Making someone else's slides

How do you create a slide show from someone else's report?

I was in the situation where a manager gave me a monthly report and asked that I present it to his managers in the form of a slide show. To make things worse, his managers insist on a standard PowerPoint template for all of these presentations. Any wonder why their monthly meetings want to make you poke out both you eyes?

Well, now, this is 180 degrees against the Pow'Rful Philosophy. I advocate that presentations be planned and then prepared. Creating slide shows to convey a monthly report are exactly why slide shows look like monthly reports. This is called "Presentation as documentation" syndrome. It is contagious, I believe based on the number of presentations we see like this.

What would you do in this situation? How do you convert a monthly report to a slide show in 2 hours, so that it does not look like a report?

This situation is like an architect designing a low-income housing scheme where all the houses look similar. Then asking the painters to fill in the blanks. Is it a surprise when the result is that all the houses look similar with a small variety in the paint colors?

All that I could with these constraints was to reduce the amount of text on the slides. The Pow'Rful Process supports good communication with PowerPoint, but with a standard template, prescribed number of slides, and a few hours to prepare, the cause is already lost.

I am reminded of The Dam Busters movie. Outside a science Lab in the UK during the war the sign at the gate said "The impossible we do immediately. Miracles take a little longer" I can only do so much with a PowerPoint Presentation under these circumstances...