Jeff Bezos Says Banning PowerPoint Meetings Is Single Smartest Thing He's Ever Done At Amazon

Jeff Bezos didn't make it to the top of the world's billionaires list by following the same old system. He knows that sometimes progress means striking out in a new direction.

Thankfully, he also practices this within Amazon, abolishing useless old bureaucratic hangups.

Images courtesy: Reuters

At the Bush Center's Forum on Leadership, Bezos talked about his management style at Amazon, and especially about the "smartest thing" they ever did at the company.

"Many, many years ago, we outlawed PowerPoint presentations at Amazon," Bezos said at the event. "And it's probably the smartest thing we ever did." Of course, Amazon then needed an alternative way for people hosting meetings to brief the rest of the attendees. So instead, the company had meetings start with each attendee silently reading a memo regarding the points of discussion.

¡åThe memo is supposed to create the context for what will then be a good discussion," Bezos said. It was usually around six pages, and structured in a narrative form. Participants then had to spend 30 minutes reading the memo before the meeting could begin. Additionally, people were encouraged to take notes, and they could ask questions and the like after the reading period was over.

Bezos said they implemented that change because "executives will bluff their way through the meeting as if they've read the memo because we're busy and so you've got to actually carve out the time for the memo to get read." Essentially forcing execs to spend time paying attention to a point before discussing it improved productivity.

"A junior executive comes in, they put a huge amount of effort into developing a PowerPoint presentation, they put the third slide up, and the most senior executive in the room has already interrupted them, thrown them off their game, asking questions about what is going to be presented in slide six, if they would just stay quiet for a moment..." he said.

And Bezos isn't the only technology CEO to start "silent meetings": Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey does something similar, with 10 minutes of silent reading from a Google Doc before every meeting.

"At Amazon, authors' names never appear on the memos. The memo is from the whole team," Bezos said. "The great memos are written and re-written, shared with colleagues who are asked to improve the work, set aside for a couple of days, and then edited again with a fresh mind," he said in the 2017 letter. "They simply can't be done in a day or two."