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If you haven't heard yet, Amazon doesn't use PowerPoint during meetings. Or at least the execs there don't use it.
Bezos told this many years ago during an interview. And we got tons of questions from our clients about it. Few weeks ago, he joined the podcast of Lex Fridman and one of the topics they discussed was how they handle their meetings. Yet again, Bezos explained why they use memos and not a slideshow presentation of some kind. Here's where we want to jump in.
First off, we love this idea. Shocked? You shouldn't be. At the end of the day, we're all about effective communication. If the memo approach works best for the culture and the teams there, let that be the case.
Here are three things that you should be mindful of, though, when listening to this interview:
That document(the 6-page memo) should be written with such clarity that it's like angels singing from on high.
Don't know for you, but if you've seen a-well written, designed and delivered presentation, it feels the same. Question is how often do you see such?
The other thing with PowerPoint - it's easy for the author and hard for the audience. A memo is the opposite. It's hard to write a six-page memo.
Ha-ha. Okay. Sure. Now, this is a bit disappointing to hear from a person like Bezos. It's easy to create WHAT presentation? A good one? That's absolutely not the case. And for so many reasons. It's like saying that writing a good memo is easy. Look at the quote again now. Surprise!
It has to be a real memo. It has to have paragraphs. Topic sentences and verbs, and nouns. That's the other problem with PowerPoint. It's often just bullet points and you can hide a lot of sloppy thinking behind bullet points.
Oh, so these are the presentations we're comparing to. The ones with the bullet points. Well, these are indeed easy to do. But wait. Is that the baseline that a person like Bezos has for a presentation? If so, that's sad. Very sad. Or, as we've always say during our courses - an incredible opportunity to differentiate. You choose which way to look at it.
Let's wrap this up. Again - we're huge supporters of the memo idea. We truly believe a lot of teams and many organizations can implement it and extract a ton of benefits by communicating this way. However, let's not hate on PowerPoint in such an extreme way because PowerPoint (and the other presentation tools) is exactly that - a tool. And you have to know how to use it. What's more, PowerPoint is responsible mainly for your slides. And a good presentation is not made of just slides. Period.
