Here's one he missed: within two weeks of a "problem" being identified (particularly if in the major media) you could bet every man woman and child in service will have viewed a PowerPoint presentation on the topic, as group or individually via email (talk about bandwidth abuse...). Problem solved!

But I come neither to praise or condemn the brief, rather to acknowledge its necessary evil...

Hammes is on target, but also cursing a hammer for people using it as a screwdriver. That's his choice of approach, a cautious one that avoids (beyond implying) placing blame where due. Much of what he describes (too many slides, too much data crammed onto one slide, etc.) is a mark of a bad briefer. From my experience, you could get away with that once. (The initial fault would lie with your boss, if he were between the briefer and the guy at the head of the table in the chain of command - and normally that's the case. But I digress...) And if 100% of the information shared is included in the briefing slides (vice "read aheads" or other more comprehensive documents) then again we have a problem for which PowerPoint is not to blame. Certainly if the problem persists (other than in the case of the occasional "rookie" briefer sent to learn a lesson 'the hard way') beyond a given commander's first few weeks in office (also when template, fonts, and background color are established) we must consider the staff itself at fault.

My career began in the days of paper flip charts and overhead projectors - we don't want to go back. The woes of the PowerPoint ranger are real, but they precede the advent of the tool that (used properly - and it often is) reduces the burden.

If you really want to talk about a time-saving technological advancement that has quadrupled our workload and made ten things more difficult for every one simplified, let's discuss email. It's much easier now to make 10,000 people jump through hoops; the hoops themselves are unchanged.

Come to think of it, I served through the advent of the computer era, and can assure you while we're better off with them we have yet to figure out a way to use them to reduce workload. The opposite has occurred, certainly to the dismay of we then-young and naive fools who saw a brighter future ('89: / '99: / '09:) Perhaps there are other great technological advancements for which this is equally (or as cruelly) true. But the technology is not to blame.