Hmmm. I don't think you understand what an executive does. PowerPoint/Excel aren't useful as analytical tools. Their useful as communication tools. Think of

Hmmm. I don't think you understand what an executive does. PowerPoint/Excel aren't useful as analytical tools. Their useful as communication tools. Think of this way. Executives are like engineers whose IDE is PowerPoint/Excel, whose language of choice is human natural language, and who spend their time programming people, not machines. You're too caught up on the PowerPoint aspect of this story. Most likely it was the guy's ability to persuade that was key. It's people programming, not machine programming that ultimately matters (until the Singularity at least - and then none of what we do matters).