Why Bezos banned Amazon managers from using PowerPoint meetings

In 2018, in its annual letter, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos once again announced that it was banning to use the program for PowerPoint presentations at company management meetings.

Photo: twitter / Jeff Bezos @JeffBezos

In his letter, he explained that the “narrative structure” of speeches is more effective than PowerPoint, writes INC.

Bezos admitted that new managers often experience culture shock at their first meetings in Amazon. Instead of looking at slides in Power point and listen to vivid phrases from the speaker, each of them sits silently for about 30 minutes, reading a “six-page report with narrative structure and consisting of real sentences, verbs and nouns”.

When the reading is completed, the discussion of the reading begins.

Bezos has been organizing meetings in his companies on this principle for 20 for years and highlighted several advantages of this approach.

1. Our brain needs a narrative form of information delivery.

The narrative may not be as important to our survival as food, but its meaning is close to that.

Anthropologists say that gaining control over fire has become an important milestone in human development. Our ancestors were able to cook food, which was a big plus. But it also brought a second advantage. People sat around fires, exchanging stories. Stories served as instruction, warning, and inspiration.

According to neuroscientists, people process information about the world through narration, communicate through narration, and people remember and save information more effectively if it is presented in the form of a story, rather than a slide with key positions.

2. Stories are more convincing.

Aristotle is the father of persuasion. More than 2000 years ago, he came up with three components that all arguments must have to be effective. These are: ethos, logos and pathos. Ethos is character and values. Logos - the argument must be logical and appeal to reason. But ethos and logos are ineffective if there is no pathos - emotions.

Emotion is not a bad thing. The greatest movements in history were caused by speakers who were gifted with the ability to create rational and at the same time emotional appeals.

Neuroscientists have discovered that emotion is the fastest route to the brain. In other words, if you want your ideas to spread, storytelling is the best driving mechanism for communicating your idea to another person.

“I'm actually a big fan of jokes in business. Often, anecdotes from customers say more about them than company data,” Bezos admitted.

He clarified that Amazon uses a "huge number of indicators" to measure the success of companies.

“I've noticed that when anecdotes and math don't agree, the anecdotes tend to tell the truth. That’s why it’s so important to validate data using your intuition and instincts, and you need to teach this to junior leaders,” Bezos emphasized.

3. Slides with key points are the least effective way to share ideas.

A slide with key points cannot inspire, even if it talks about a brilliant idea, but the story can really be inspiring.

Simply put, the brain is designed so that it can not store information that is structured as key points on the slide. Neuroscientists have long noticed that we remember things much better if we see photographs of the object and the accompanying text than when we read short lines on the slide.

Visual effects are much more effective than text. That is why if you decide to use slides, use more images than words, and do not use markers.

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