We are normally big fans of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, a British lobby group which specialises in publicising wasteful or unnecessary government expenditure. They do an important job and they generally do it well.

However, we must disagree with them – with all due respect – when they criticise the Foreign Office for employing the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) to teach diplomats how to speak and stand.

This is, for once, public money well spent.

Although Brits are often mocked these days for their unjustified air of superiority, it should not be forgotten that their ancestors built and ran the biggest Empire the world has ever seen, partly because they were represented by leaders and diplomats who were famous for their ability to project effortless self-confidence.

This is, alas, something of a lost art in touchy-feely contemporary Britain. However, even if you have no confidence, and no reason for confidence, it is still possible to act as if you have.

British diplomacy may have declined, but Britain still boasts possibly the greatest acting tradition in the world, and the diplomats are right to take advantage of it. Actors come from all over the world to learn the techniques of playing natural leaders at the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre, and, of course, RADA, so it makes sense that Britain’s leaders do the same.

This applies to business leaders too. There is a lot of evidence to show how proper posture can help in a very wide range of marketing and management situations.

An entrepreneur, especially a young or inexperienced entrepreneur who has yet to develop the skill of exuding self-confidence, could do a lot worse than attend a good drama workshop. Since we lack the deep pockets of a government, most of us could not afford RADA, but any half-decent acting class could teach a few basic techniques that could be of immense practical help: voice projection, power stances, positioning, eye contact, attracting and distracting attention, and pretending to be the dominant personality when you secretly feel nothing of the sort.

Alternatively, a more direct approach might be to join a public speaking club.

As an American actor observed, “If you pretend, you are already starting to feel... You let the pretension generate the feeling... That’s the British way.” So if you can pretend to be a successful entrepreneur, you might become one.

There are many kinds of war hero. Those who show physical courage are obviously the most impressive to us cowardly, stay-at-home types, but moral courage is just as heroic, and much harder to find, especially in the conformist culture of the military.

So it was an act of extraordinary bravery for Colonel Lawrence Sellin to criticise the “PowerPoint mentality” of the US high command in Afghanistan. He must have known that he would be fired for it – as indeed he was. Perhaps only a 61-year old reservist could say what he said: a young career officer would be understandably more reluctant to go against the military Establishment.

As we observed in the case of General Stanley McChrystal a few months ago, it was necessary for his superiors to fire him, not in spite of the fact that he was telling the truth but because he was telling the truth.

What he said applies to more than the mismanaged war in Afghanistan. Many organisations are paralysed by a mindset that is obsessed with how a strategy can be presented and that ignores the real question of whether or not the strategy actually works.

This is itself a symptom of a deeper problem: the shortening attention span which is the curse of 21^st Century Western culture is infecting even top executives. They would rather think in terms of bullet points than research and analyse a situation in detail.

PowerPoint can be a very useful tool, but it must not be forgotten that it is only a tool. There is a real danger that a skilful PowerPoint presentation can generate an artificial certainty, so that “the medium becomes the message”. The fact that it makes a strong visual impression gives it an authority that is divorced from the facts on which it is meant to be based. A PowerPoint presentation becomes “the truth” simply because it is a PowerPoint presentation.

Even the person doing the presenting is vulnerable to the false sense of security radiated by PowerPoint. Entrepreneurs are most at risk. Nobody is checking our work, but we must bear the consequences if we make lazy assumptions or we start to believe our own hype.

Use PowerPoint to convince others – but never as a substitute for thinking things through.