I normally don't get much from presentation slides; they aren't even intended to be consumed independent of the speaker's remarks and they often amount to the bullet points of someone's outline. But in this case, the article is an extremely poor summary of this comparatively rich and substantial presentation. Thanks for sharing this link. It is much more comprehensible than the article itself.
> they aren't even intended to be consumed independent of the speaker's remarks
Historically, yes, as an aspirational goal. Even if, in practice, a lot of people didn't want to or didn't get around to creating a doc to go along with the presentation.
That said, I've seen a real trend over the past decade of a lot of people wanting to consume content/ideas/etc. from a slide format rather than reading paragraphs of text. So it's pretty normal--at least for routine information sharing--to create a text-heavy presentation and just hit the high points when presenting from it. Not sure this is even a bad thing for a lot of purposes--especially to the degree people can put together cogent sets of bullet points but aren't that great at pages of prose.
> I've seen a real trend over the past decade of a lot of people wanting to consume content/ideas/etc. from a slide format rather than reading paragraphs of text.
I prefer long form content... but spending time in the comments section of HN may show a revealed preference.
I concur with your observation. Piling on with a couple examples:
- Axios is a news service that only delivers information in bullet points. Unlike their long-form competitors, they are expanding into local news. [0]
- Long form content, such as books, are less popular. The average number of books read each year has fallen to a 30 year low. [1]
That sounds like the worst of both worlds? You end up with a slide deck that doesn't contain the information added by the presenter, but which are too info-heavy to work well during the talk.
I'm talking more about program updates, "know before you go" information about events, etc. rather than conference keynotes. (Of course, there are many things in between.) For this sort of thing you really do want a canonical source of information--including for those who didn't attend a call that hit the highlights. And these days that tends to be a fairly dense slide deck because that's what a lot of people prefer and you meet people where they are.
My conference presentations don't generally have a lot of words. But that's not all I do and it does mean my conference presentation slide decks aren't super-informative on their own.
The perennial issue for competent organizations as they scale is the quality of the middle management. Alex didn't write anything about hierarchies of molds (because it most certainly isn't moldy all the way to the top and never was). His pithy slides also don't discuss hiring practices at Google for managers. [We all know how they grill us poor doers.] He also failed to mention our dear friend Peter of the principle fame.
p(goal) = f(p(planners), p(managers), p(doers)) is a more realistic equation. What that f() looks like depends less on organizational structure than on the quality of the workers that mediate planning and building.
As the corporate organism itself grows larger and faces newer challenges, it may need to evolve and develop new, more specialized organs that a slime mold does not inherently possess or function well at to scale.
Many organisms in the natural world could not scale exactly as-is to 10x or 100x their normal size with their existing structures.
The idea of a slime mold representing the whole company may have once been true a decade or more ago when Google was much smaller and less extended, but the mental model is much like newer people at Google yearning for the "old Google" that never worked there during its earlier days. It's a nice fantasy.
The presentation is 170 slides, and involves statistical arguments modeling work.
- Small projects can tolerate collaborating specialist pools (CSPs).
- CSPs attempting large complicated projects are quickly disastrously unlikely to even be completed due to the network effects of uncertainty and disagreement on commitment efforts, even with a hierarchy stuffed-in (assuming each specialist is necessary)
This presentation is so clear I'm going to show it to my high-schooler so that she can (1) understand why Dad works on Saturday (I confess to some "heroics"), and (2) concepts she can keep in mind on upcoming projects at school, and eventually at a job.
Apart from the intra-company dynamics, there is also the fact that Google do not face the same kind of consumer driven market pressure as, say, Walmart.
I do recommend the excellent "Allocation under Dictatorship: Research in Stalin’s Archives"[1] where the greatest incentive individuals face in an organization have involve doing relatively better compared to other individuals in the organization without significant outside indicators of the right direction.
In that sense, Google is like a government behemoth. Most involved in its direction and functioning have incentives that are decoupled from whether the people who are touched by their "products" and "services" are happy with them.
[1] https://komoroske.com/slime-mold/