Is PowerPoint “Fake Work?” Not If You’re a Chief of Staff.
A recent article made the rounds with a provocative argument: building decks, reviewing decks, and meeting about decks is “fake work” that wastes time in organizations everywhere. For some roles, that critique is not entirely wrong. For Chiefs of Staff and strategic operators, however, slides or other visuals that are built for this purpose are not a distraction from the work. In many cases, they are the work.
At Nova, we have trained 2,000 students in the Chief of Staff role. One theme surfaces consistently: the ability to build clear, high-impact visuals and presentations. It’s not a nice-to-have, it’s a core CoS competency. For high-level executive transparency, alignment, project management, simplicity, brand credibility, and storytelling, visuals are essential.
So, when are slides worth the time, and when are they a genuine waste of it?
Here is the breakdown.
When slides are a waste of time
building them just to build them
when it will slow you down & not help in the future
storytelling when you don’t need a story
for meetings that don’t need anything fancy
numerous review meetings about the same deck
when your story or project is simple enough to just be shared via text or live
when you don’t need buy-in or brand credibility
When slides are incredibly helpful
aligning a team with one visual instead of pages of details
when it can save a leader a 10-minute email deep dive
simple & clear project management on just a slide or two that others need insight into
branded storytelling to add credibility & buy-in (pitches, fundraising, product launch, etc)
housing loads of organized details that you reference daily in one simple spot instead of all over your computer (a walking deck)
Why Chiefs of Staff Cannot Afford to Skip Slides
The Chief of Staff role sits at the intersection of strategy and execution. That means communicating upward to the executive team, across to department leads, and downward to operators, often at the same time, and always with clarity.
That is exactly what great slides accomplish. They distill complexity into alignment and in a CoS context, alignment is everything.
Whether the tool of choice is Google Slides, Canva, or PowerPoint, a well-built slide does the following:
Replaces a 20-minute meeting. One clear visual can communicate what a long email never could.
Builds credibility. Branded, polished decks signal professionalism and earn trust with senior stakeholders.
Creates a single source of truth. Instead of information scattered across Slack, email, and shared drives, a great deck becomes the document everyone actually uses.
Scales the leader’s vision. A CoS’s job is to cascade the principal’s priorities across the organization. Slides do that efficiently and at scale.
The Walking Deck: A CoS’s Secret Weapon
Of all the tools in a Chief of Staff’s toolkit, the Walking Deck may be the most underrated.
A Walking Deck is a living, branded slide document that houses everything a leader needs at a glance. Agendas, priorities, key metrics, rhythms of business, and initiative updates all live in one place.
When built well, it takes about three minutes to update and can be shared at the highest level of the organization. No context-switching. No hunting through old emails. No time lost searching for the right file.
The CoSs who use them well are not wasting time. They are building the infrastructure that makes great leadership visible.
What Is Next: AI and the Future of Slide Creation
AI-powered slide tools are improving quickly. Already, tools like Canva AI and Microsoft Copilot can generate polished decks from a bullet-point brief in seconds.
But even as AI handles more of the building, the strategic thinking behind what goes into a deck will remain a human skill. What story to tell, what to prioritize, how to frame it for the executive team — that judgment belongs to the CoS.
Until then, Chiefs of Staff and Strategic Operators: the slides are worth it, so build them well.
P.S. Nova's Chief of Staff course teaches you how to build a Walking Deck that works at the highest level of your organization and the strategic frameworks that make great operators great. novachiefofstaff.com
Link to the article mentioned: https://fortune.com/article/slack-cofounder-stewart-butterfield-workers-ceo-stuck-doing-fake-work/