I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I read recently in the New York Times that PowerPoint was causing huge productivity and communication issues for the U.S. military.

“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” declared Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps.

However, senior military officers did see a value for the slides when the intended goal is to obscure information. “The news media sessions often last 25 minutes, with 5 minutes left at the end for questions from anyone still awake,” is how the article described some press briefings. 

Of course we all know these same issues hold true in the corporate world as well.

How many times have you sat through a 30-minute presentation in which the slides contained all text and bullets that allowed the speaker to go on auto-pilot?

Or a show and tell from techies who want their work deliberately shrouded in mystery in order to maintain their hero status?

As communications pros, we all know all too well the faults of PowerPoint – or perhaps more accurately how most executives are using it. But, how do we overcome this when it is so ingrained in most corporate cultures?

One answer was served up over drinks with a few folks after work one night. Actually, it was underneath the drinks.

One colleague pointed me in the direction of a really fun article about great ideas (and some folk lore) that originated through drawings or notes on cocktail napkins, among other things.

And while we laughed at first, the more we thought about it, the more the “cocktail napkin” concept makes sense for PowerPoint.

We thought of two basic rules:

1. For images, graphics, etc., they should be simple enough that you could have drawn them on a cocktail napkin yourself (or at least sketched them out).
2. For text, never put more on a slide than you could write legibly on a cocktail napkin.

Here’s an example of the idea at work.

Remember Tim Russert’s “Florida! Florida! Florida!” whiteboard from the 2000 Presidential Election? It’s now housed at the Smithsonian Institution.

So maybe there’s something to the cocktail napkin strategy.

Or are we just spending too many nights enjoying Happy Hour a little too much?