--- title: "Lesson of the day: don't be a pompous windbag" url: "https://osherove.com/blog/2005/2/24/lesson-of-the-day-dont-be-a-pompous-windbag.md" canonical: "https://osherove.com/blog/2005/2/24/lesson-of-the-day-dont-be-a-pompous-windbag.html" published: "2005-02-24T13:00:00" updated: "2005-02-24T13:00:00" tags: ["Off Topic"] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "One of the things that I was totally surprised with when I started working with large organizations as a trainer was that their training staff had different ideas as to what makes for a solid, qualified and standardized…" usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # Lesson of the day: don't be a pompous windbag By Roy Osherove February 24, 2005 In [Off Topic](https://osherove.com/blog/category/off-topic) **Historical article** · Originally published February 24, 2005; technical details may be outdated. One of the things that I was totally surprised with when I started working with large organizations as a trainer was that their training staff had different ideas as to what makes for a solid, qualified and standardized presentation. There I was, showing them some of the materials, and I get back a "this needs some work" or "this wouldn't fly here". That is  -the process is so ingrained in every part of the procedure that even things which are supposed to be customizable and flexible like presentations (heck, some lectures I've seen don't even have powerpoint files, or just one slide, and they rocked) gets "standardized". I was too quick to react. I let my senses take hold of me and began sort of an argument over how no one should ever tell anyone else which slides work, which don't and all these sorts of things. If I had just sat down and thought for 5 minutes over it, I would have figured out that -  If making a few changes to the slide is what makes them happy - do it. It's their money -  If what you're saying is really so important you can always "black out" the screen by pressing "B" or "W" mid way so people listen to you, and not read the slide behind you. - You just might learn something, you pompous windbag, Roy. They handed me a format of presentations they used before and I looked at it. It didn't look half bad. Certainly, I can meet these standards and even learn something in the process. **Lesson of the day**: When someone calls you out on the quality of your work - they just might be right. That's not to say what I had until then was bad. It just means it didn't fit **that organizations' view** of what training looks like. Live and learn. ## More in Off Topic [All posts in Off Topic](https://osherove.com/blog/category/off-topic) - Mar 11, 2005 ### [the CSS maze](https://osherove.com/blog/2005/3/11/the-css-maze.html) - Mar 1, 2005 ### [Met some nice people in Prague](https://osherove.com/blog/2005/3/1/met-some-nice-people-in-prague.html) - Feb 21, 2005 ### [Congratulations to Yosi Taguri!](https://osherove.com/blog/2005/2/21/congratulations-to-yosi-taguri.html) - Feb 7, 2005 ### [I'm not really here, sorry.](https://osherove.com/blog/2005/2/7/im-not-really-here-sorry.html) --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/