Any good presentation will be a combination of interesting information and arresting graphics. Graphics aid in concentration, comprehension and retention. The better they are, the more likely the message being communicated will be understood and remembered.

In the many presentations I have made over the years, I seldom counted on delivery alone to ensure that the information I offered up would have the desired impact. I was just not that good. So, I liked to use props, and the best and most readily available props are invariably the graphics by which the information is being conveyed.

There are basic rules for infographics, be they in a PowerPoint presentation, in a printed document or on screen.

1. Each graphic should make one point. Which means that if there is no point, don’t have a graphic. (Actually, if there is no point, don’t do a presentation at all.) The corollary is that if you want to make several points, then use several graphics. Layering can work, if your points are sequential and if the layering is handled delicately and judiciously. It’s a dangerous practice, however, that should be attempted only by the most adept.

2. The graphic itself should be obvious. Obvious doesn’t mean plain. It doesn’t mean boring. It does mean clearly understandable. Whether you are showing market share, population densities, product life cycle stages, elevations or critical paths, the viewers’ or readers’ eyes should know instantly where to focus.

3. If you have devices like legends, eyes are forced to hop from place to place just to have a reference point. Legends are not helpful. They cause clutter. They cause confusion. They should be avoided. Graphics where the legend is built into the concept are most effective.

If you are looking for a really great website on infographics, check out infographicsblog.com. It showcases some of the finest – and, sometimes, the less than finest – infographic work being done, saluting innovation and creativity as well as the ability to educate and impress. For each example, the author explains what works well, what doesn’t, and what essential element is missing that might, if present, have put the illustration over the top.

One of my favourite, if slightly flawed, graphics from this blog shows the evolution of Crayola crayon colours over time (100+ years). The kid in you has got to love it, though the ability to have the colour name pop up as your mouse rolls over each colour strip would have been a wonderful touch.

A particularly troublesome illustration tries to present the 10 best places to buy a house in America. Focusing on small cities, it looks at such factors as median family income, average property tax, the number of universities and museums within 30 miles, the number of librairies and movie theatres within 15 miles, the number of sunny days per year, as well as unemployment levels. It uses a variety of charting tools, several overlapping X and Y axes, and a map where the cities are identified by numbers for which you must refer to a legend. I would challenge anyone to actually identify, at a glance, which city would top the chart. Actually, I would bet that, given 10 minutes to study the graphic closely, most people would still be hard pressed to choose. It is one of those well-intentioned if ill-conceived graphics laden with data but light on useful information.

Spend some time at the site. It is as much fun as it is enlightening.

I’m sure he wouldn’t want me to say it, but Wayne Turmel is not really cranky. Feisty, perhaps. Persnickety at times. And he can bite when he has to. But, at the end of the day, Turmel is just too humorous and too caring to be really cranky.

Turmel is the host of The Cranky Middle Manager Show. A star in The Podcast Network firmament, the show is popular for good reason. Turmel is an engaging interviewer and his guests generally have something useful to say. The subject matter is management - for better and, every now and then, for worse.

A few weeks ago, he interviewed Aubrey Daniels, author of OOPS! The 13 Management Practices that Waste Time and Money. Among the discussion topics were forced rankings and stretch goals. Aubrey sees both as counter-productive. Forced ranking, he says, creates unhealthy competition instead of fostering teamwork. Stretch goals, almost by definition, cannot be met and so engender little beyond frustration.

I have, in my career, dealt with both, up close and personal. The forced ranking was done by senior managers behind closed doors. The purpose was not so much to filter out the poorest performers as the infamous GE program purported to do. It was done to bring to the senior managers’ attention the fact that they depend more on some staffers than others and yet they put all these employees in the same salary pool and try to treat them all equally. In other words, it was done not as a policy measure but to send a message.

Regardless of the motivation or the filter used, managers cannot help but rank their employees by importance. And, when push comes to shove (i.e., if you actually had to fire someone at the end of the ranking exercise), performance is not that important. Let’s face it, accounting clerks and customer service reps are disposable. Analysts are expendable. As you move up the food chain, experience and technical knowledge are harder to replace. You have, thereby, simply created a bell curve of importance. In any forced ranking, a top producing clerk would be vulnerable and a so-so performing employee higher up the food chain would be safe. There is churn at the bottom and status quo at the top. In other words, nothing constructive has really been achieved.

The way around this, of course, is to do the rankings not vertically (i.e., within departments) but horizontally (by level, across the organization). The competition, as you might imagine, would then be not with staff, but among the senior managers themselves.

It is obvious (at least I hope it is) that I am not a fan of forced rankings or bell curves. People should be rated on how they contribute relative to the needs and expectations placed on their respective positions. And they should be rated on how they perform relative to their own capabilities. (That is probably another discussion topic. In truth, my colleagues were always harsh on me when I came down on a good employee who would never go above and beyond.)

I also have strong opinions on setting stretch goals. Stretch should be meaningful (important and understandable) as well as achievable. Otherwise, you are not stretching the band, you are snapping it. If your target is far away, set a series of milestones and timelines to reach the milestones. As a colleague of mine put it, you eat the elephant one bite at a time.

Aubrey Daniels is obviously someone whose heart is in the right place. He is certainly spot on when he talks about Hell’s Kitchen’s Gordon Ramsay. Now there’s a cranky manager! That said, again I differ from Mr. Daniels: all the swearing, the tantrums and the abuse notwithstanding, there would be a line-up a mile long if there was an opportunity to be one of Ramsay’s protégés like Marcus Wareing or Angela Hartnett.

Anyway, do yourself a favor. Load up on Twizzlers and then download The Cranky Middle Manager Show.