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Fishman, author of The Wal-Mart Effect, writes this month in Fast Company about our love of bottled water, which he says “is not a benign indulgence.”

Check out this quote:

In San Francisco, the municipal water comes from inside Yosemite National Park. It’s so good the EPA doesn’t require San Francisco to filter it. If you bought and drank a bottle of Evian, you could refill that bottle once a day for 10 years, 5 months, and 21 days with San Francisco tap water before that water would cost $1.35.

That is what a sticky idea sounds like. I felt my brain squirm when I read that paragraph. I think Fishman may have single-handedly shamed me into giving up bottled water. You?

I am strangely fascinated by the philosophical debates about PowerPoint. Edward Tufte, who’s a hero of ours, is virulently opposed to PowerPoint. I’m someone who uses it constantly, so it would be a bit hypocritical for me to rant against it. True, I think it enables a lot of our worst tendencies (being verbose, summarizing rather than unpacking, using bulletized abstractions rather than concrete examples, thinking in terms of a collection of points rather than a storyline, “telling” rather than teasing, etc. … as a matter of fact, this parenthetical comment is itself rather PowerPointian). But I also have to say that the existence of Krispy Kreme enables a lot of my worst tendencies, too, and I don’t have an unkind word to say about them. It’s certainly *possible* to create a kick-ass PowerPoint, and it’s certainly *possible* not to eat a half-dozen doughnuts when you walk in KK. So.

In the WSJ, Lee Gomes has interviewed the inventors of PowerPoint to get their take on the anti-PPT criticisms. The surprise: They basically agree. Here’s an excerpt:

Mr. Gaskins and Mr. Austin, now 63 and 60, respectively, reflected on PowerPoint’s creation and its current omnipresence in an interview last week. They are intensely proud of their technical and strategic successes. But to a striking degree, they aren’t the least bit defensive about the criticisms routinely heard of PowerPoint. In fact, the best single source of PowerPoint commentary, both pro and con, (including a rich vein of Dilbert cartoons) can be found at RobertGaskins.com, his personal home page.

Perhaps the most scathing criticism comes from the Yale graphics guru Edward Tufte, who says the software “elevates format over content, betraying an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch.” He even suggested PowerPoint played a role in the Columbia shuttle disaster, as some vital technical news was buried in an otherwise upbeat slide.

No quarrel from Mr. Gaskins: “All the things Tufte says are absolutely true. People often make very bad use of PowerPoint.”

Mr. Gaskins reminds his questioner that a PowerPoint presentation was never supposed to be the entire proposal, just a quick summary of something longer and better thought out. He cites as an example his original business plan for the program: 53 densely argued pages long. The dozen or so slides that accompanied it were but the highlights.

Since then, he complains, “a lot of people in business have given up writing the documents. They just write the presentations, which are summaries without the detail, without the backup. A lot of people don’t like the intellectual rigor of actually doing the work.”

In the book we discuss how to combat mistaken perceptions, such as people’s inflated sense of the danger of shark attacks — the attacks are so rare as to be mathematically soothing, and in fact the danger of shark attacks is dwarfed by the danger of deer attacks (aka those little furries who dart mindlessly in front of your car just at the moment when braking would be pointless).

Here’s another approach to the same topic: Turns out SAND ATTACKS are more dangerous than sharks: (Thanks to Hashim for the pointer)

http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/06/20/sand.deaths.ap/index.html

Update: The link above no longer works but here is a link to CBS article on the same topic.

From a story in the Eugene, OR Register-Guard (thanks to Len H for the link) (Update: here is a link to the same story from CBS):

Kyleray Katherman, 13, thought something was funny about the water coming from the drinking fountains at his school. So, being far more intelligent and resourceful than I was at 13, he conducted an experiment. He used a Q-tip to swab the spigots of four different drinking fountains (and also a toilet for good measure). Then he took the samples back to the lab and tested them for bacteria. (Apparently junior high is a good bit more like CSI than in my day.) Result: The toilet water was Evian compared with the drinking-fountain water.

Then, in a masterstroke of stickiness, Katherman presented his analysis of the 5 sources of water to his classmates, and without telling them where each sample came from, he asked them which source they’d prefer to drink from.

They chose the toilet water, of course. And imagine the looks on their faces when he let them know. (For that matter, imagine the look on *his* face when his punchline worked as intended.)

Think about how much more powerful it was for him to structure the presentation this way, getting people to commit to a preference for toilet water, rather than launching into his presentation with a typical opener: “Based on my analysis of the drinking water in this school, there was a significantly higher level of bacteria in the drinking fountains than in the toilets.”

In the book, we talk about how vivid details can make ideas more credible. Here’s an example from the annals of advertising, plucked from an article on the copywriter Claude Hopkins:

Back in 1919, Schlitz beer approached Claude Hopkins. Their beer sales were in 15th place. They asked Hopkins if he could help them sell more beer. He agreed to meet with Schlitz and toured the brewery. He was fascinated with what he discovered. He then returned two months later with an ad campaign.

His ads told of the “crystal clear water from a special artesian well”. They told of the one “mother” yeast cell that produced all the yeast for fermenting the beer. It was the result of over “1,500 experiments and produced a very distinct fresh, crisp taste”. He told of how the bottles were “sterilized 12 times to ensure purity, so that nothing would interfere with the clean taste of the beer”.

The Schlitz people hated it. They explained to Hopkins that this would never work. They told him, “All beer is made the same way.” Hopkins calmly assured them that people would be fascinated with the “behind the scenes” look and, that no other beer maker had ever told the story.

After much discussion, Schlitz relented and let the ads roll out. Six months later, Schlitz beer was the Number 1 selling beer in the nation.

From 15th place to 1st in half a year – absolutely astonishing…

In actual fact, Schlitz were right. All beers are made pretty much the same way.

But, what Claude Hopkins had done was to turn the features that went into making beer, into the benefits people gained when they cracked one open and drank it – clean, crisp and, distinctive.

The work of a master.