Topics: Amazon, Business, Technology, Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos doesn't want to sit through your PowerPoint presentations.
It doesn't matter what kind of transitions, GIFs or fancy fonts you might have used, the Amazon founder doesn't want to see it.
To really make that clear, Bezos banned PowerPoint from being used in meetings run by members of Amazon's senior leadership, meaning his staff instead had to come up with alternative ways to present their information.
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The ban was first brought in in 2004, according to Management Today, when Bezos sent out an email saying that instead of PowerPoint presentations, he wanted to see some 'well-structured' text.
According to Ram Charan and Julia Yang’s book The Amazon Management System, he wrote: "Well-structured, narrative text is what we’re after, rather than just text. If someone builds a list of bullet points in Word, that would be just as bad as PowerPoint."
Of course, you could argue that PowerPoint presentations could consist of 'well-structured' text, but Bezos went on to share his reasoning, claiming that a 'good memo' would be more effective than a jazzy slideshow.
He continued: "The reason writing a good four-page memo is harder than 'writing' a 20-page PowerPoint is because the narrative structure of a good memo forces better thought and better understanding of what’s more important than what, and how things are related.
“PowerPoint-style presentations somehow give permission to gloss over ideas, flatten out any sense of relative importance, and ignore the interconnectedness of ideas.”
I'd argue that I'd pay more attention to some slides with cool transitions than I would to pages of nothing but words, but Bezos doubled down on his belief in 2018, proving that even updated features on the programme weren't enough to win him over.
In an annual letter sent to employees in 2018, Bezos argued again that the 'narrative structure' of a memo was more effective than PowerPoint.
To ensure everyone genuinely gets the memo, anyone taking part in a meeting must sit silently for about 30 minutes to go over the document which should be 'narratively structured with real sentences, topic sentences, verbs, and nouns', Bezos said.
Once everyone's digested the memo, they then discuss the points made.
"It's so much better than the typical PowerPoint presentation for so many reasons," Bezos claimed.
Though it might not sound like the most exciting way to be given information, Bezos' method is backed by some research.
In 2020, research from UK-based presentation specialists Future Presents, and cited by BDaily, found that 58 percent of UK office workers had fallen asleep during a presentation in the year prior, and it takes less than six minutes for people to drift off.
Susie Phillips-Baker, organizational psychologist with Future Presents, added: “Taking in lots of visual and auditory information can place high demands on the working memory, so by reducing the processing demands on the audience, you can essentially avoid the mind wandering or switching off."
