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How to prep for your next presentation now that "death by PowerPoint" has been replaced by something quieter, cheaper, and far more dangerous to your reputation.

Sherman Mohr | INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy Certified Practitioner and Over 50 Pro

"When a polished deck costs nothing to produce, polish signals nothing." Sherman Mohr

How about this number from corporate America? Microsoft's 2025 Work Trend Index, built on trillions of anonymized Microsoft 365 signals, found that PowerPoint edits spike 122% in the final ten minutes before meetings. HR Executive

This happened to me recently. I had prepared and rehearsed a brief presentation for 6 days and still was working on necessary modifications 30 minutes prior. 

Most of us know the feeling. The meeting is at two. At 1:51 you are moving a logo, recoloring a chart, and adding a twelfth bullet to a slide nobody will read. The deck gets prettier. The argument does not get better. You walk in with a document that proves you were busy, not that you are worth hiring.

For professionals over fifty, that gap is no longer a cosmetic problem. In a career transition, every presentation is a valuation event: the consulting pitch, the board interview, the fractional proposal, the five-minute "tell us about yourself" that is really a ten-year bet on you. And the rules of that event have changed underneath us.

Death by PowerPoint was a crime of excess,  too many slides, too many words, and too much time. The new crime is emptiness: polished, generated, frictionless decks that look like work and carry no judgment. The first one bored people. The second one costs you their trust.

Three shifts have quietly redefined what a presentation is.

The audience is fragmented. The same Microsoft research found knowledge workers are interrupted roughly every two minutes, about 275 times a day. Also, that 57% of meetings are ad hoc calls with no calendar invite, and that nearly a third of meetings now span multiple time zones. Your deck will be skimmed on a phone between calls, forwarded to someone who never heard you speak, and judged in a room you're not in. It has to make your case without you.

The smartest rooms have already moved on. In June 2004, Jeff Bezos banned PowerPoint from Amazon's senior leadership meetings in favor of narratively structured memos, read in silence at the start of the meeting. His reasoning was blunt: slide-style presentations "give permission to gloss over ideas."  He also preferred the memo because oral presentations reward slickness and rhetorical skill as much as substance. Twenty years later, much of the market is arriving at the same place by accident: the deck is read more than it is presented.

Production is now free. Gamma, the AI presentation platform, reported more than 70 million users and over 400 million presentations, documents, and sites created by late 2025. Tenet When a polished deck costs nothing to produce, polish signals nothing. For thirty years, a tight, good-looking deck was proof that someone had done the work. That signal has been counterfeited at industrial scale.

Put those together and the job of a presentation changes. It is not a show. It is a decision document with a speaker attached and the scarce input is no longer design or effort. It's judgment. We keep going back to it don’t we?

You have an unfair advantage here, and an unfair liability.

The advantage: you have sat through more bad presentations than anyone under forty has had hot dinners. You know in the first ninety seconds whether a speaker knows what they want. That pattern recognition is the whole game, and you already own it.

The liability: most of us learned to present when the deck was the proof of effort. Forty slides meant you'd done the homework. A thick appendix meant you were thorough. That instinct now works against you, because volume reads as an inability to decide what matters. This is the exact quality a buyer of senior talent is paying for.

There's a second habit worth naming. Long careers train us in the update posture: here's what my team did, here's the status, here are the next steps. That's a report on responsibilities. In a transition or consulting gig, nobody is buying responsibilities. As we argued in "Your Career Is a Company," responsibilities describe where you stood; outcomes describe what changed because you were standing there. The room in front of you is asking one question, whether it says so or not: What changes for me if I say yes to you?

Every slide either answers that question or taxes the listener's patience. There is no neutral slide.

Five moves, in order. The order matters: most people start at step four, opening a template and choosing fonts, which is why most decks are decorated before they are decided.

V — VALUE SENTENCE → A — ARGUMENT ON PAPER → L — LEAN → U — UNCLUTTERED → E — EVIDENCE YOU'LL SIGN

Before you touch software, write one sentence: If you agree with me, here is what changes for you. Not "Today I'll cover…" — that's an agenda, and agendas are where attention goes to die.

This is a mindset move as much as a structural one. A presenter thinking How am I coming across? is performing, and performance breeds nerves. A presenter thinking What does this room need to decide? is delivering value, and the spotlight moves off you and onto their problem. Cognitive neuroscientist Stephen Kosslyn, who has spent years applying the psychology of perception and memory to slide design, advises stating your conclusion at the beginning, not saving it for the end. Kosslyn, Clear and to the Point

The filter: Could someone in the room repeat your value sentence to their boss tomorrow, accurately, without notes? If not, you don't have one yet.

Write a one-page memo in full sentences before you open a slide tool. Bezos's insight was that narrative structure forces you to rank ideas and show how they connect the two things bullet points let you skip. Management Today

The memo is where you discover you have four ideas instead of eleven, that your strongest proof is buried on slide nine, and that one of your points contradicts another. Better to learn that at your desk than in the Q&A.

The rule: If you can't write it on a page, you can't present it in twenty minutes. Slides visualize an argument. They are not a substitute for having one.

Brevity isn't a style preference. It's one of the most replicated findings in learning science. Richard Mayer's coherence principle holds that people learn more deeply when extraneous material is excluded rather than included; in the Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning, it was supported in 23 of 23 experimental tests, with a median effect size of 0.86 — large, by any research standard. Cambridge University Press

Translate that into business terms: every slide you add to look thorough makes your best slide harder to remember. Extra material doesn't sit politely in the background. It competes for the same limited working memory as your point.

Here's the finding that should change how you think about design. Psychologists Rolf Reber and Norbert Schwarz showed that people are more likely to accept a statement as true when it is easy to read than when it is hard to read. Sharing the same claim, changed only in legibility. American Academy of Arts & Sciences Researchers call this processing fluency. Easy-to-process information feels familiar, and familiar feels true.

The implication is uncomfortable: clutter doesn't just look bad. It makes your true numbers less believable.

And don't assume you'll spot the problem yourself. Kosslyn and colleagues found that eight basic psychological principles are routinely violated in slideshows, that academic decks are no better than business ones, and that audiences notice and are annoyed by those violations. Yet even observers often couldn't identify what was wrong with a slide, or explain why. Frontiers in Psychology Bad design is felt before it's diagnosed.

AI is genuinely useful for presentations. It can compress your memo, generate the strongest counterargument, play the skeptical CFO in a rehearsal, and handle formatting drudgery. It is dangerous when it writes your value sentence, invents your proof, or fills gaps you didn't notice were there.

Researchers at BetterUp Labs and the Stanford Social Media Lab have a name for the failure mode: workslop, defined as AI-generated work content that "masquerades as good work." In their survey of 1,150 full-time U.S. employees, 40% had received workslop in the past month. Each instance took recipients nearly two hours to untangle, and about half viewed the colleagues who sent it as less creative, capable, and reliable. Allwork.Space, CO/AI

The stakes aren't hypothetical. Deloitte Australia faced public backlash after a government report it produced contained apparent AI-generated errors, including a misquoted judge and references that didn't exist. eWeek

For the over-fifty professional, the risk is asymmetric. One fabricated statistic in a pitch doesn't just cost you the point. It confirms two stereotypes at once: that you're behind on the tools, and that you didn't check your work. A thirty-year reputation for rigor can be reduced in a single slide.

The signature test, borrowed from our Signature Stack: before anything AI-assisted goes in front of a buyer, ask three questions. Can I defend every number without the chat window open? Does it contain at least one thing only I could know? Would I sign it in ink?

Join us in community? Join the Second Act Advantage Community by visiting us each Monday. No agenda, some structure, some accountability. We’ll start October 5th at 12:30 Eastern with a simple three question guideline.

1) What do you have planned this week?

2) What are your hurdles?

3) What did you accomplish over the last week?  

Here is the link: Second Act Community Call
Monday, November 2nd · 12:30 – 1:00pm
Time zone: America/New York
Google Meet joining info
Video call link: https://meet.google.com/xpk-xbxe-pyy 

If you need assistance or want to discuss anything above, schedule a call.

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Here are examples of slide uses that exhibit what the V.A.L.U.E. system is all about. Read and learn!

Once Again, opportunities arise with technological changes.

Every time there is an extreme advance in technology, fear abounds. With the near automation of building presentations, I’m seeing more of them. Many make no sense and are AI Slop.

Here is the opportunity. When I presented Over50Pros at a 1MillionCups gathering recently, my presentation coaches brought the distinction and opportunity home. They led me to a very simple presentation. No fluff. Just impact. It was a great reminder that beauty and slick presentations are not the requirement. Just knowledge and simplicity.

If you go into each talk or meeting with 10 words of knowledge for every word you speak, you’ll be great. If you don’t have the knowledge. Don’t pretend to know something you don’t.

And as always, if you need help with anything related to topics in the newsletter or transition over 50 years old, schedule a call.

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Coming Next Week: The importance of taking a break.