Diageo's Marketing Chief Bans PowerPoint

In an effort to get to know more about the business and to discourage his people from doing lazy presentations, new Diageo North American chief marketing and innovation officer James Thompson instituted a policy of no PowerPoint.

Banning slides is the kind of move that sounds like a gimmick right up until you consider what it forces. Without a deck to hide behind, people have to understand their own part of the business well enough to simply talk about it, and a new leader listening to those conversations learns far more than any set of bullet points would have taught him.

The early results of that decision, along with several other smart moves he made, make this a useful case to study for anyone taking on a new leadership role and looking for tactics that have actually been proven to work.