Why Do White-Collar People Adore The Slide Deck So Much?

It doesn’t seem like the best way to convey value in 2023. Or in 2002, really.

10 summers ago, I worked for McKesson out of The Woodlands, in Houston. I was 32 that summer and I didn’t want to live in The Woodlands, which is planned suburbia extraordinaire, so I lived in Houston — near Greenway Plaza — and drove 45 minutes to work every day. When I got there, I mostly sat in an office with two other people and started a Tumblr blog, because there was no real work to be done for my summer engagement. I made the equivalent of $87,000/year for three months to basically sit on my ass and write emails and look at Facebook and whatnot. It was pretty tedious, and also in some ways great. I had just gotten married that previous March and I was apart from my wife for three months, which was weird/hard. But I made a bunch of money, that I usually spent on pizza and beer and sushi rolls, to do nothing all day.

One of the ladies in my office was named Karen. Ha. No. She was actually a 29 year-old Asian woman, so not the stereotype that would emerge during COVID. Near the end of the summer, we had to do presentations to an executive team about what we did that summer. My presentation was six slides. The absolute default for McKesson was that it had to be a slide deck. I remember…