Lou Gerstner IBM building access incident

First day as CEO, Gerstner can't get into the building (no ID); when finally inside, turns off the PowerPoint projector mid-meeting and asks executives to "just talk about your business." Tom uses this as the centerpiece of his anti-PowerPoint argument, sourced from Tufte.

He tells the story of Lou Gerstner, who became the CEO of IBM when IBM was having some serious problems. The first day — first of all he couldn't get in the building, he didn't have an ID. Sort of a catch-22 — couldn't get an ID until he got in the building, but he didn't have an ID so they wouldn't let him in the building. So here's the CEO, for an outsider, of a four-hundred-thousand-employee company who couldn't get in the building. When they finally had someone come down and overrule the security guard, he got in the building, he had some meetings with some of the top executives to find out what's going on in IBM. And they all got up to do their PowerPoints. After about fifteen or twenty minutes, he went up, he turned off the overhead projector, he says, let's just talk about your business. Emails went around IBM within five minutes about how Lou Gerstner had turned off the PowerPoints, and they didn't have PowerPoint anymore. Too many people use PowerPoints as a crutch.