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Jeff Bezos’ old video on banning PowerPoint at Amazon meetings goes viral
An old video of Jeff Bezos sharing why Amazon employees write ‘narratively structured six-page memos’ instead of PowerPoint at meetings was posted on LinkedIn.
An old video of Jeff Bezos, founder of e-commerce giant Amazon, has resurfaced on social media that shows him talking about a rule he implemented at Amazon meetings. In the video, he explains why he banned PowerPoint at the meetings in favour of memos.
LinkedIn user Daniel Abrahams shared the throwback video of Bezos where he is seen explaining why Amazon employees ‘write narratively structured six-page memos’ that everyone present at a meeting reads before anyone actually starts talking.
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“Just like high school kids, 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… And then everybody has actually read the memo. They're not just pretending to have read the memo,” Jeff Bezos says in the video.
Take a look at this old video of Jeff Bezos:
Since being shared a day ago, the LinkedIn post has accumulated over 3,500 likes. It has also collected tons of comments from people. While some were impressed by this method, others had their doubts.
How did LinkedIn users react to Jeff Bezos’ throwback video?
“That's an incredible approach to increase engagement at work! Reading memos together ensures everyone's on the same page, no bluffing,” wrote a LinkedIn user. “This sounds insane. There are plenty of methods to ensure productive meetings other than forcing management to sit quietly and read,” argued another.
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“Spot on - actually reading and understanding things helps tremendously. That renders content to a meeting upon which decisions taken are also embraced: the actual output becomes the deliverable rather than the "beauty" of the slides and the presence in the meeting,” praised a third. “Focus during the meeting shall be on content but not actually on the tool itself. It shall be in any mode - memo or PowerPoint or mind map - sometimes hybrid. No discrimination or bias on any single approach! A humble view is that let us embrace what is a productive tool for meeting rather than researching tool selection,” shared a fourth.
