Packing up again, this time it’s a Caribbean cruise with the family. All I can say is: I’m so ready.

But before I go, a quick request. A project came up to build a quick and dirty knowledge base for expats and every time the model is seen someone wants to bolt on another function. We’ve decided to do the expat piece as a proof of concept and build a reference architecture model for a process tool in parallel.

There are a lot of choices for process modeling tools around here, ranging from homegrown to dedicated teams that claim to be centers of excellence. Anyone with practical experience in HR process modeling, I’d love to hear from you. I’ll be back on shore on the 27th.

Mostly off topic…my life has been inundated with PowerPoint. Starting with a summary presentation of the strategy meetings I detailed last month, one by one they increased and soon I was juggling decks from all sides, including from my school-age children.

I’m reasonably adept at PowerPoint, and I believe that in the right hands it can do some very cool things. Musician David Byrne has done some interesting work using it as an artistic medium. However, in the case of most business applications, I tend to agree with Edward Tufte’s sardonic assessment of the cognitive limitations that template-driven PowerPoint imposes. One of the better examples, by Peter Norvig, is here.

The next presentation I had to deliver was at a benchmarking group. Mulling over my topic and this love/hate relationship I have with PowerPoint, I decided to try a presentation modelled after the “Lessig Method”, named for Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, whose presentation style of using slides with short phrases or even single words has gained some notice. More about that here.

Generally I don’t work from detailed speaking notes. I usually present on subjects that I’m close to and am relaxed speaking freely about. My slides are typically milestones of what I’ll cover verbally. In this case I created my deck by essentially figuring out how my rap would go by rehearsing it a few times and pulling out lots of key words and phrases per Lessig’s approach. I ended up with 50 slides for what would probably have been 10 or 12 if I’d used the typical title-bullet-transition approach.

Sad to say, it didn’t resolve my PowerPoint angst. My presentation was very well received, right up there with highly entertainment-oriented ones where I’ve pulled out all the multimedia effects. I was asked by a reviewer at my office if he could have a copy so he could steal it for his own presentations. Yet at the same time I can’t escape feeling that perhaps it was well received only because of it’s novelty, a break from the bullets. And the impression that I get from the presentation style, and others I’ve seen like it, is that of ‘MTV for meetings’ – lots of quick cuts, flashing screens and only tiny amounts to digest in one bite. Well, if that’s my worst burden, I’ll deal with it.

My daughter in middle school has been using PowerPoint for a few years, they teach it in school these days. For my son’s 10th birthday she made him a presentation instead of a card – with photos, clip art, animation, sound and timed transitions. And now my son is getting the same instructions she had a few years back and together we created a deck for his research project. And he demanded backgrounds, type effects and cool transitions too.

I used to be in graphic design. Maybe I still am.

I’ve made it back to New York. Tokyo is a fascinating city, I enjoyed it very much. We stayed until Sunday morning, which gave us some time to sight see on Saturday and get a bit of the flavor of the city. On Friday we ran two intranet usability sessions which were very much on a par with all the others to date. I must say that I’ve experienced far less regional variation in the response to our prototype and types of issues raised than I anticipated. The anecdotal evidence points to people (at least those within my company) being more similar than different. While I treasure differences around the world it’s assuring to see that in some way the web has enabled us to provide people tools that can be used with a degree of consistency globally.

I was able to chat up one of our senior HR people and some of his team, although it was not a full a session as I’d hoped. But just being there and meeting them ensures that future telephone exchanges will be more productive. In mid December we’ll cover some sites in Latin America which will wrap up our ‘four corners’ tour. For my part I see that our HR self-service deployment has greater complexity than I’d realized. At one level we have enough flexibility in our systems to allow for local variation but there will be many challenges as we go along regardless. I wonder if it’s ever possible for an organization our size to move to truly global standards? I believe it would have to be more of a command-and-control environment, and I’m not aware of many multinationals that successfully operate in that manner. In any case there’s much to do and now I have a few more personal connections with which to do business.