Traveling Presentations-Old School

Presentation is the life blood of an organization.   The Military runs on Powerpoint, along with the Fortune 500.  Interestingly, the only politician who ran using a presentation tool was Ross Perot.  The charts he used quickly became fodder for comedians.  Voters seem the only body of people able to be swayed by speech alone.  Of course, the results they get are, well, wanting a bit more substance, no?  For other endeavors, presentations are essential language, in any language.

Working on a presentation. That seemed to characterize most of the last 20 years of my former worklife. In fact, presenting ideas was the kernel of what I did. Creating, gathering, understanding, analyzing facts, concepts, ideas, occupied the first 40 hours of the workweek, and turning them into presentations that got others going was the remaining 20 hours.  More or less.  We talked in presentations.  Even in small companies, presentations galvanized action.

For years, business presentations were done on slides,  literally and figuratively.  A big audience, say 30 or more, merited 35mm slides.  Any smaller group got overhead slides.  The slides were made sometimes on typewriters, with some handwriting to emphasize or add drawings, or any media that could be run through a copy machine, where the overhead slides were produced.

Later, we had specialized software, and began developing presentations from a combination of printed material, drawings, and spreadsheets, and pages from Harvard Graphics, or for those less adept, Lotus Freelance.  The progress in software was as fast as in the spreadsheet area, as Microsoft drove to dominate this niche, while IBM seemed intent on killing Freelance along with Lotus 123.  Within a couple of years Powerpoint was the standard.

All of this was printed, and went to the copy machine to be copied onto acetates.  Each presenter had a favorite way of transporting and organizing the acetates for use on the overhead.  Some methods were to be carried loose in a file folder, or to be inserted in a sleeve and then into a ring binder.  These binders got very heavy!  When on the road, no presenter was willing to trust that their presentation could be produced in field offices to their standard and time needs, so the presentations needed on a trip, of any length, were carried in a case that grew to resemble a pilot's map case.  And never left your side!  Oh, those 35mm slides?  They were coveted for travel- if you could justify the cost of over a dollar apiece.