Well, everybody's using it for coaching and I've already talked about how Mhmm. There's like a disconnect between what they're doing for online training and what they're doing for coaching, and there's no there's no connection at all. But punitive, I think people don't wanna say they use it for punitive. Although they do talk about if their cell phone usage, then they'll.
Mark: Yeah. And I I wonder I think it might be worth asking the question or digging into it a little bit more, but I know that there are definitely camera and telematics data points that are used in bonus calculation, so you could see that potentially being considered as a punitive where everybody starts with the maximum, and then all of your bad events knock you down on your bonus. You get less of it that's sort of a piece of news.
Jane: And do private fleets do the same thing? Do you use the same bonuses? Or do they, you know, I don't know.
Mark: Yeah. There a lot of them were talking about risk scores and lower score being better and bonusing based on the lower scores. So not that different.
Jane: I think it might just be the way they're talking about it.
Mark: It might be. So I'm curious to explore, but I thought it was interesting.
Jane: And I don't My suspicion is that everybody's kinda using it the same way.
Mark: Possibly. Yeah.
Jane: And that there are some fleets who are doing it. Well, it depends on what they mean by punitive. Because if you if you go off the road or if you have a hard break and and then the camera catches it and then, you know, someone calls you calls the driver and talks about it and sees what the situation is or they have a bunch of heartbreaking things, then are you going to say hey, you, why are you heartbreaking? Stop doing that. You're gonna lose your bonus?
Or
Mark: you No. It was actually, no. That we're talking about it. It was in the context of distraction. And for higher fleets definitely are doing punitive things in terms of distraction, you know, four distracted events or whatever, five distracted events and you get punished or you potentially get discipline or you get terminated and the private fleets really talked primarily about coaching, you know, coaching around that.
It I think is still there's still a very good chance that they're all doing the same thing. And this was just somebody
Jane: Who happened to be more in the coaching?
Mark: Or somebody who was just pumping the tires of the of the private fleets that he's trying to sell to?
Jane: Or the the fleets actually do have punitive. They didn't talk about it yet.
Mark: Yeah. So it was an interesting event to go to. Very different schedule, very different flow of things. You know, you you get used to how conventions work. So many of them are scheduled roughly the same.
Jane: Right. Because you had lunch at eleven every day.
Mark: They're big thing as luncheons every day. There's no
Jane: At eleven at eleven.
Mark: No events in the evening, but, yeah, luncheon that starts at eleven. And, like, eleven forty five, they start the lunch program sort of the the speaker program, which is largely awards and sort of summaries and and that kind of stuff. My favorite part of it was their booth selection process. Most events, it's just kind of a free form and it's open at a certain time. So at TCA, they have like a magic day.
At noon and eastern time, everybody gets the floor plan and the booths are first come first serve. ATA, when you go to the event, actually at MCE, there you can just wander up at any designated time and, like, they've got a couple of two hour blocks where you can just go up and see the floor plan and pick your booth for next year at that point. But NPTC does it very differently. They have a draft and your draft pick. Your order of draft pick is based on basically how much money you've spent with them and how long you've been member.
So the longer you're there and the more money you spend the the higher you go up in the rankings, which means you get to pick sooner. So it was it was quite fun. We didn't have a great ranking because we haven't been a member for very long.
Jane: It's like six months.
Mark: No. We've been a member for about a year and a half, and this is only the second event that we had been to. So I thought it was I thought it was a lot of fun just watching everybody. Sort of shout out their booth numbers if they want when their name is called. There's somebody at the front who calls out your name and you shout out the booth number.
And if you're not sure if it's available, you can say, is this one still available? And then they'll, you know, have a bit of back and forth. But there's also a bunch of can we take this booth and split it? Or can we put a bunch of these together and turn it into this? And they they will look at it and see if they can do it?
And, yeah, and the Freeman guy was there with his master. Floor planned as well, and he would clarify what the new booth number would be when you're chopping them up and refining them. So you actually get a very basic default floor plan as a starting point, but it changes significantly throughout that draft. And so by the end of it, it was looking quite different. So it was kinda cool to watch how that floorplan evolves.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: And also see where everybody's gonna be. The advantage, I suppose, of being lower on their the rankings as you get to see everybody else.
Jane: Get the good spots. Yeah.
Mark: Well, you can you can see ahead of time where everybody's good to be. So I thought that was a lot of fun. It was a a very good hour. So That was this week. I've got a week off, and then I'm off to Boston for the National Tank Truck Council
Jane: Oooh
Mark: yes. To very similar sounding associations, NPTC and NTTC.
Jane: Yes. I'm having problems.
Mark: Oh, marketing is so confused with which one is which. So finally, I just said private fleets and tankers in Orlando and Boston. So I'm looking forward to that. That's also a new convention for us.
New Association that we joined about a year ago, so going to my first event.
Jane: You and Selase?
Mark: Yeah. Yeah. We're spending the May long weekend in Boston, which not so terrible.
Jane: Not terrible.
Mark: No. At a in a set to Encore?
Jane: He haven't been in Boston for
Mark: Haven't been to Boston for years. So really cool.
Jane: In Boston is a great place.
Mark: I do love the Wyndham Encore. Those are great hotels, a bit burned out on Vegas, but this would be a nice way to go to a decent hotel that's not in Vegas. So
Jane: Cool.
Mark: I think we can wrap it up there. After our lengthy discussion of PowerPoint in short summary of Private Fleet's conference, That's a good time day, and thanks everyone for listening.
Jane: Have a good day.