Turn off the PowerPoint Presentation
Who loves a good PowerPoint presentation? Jeff Bezos of Amazon certainly does not!
According to him, people are so busy that they typically don’t read (or don’t thoroughly read) pre-distributed material before meetings and when they attend the meeting they can ‘bluff’ their way through when the presentation is delivered on a PowerPoint.
So, at Amazon they don’t use PowerPoint. Instead they use the old-fashioned memo with “real sentences”. Ideally the memos are kept to a limit of 6 or 7 pages and the memos are presented to meeting attendees who are given the first 30 minutes to read and digest the content in silence. Once everyone is equally informed, engaging discussion takes place and decisions are made.
Sounds quite productive to me. Not only does this meeting strategy make sense but surely saves time overall. PowerPoint looks nice but I have often found using it rather awkward and time consuming. I’d much prefer to invest that time into writing a more informative and complete memo.
Reference: “It is always Day One” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPbKeNghRYE
Who loves a good PowerPoint presentation? Jeff Bezos of Amazon certainly does not!
According to him, people are so busy that they typically don’t read (or don’t thoroughly read) pre-distributed material before meetings and when they attend the meeting they can ‘bluff’ their way through when the presentation is delivered on a PowerPoint.
So, at Amazon they don’t use PowerPoint. Instead they use the old-fashioned memo with “real sentences”. Ideally the memos are kept to a limit of 6 or 7 pages and the memos are presented to meeting attendees who are given the first 30 minutes to read and digest the content in silence. Once everyone is equally informed, engaging discussion takes place and decisions are made.
Sounds quite productive to me. Not only does this meeting strategy make sense but surely saves time overall. PowerPoint looks nice but I have often found using it rather awkward and time consuming. I’d much prefer to invest that time into writing a more informative and complete memo.
Reference: “It is always Day One” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPbKeNghRYE