The suits and power skirts sitting around the conference table may just as well have been on lunch break. One guy kept stepping away to answer an inconsolable cell phone. A couple of others were frozen in prayerlike formation, heads bowed toward hands clasped around their PDAs. One guy was more interested in his newspaper than the details of the multibillion-dollar heavy-industries merger they were supposed to be hammering out inside a marquee Wall Street investment bank this winter.
For a while, PowerPoint presentations, with its clipped advertising language, appeared to be the cure for attention-deficit disorder. No longer.

