NEW POWERPOINT MERIT PATCH
http://www.nbc-links.com/graphics/pwrptpatch.gif
“Wear your new patch with pride… you’ve earned it!!!!
MEMORANDUM FOR All US Army military personnel:
(Ensure widest possible dissemination.)
The US Army uniform board has just released a new patch for those trapped in staff positions and who have served above and beyond the call of duty in making time consuming POWERPOINT presentations day after day, week after week, month after month without recognition.
The new “PPT1000″ patch, shown above, is authorized to those who have put in at least 1,000 hours on PPT presentations. Subsequent awards for 2,500 hrs, 5,000 hrs, and 10,000 hrs are to follow. Posthumous awards for those putting in over 25,000 hrs will be presented to the next of kin, upon request.
The patch may be sewn on the right shoulder of the battle dress uniform or affixed to the flight suit/ACU with Velcro. A special pin version will be developed for the Army Class A uniform. Subdued versions are not authorized at this time.
Similar patches have been authorized in the past for serving in combat, but since our real mission today is to beat the other services out of $$$ by creating spectacular PPT slides, the Board deemed this was absolutely appropriate at this time.
Please submit your request to your commander or servicing MILPO for issue.
A similar patch and pin is under development for qualified Excel operators. Microsoft Word operators will not be recognized because the Army chooses to avoid the preparation of written products, particularly with signatures.”
POWERPOINT CREED
http://www.nbc-links.com/powerpoint.html
“This is dedicated to John “Slidemeister” Wilwerding. Remember the Marines’ rifleman creed (This is my rifle…)? This was created by a Marine at WESTPAC. (I don’t know who this guy is but it was on the e-mail I received….)
My PowerPoint
This is my PowerPoint. There are many like it but mine is 7.0.
My PowerPoint is my best friend. It is my life.
I must master it as I master my life.
My PowerPoint without me is useless.
Without my PowerPoint, I am useless.
I must format my slides true. I must brief them better than the other J-cells who are trying to out brief me. I must brief the impact on the CINC before he asks me. I will!
My PowerPoint and myself know that what counts in this war is not the number of slides, quantity of animations, the colors of the highlights, or the format of the bullets. We know that it is the new information that counts. We will brief only new information!
My PowerPoint is human, even as I, because it is my life. Thus I will learn it as a brother.
I will learn its weaknesses, its strengths, its fonts, its accessories, its formats, and its colors.
I will keep my PowerPoint slides current and ready to brief. We will become part of each other. We will!
Before God I swear this creed. My PowerPoint and myself are defenders of my country. We are the masters of our subject. We are the saviors of my career.
So be it, until victory is America’s and there is no enemy, but peace (and the next exercise)!
PowerPoint Ranger!”
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RESOURCES
http://www.vproservice.com/ppt/
“The eArmy Resource Center is your one-stop site for all your pre-made training needs. Through the generous nature of our visitors, we have gathered over one hundred of the top requested and used presentations and classes all available for download. This is an entirely FREE site with no strings attached. We only ask that if you develop your own classes that you consider donating them to the Resource Center.”
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http://www.armystudyguide.com/content/powerpoint/index.shtml
“Choose from a category below to access available powerpoint presentations to use for training and briefings. If you have a powerpoint presentation that you would like to add, please contact us.
The presentations we provide were submitted by many Soldiers over the past few years. The presentations cover a wide range of subjects and remain unaltered from their original form. You may need to remove unit specific material and should check the accuracy of the information before actively using any presentation.”
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BEST PRACTICES [2004]
http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/published/bn.htm
BRIAN LAMB, C-SPAN HOST: What`s a Power Point briefing?
THOMAS BARNETT, AUTHOR, “THE PENTAGON`S NEW MAP”: Well, it`s a hard thing to explain but, I mean, most people understand what a Power Point briefing is because it`s infiltrated large aspects academia and education and they`re fairly common in the business world. But inside the defense community, the Power Point briefing is the dominant mode of idea transmission, much more than a policy memorandum, much more than an article or a book you can write.
LAMB: What`s it look like?
BARNETT: It`s a series of slides that are projected behind you. And you stand up and deliver a narration to these slides. Now, the classic way you see it in movies and whatnot, they show you overhead satellite pictures. It`s fairly static pictures. And they describe, you know, Here we`re looking at — Here we`re looking at — Here we`re looking at. The kind of stuff I do, because it`s very conceptual, and what I`m trying to do is explain a way of thinking about the future of the world — my presentations tend to be highly animated.
LAMB: You actually say in the book you`re pretty good at this.
BARNETT: Well, I will tell you, people have been telling me throughout my career that I`m one of the best Power Point briefers. And it`s a — I will say that with some humility, in the sense that it`s a very odd skill and it doesn`t — people don`t understand how powerful it can be inside the Pentagon because it doesn`t have that same sort of power outside the Pentagon. The closest thing you see to that type of activity is probably your weatherman standing in front of a screen and all sorts of animations and maps and stuff like that changing behind him as he describes something.
LAMB: What is a rule set?
BARNETT: Well, as I explain at the beginning of the book, one way to think about a rule set is it`s the way the game is played. It`s the rules of the game, OK? So American football has a rule set. American baseball has a rule set. Hockey has a rule set. The U.S. economy has a rule set. The way the U.S. engages militarily with the outside world has a rule set.
LAMB: And you say it`s changed in 1776 and in — jumping ahead to 1861, or all the years, it seems like, when war happened.
BARNETT: Yes. Because usually, what war represents is that the rule sets have gotten so dangerously out of whack that there is such either anger or dissatisfaction in the system that somebody tries to change the system through war, OK? And the argument I make about the 1990s is that globalization had spread so dramatically to such a larger portion of humanity, that what happened was, was that the connectivity raced ahead of the security rule sets, and the economic rule sets raced ahead of the political rule sets.
LAMB: By the way, back to your Power Point briefings. How many times have you given one?
BARNETT: I`ve given probably a thousand or more.
LAMB: How many people usually in the audience?
BARNETT: Anywhere from — I do — sometimes — I`ve done ones for senior leaders, where it`s the one guy in the room, and I`ve done them for as many as 500 or 600, where there`s another 2,000 or 3,000 that might be watching on video communications, you know, broadcast around the world.
LAMB: And how many other people are there in this town like you that give Power Point briefings?
BARNETT: Well, there are a lot of people who get Power Point briefings. What I get told a lot after Power Point briefings is that they`ve never seen anything quite like mine. I mean, mine stuff tends to be — because it is high concept and because it doesn`t race through history and because it presents a lot of big ideas, to get that across to people, you have to make it entertaining and you have to make it dynamic. So my presentations tend to be highly theatrical. It`s almost like watching a show. In fact, people have said that I could probably take it and put it on Broadway and charge money for it in that kind of manner. I spent most of my career across the `90s making these arguments about how national security had to come closer and understand this process of globalization. And what I heard from the Pentagon was, It`s a complicating factor. You know, We don`t do global economics, we do war. So the only way I could get into people`s offices was to create this very compelling, entertaining Power Point presentation. And I knew that most of the `90s, I was getting in because I was awfully entertaining, because people loved the Power Point. They thought it was fascinating. They didn`t know what any of it meant, in terms of how it connected to national security.
They ask around. They`re told, Hey, you got to see this guy. He`s got this brief. It`s weird as hell. He gives it all the time. He`s kind of a cult figure inside the Pentagon. People really like him. They`re not sure exactly what to do with him, but he gets to brief everywhere. So go see this. They send a guy up to — Andrew Chayefsky (ph), one of their reporters, up to the War College. He sits through two hours of the brief. I do it just for him. And he says, This is unbelievable. I`ve never seen anything like this. I didn`t realize people even thought this way inside the Pentagon. I mean, I can`t believe they pay you to do this.
LAMB: General Eisenhower warned us about the military-industrial complex.
BARNETT: And driving policy. Right.
LAMB: We have $450 and above billion defense budget.
BARNETT: Right.
LAMB: Is it enough?
BARNETT: I think it`s more than enough. I mean, if all you want to do is defend this country, I can defend the country for about $100 billion. If we`re spending $400 billion, we`re doing something besides defending this country. And my argument is, what we`re doing is we`re exporting security around the planet and making the world a more better and stable place.
LAMB: Good idea?
BARNETT: I think it`s a very good idea, because I think we`re the only country that can actually pull it off. And that when we do that, we create peace and prosperity that benefits us in a tremendous way.
LAMB: Shouldn`t some of the others — I didn`t mean to interrupt — but shouldn`t some of the others pay for this?
BARNETT: That`s the question I was going to make — that was the point I was going to make.
They do already. OK? We float $130, $140 billion in treasury bonds, first quarter of 2003. Four-fifths of that money was bought by foreigners. Guess who the two biggest buyers were? Japan and China. OK? That`s a transaction. When I accuse this administration of waging war within the context of war and not explaining war within the context of everything else, that`s what gets you a charge of unilateralism. Did we wage war unilaterally in Iraq? Well, if you don`t count who paid for that war, then I guess we did. But if you count who pays for it, then you understand that that`s a transaction. And if you don`t make China and Japan happy with that transaction, they`re going to stop buying that service, called U.S. military and military interventions.