Yesterday in San Diego, Bob Befus, one of the founders of  SlideSource.com, presented at Rick Altman’s annual Presentation Summit. His talk examined the collaborative aspects of the presentation creation process and explored how the development of strategic knowledge is often a byproduct of this process. Bob outlined how companies come to understand what they think while working out what they are going to say and how they are going to say it.

Through the lens of his experience with FDA Advisory Committee meetings, Bob illustrated how this development of strategic knowledge takes place during the highly iterative process of creating a 90 minute presentation that summarizes thousands of hours of research, along with the thousands of slides prepared for use during an exhaustive Q&A period, all with millions, or even billions, of dollars at stake.

No matter the industry or the product, PowerPoint is obviously the primary tool used to create these significant, high-stakes, strategy-making presentations. As a collaborative environment, PowerPoint has benefits as well as pitfalls which Bob outlined. He closed his talk by sharing how the search for ways to overcome the obstacles PowerPoint creates in the collaborative process led to the development of SlideSource.com.

Key slides from the presentation can be downloaded here.