Mark Hurd, the CEO of HP, told a story in this week's Fortune. He recalled an excellently delivered presentation in a meeting a long time ago. The boss at the meeting calmly said in the end, "Good story, but it's hard to look smart with bad numbers."
That shall be the first principle of everything everyone does. But sometimes, you need a good presentation to make your bad numbers look less bad. That comes back to the trend I am observing in economics seminars and conferences.
More and more academics are using LaTex and its associated Beamer to deliver presentations. Prof. McCalman, our PhD program director, is pushing everyone in the program to use LaTex and Beamer. I am all for the new policy, since I am sort of an early adopter of new technologies. But many people cite the first principle I mentioned in the beginning here to resist the trend.
Too bad that is not the right thinking people here should have. If you are from a top 5 program, people will listen to you in whichever way you present it. I bet you can present a job market paper in word file and excel tables and still get a decent job. But not here. We need to dress well, put some lipstick on the pig, and use LaTex to get people to listen to us. Substance is of course important. But you need to have both substance and presentations to get you a good talk if you are nowhere near the top 5. To make things worse, people in the top programs also know LaTex and have pretty good dresses. Life is hard, isn't it?
(Picture: HP)
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