Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint”

When I was in high school I tried to ban powerpoint, arguing that it inhibited our ability to grow as public speakers. I wrote Edward Tufte and told him about it and he shipped me 20 copies of "The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within" (http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_pp).

Some teachers opposed it and I ended up losing. I'm sure Powerpoint was more convenient for them. I use deck.js for slides now but mostly for images - the other slides tend to have 3-4 words while I try and tell a story to draw in readers.

My last project pitch to management I printed out copies of a written proposal and had everyone read for ten minutes to start the meeting. It was actually really nice.

I'm in love with this idea. The information density (in terms of time) of a well written memo is much greater than that of a presentation. Many 30 minute presentations could be read in 5 minutes.

The written word is also a great equalizer. A "presenter" can be judged based on their content rather than their public speaking ability.

It's odd how tied some folk are to slides even when it's a completely inappropriate tool for the situation at hand.

On the viewing side as as well as the presenter side.

I occasionally workshops on various things. Some (not all) of them <gasp> don't have any slides.

None.

On the grounds that the point of the workshop, as far as I'm concerned, is to pay a lot of attention to what I'm telling you - and do the practical exercises. You learn by doing - not by reading. A slide deck just gets in the way of that. It's a barrier between me and the class.

Every time there's one or two people who really hate that and complain about the lack of the deck. Not the quality of the workshop - that they're fine with - but the fact they don't have a slide deck.

Occasionally it's because they want to take away the deck and run the workshop inside their own company for free (and hey - I don't mind about that. Honest. It actually helps sales ;-).

But more often folk seem to need "a thing" to take away and look at again. Not so much as a learning tool, but as token that they were there.

I'm seriously considering making some physical "things" for folk. Maybe postcards with the key learning points on and a reading list. Just to see if that'll help.

In my experience the people who give shitty presentations with powerpoint would also be perfectly capable of giving shitty presentations without powerpoint.

I want to know the new dominance ritual. At non AMZN type companies a major dominance ritual lower ranks spending inordinate amounts of time adding meaningless flair to powerpoints, as an illuminated manuscript work of art rather than a professional business communication to show off to the boss. So whats the new dominance ritual if its not powerpoint anymore? Buying the audience coffee? Charging their cellphones for them? Traditional stuff like kissing up and brown nosing? Buy the audience ceremonial donuts? Physical trinkets/gifts? "Here's a printed out copy, of the email you already read, about the results we previously discussed on the phone, as a physical artifact to remind you of the meeting and your superiority over me"?

You don't get rid of a behavior by suppressing one of its minor manifestations. You're just going to get a new manifestation of the same behavior. So what is it / will it be?

I don't think powerpoints are inherently bad, but they're misused enough that I wouldn't begrudge anyone who wanted to ban them outright.

The two best ways to use them, from experience, seem to be:

- Super dense slides. These slides have a lot of text and are information-rich. You're not expected to read them, and the presenter will just skim over them, presenting a high-level view of each topic, but definitely not reading off of the slides. The slides are there as a rough guide to the talk, and as an in-depth resource afterwards. - Super spare slides. These slides have few-to-no bullet points, and are heavy on pictures. They're pretty much there to guide the speaker's narrative, and nothing else. At worst, there might be an inherently visual data element, like a graph.

The common element being that the slides are there to guide the talk, not be the talk. The reason powerpoints are so reviled is because people tend to just write a speech, put a bullet point in front of each sentence, and read it off a projected slide.

PowerPoint is a presentation tool, and like any tool it can be misused to the point of frustration. At best, PowerPoint offers a good way to provide a visual aid for a presentation. People who present crappy PowerPoint decks would have no trouble delivering a similarly crappy speech, or writing an indecipherable memo.

One great book on delivering awesome presentations - Presentation Zen (http://www.amazon.com/Presentation-Zen-Simple-Delivery-Editi...)

Edward Tufte's article "PowerPoint Does Rocket Science--and Better Techniques for Technical Reports"(http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...) has a wealthy of information about why and how to avoid Powerpoint.

"Powerpoint is easy for presenter, hard for audience"

My observational experience is the opposite. A powerpoint must have "professional" design and "professional" multiple fonts and "professional" multiple colors, and "professional" multimedia such as stock photos and such. A lack of extensive customization shows a lack of motivation or a lack of respect. It doesn't matter if it contains actual content as long as it looks nice, because all actual content was already discussed interactively via email or phone call or written reports. So a presenter starts with generating 30 minutes of content then spends 6 hours adding meaningless flair, getting it approved by boss, bosses boss, then endless editorial changes to the multimedia, "move that stock photo a little to the left", etc. The graphics arts load on the presenter is huge and extremely expensive, yet provides no monetary value, especially for internal presentations.

On the other hand the reviewer doesn't really learn anything because any important topic was discussed in written email format in detail, the presentation is a mere formality / dominance ritual. So powerpoint is pretty easy on the audience, if its a powerpoint, that means you should tune it out.

A more in-depth treatment "no Powerpoint" at Amazon is given here by Steve Yegge:

https://plus.google.com/110981030061712822816/posts/AaygmbzV...

This reminded me the way we did Design Reviews at some multinational corporation.

I would write and print a design document of 30-50 pages long, schedule a 1-2 hours meeting and send the document in advance to those 5-10 people attending. Off-course only 1-2 persons would actually read in advance.

Then we were reading it page by page and discussing it, giving special attention to various diagrams, such as flow charts, sequence diagrams, FSMs and UMLs.

We almost never were able to finish in time, so the next meeting should be scheduled (in 1 or 2 weeks because of scheduling constraints) ...

All the meetings I do are voluntary. Most of the people who attend work with the problems in some way.

Your time is incredibly valuable. If you're sitting there for 30 minutes while someone reads your memo, if you're getting everyone together in one place to read your memo, with all that implies for their schedules, then that's a waste of a lot of extremely important time for a lot of people.

Meetings are for discussions that you can only have with everyone together. They're so that people who don't understand something can ask you questions, or so that you can work with others who do understand the problems. Not for reading groups.

Oh hey! This is exactly what Edward Tufte taught us at his course the other week. Now I'm curious as to who originated this practice...?

This seems pretty much what Steve Yegge said a few years back - cannot find the ref but he had to write a essay for Bezos to read - no PowerPoint.

I think it's sensible - you can write a PowerPoint in ten minutes and not have to think things through. Try not thinking while writing 6 pages of argument - it will be impossible or achingly clear when it's read.

This reminds me of when I was back in school and the instructor would have stuff in Powerpoint on the projector screen. It was only interesting when a photograph or image would be displayed (this was an East Asian history class) but the rest of the time was just me listening to him speak about the topic rather than paying attention to the slides at hand.

Why? Because he was pretty much just narrating what he already had on the screen.

I have always found that Powerpoint is useless for displaying anything in a meeting or seminar and yet I still find myself doing that when I myself choose to give a presentation. Additionally, I have yet to see anything that replaces it well enough that also mimics the speed and simplicity of the application, and I also find more value in just listening to the person rather than seeing what is on the screen.

I posted "Death to PowerPoints" -- http://www.strategicmessaging.com/powerpoints/2008/02/02/ -- 5 years ago, and still live by it. I almost never sit through a conventional presentation in a 1-on-1. I almost never attend presentations where a deck is presented to a group.

That said, I frequently edit slide decks for my clients to inflict on other people. And on the rare occasions I give presentations, I use PowerPoint, commonly in old-fashioned bulleted-outline style.

Complicating the discussion yet further:

* I write stuff for people to read MUCH more than I give presentations.

* My writing involves a lot of lists of bullet points. :)

I'm not sure about just reading a six page memo out loud to everyone. That seems like a great thing to email to everyone. Some of my least favorite memories from college are the couple of classes I went to where the professor basically read the book to us. The difference is, I'm guessing, that attendance isn't optional at an Amazon meeting.

Personally I like keeping presentations on the short side - only using slide shows for ancillary data like citations (which I find awkward to fold into the flow of a speach) and graphical data. Unless something is really interesting or very important, it's only going to get 5-10 minutes of people's attention.

As an audience person (ie, listening to talks) I believe "Powerpoint is easy for presenter, hard for audience" is crazy talk.

I generally follow using the slides, not listening to the dude who's talking for 30min-1h thank you very much.

Making things simple as you present something complex has nothing to do with having a powerpoint presentation or not. Nothing.

Giving a paper to read is just the same as powerpoint, except if the speaker sucks, you don't have to endure that. So yeah. Wrong punch line, okay approach.

The idea that everyone abides by a standard protocol is a dead giveaway that the author has never spoken with an actual Amazon employee.

One of the hardest things I've learned over the years is how to condense information into quick slides, quick demos, quick presentations. People don't have the capacity that some of us might have. We're used to the material, so it's second nature to us. And other people don't see things that way. Especially when you're communicating with older people who will be lucky to understand 50% of a keynote, product demo, idea, task, problem, etc. They need the facts, and they need them quickly. I love the Amazon approach behind memos, and everything being shorter and to the point in general. The way to go. It's crazy how much you can condense that shouldn't have been there in the first place. Beautiful.

Although I've seen all the 'bad examples' come by, on average I don't have much of a problem following ppt backed presentations, contrary, apparently, to others.

Nevertheless I think this is a great idea on itself. I've seen too many meetings where there was reading material but so few people read it that the talk actually focussed on them.

There's one issue though, and only experience will tell whether it is relevant. I for myself am fond of taking in knowledge via paper but the effectiveness of this highly depends on the moment I'm reading. Also I've noticed I find it harder to concentrate when I'm reading 'together in a group'. I feel a bit rushed by it. But perhaps that's just me or something that is easy to get used to.

Amazon, when I worked there, had the worst meeting discipline of all the companies I have worked for. Meetings normally started 10 minutes late and most people didn't show up until 5 minutes after the start time. Being punctual it drove me up the wall.

I'm guessing you copy/pasted the title in from the blog but you should probably remove the CAPS.

I like this way of doing meetings, I haven't heard of anything similar before. Although I've always hated slide shows. Do I read the bullet points? Listen to the presenter? Does the presenter read the bullets and go into detail on each one? What does it mean if there is a bullet but the presenter doesn't mention it during the presentation? There's too much going on at once. A good slide show can work very well (using a slide to illustrate your point with a graph etc.) but most people can't create good slide shows.

This article could not have been posted at a better time! I seriously think that these form of presentations do put their audience to sleep whilst also being non productive.

I personally don't think one can do without slides as sometimes it helps the audience visualise what one is discussing. Therefore I believe it should be more about the essence of the content.

In summary, just keep each slide to a max of 2-3 words or just one image that best describes the topic you are discussing.

I feel that this could work well for many organisations, irrespective of their size, especially when one factors in how much time could saved on meetings.

Powerpoint is not the problem, it is the poor presentations people give using it.

I once went to an IDEO talk and noticed that all words in the speaker's Powerpoint are capital letters. After the talk, I asked the guy why he made it like that and his answer was that since capital letters make it harder to read, you would force yourself to write concisely on the Powerpoint. He also mentioned that many people inside IDEO follow this rule.

Badly made Powerpoint is just useless while 6-page memo might be too time consuming and inconvenient. Capital letter approach could be a good compromise between those two.

I think blanket rules like this are a bit silly. Clearly PP (Powerpoint) has its uses. A picture is still worth 1000 words.

My suggestion would be to have a default ban, but insist that if a presenter really "needs" to use PP (s)he should have to get some sort of permission first. The reason for that is that the person wanting to use PP would then have to consider and justify its use before using it. Basically, just give them pause to think and consider.

The wonderful thing about the linked article is that it's essentially a bullet-pointed summary of a much longer source.

The real drawback to this approach is that it ensures no one will prepare for the meeting and the 'discussion' will consist of kneejerk reactions to what they have just read. It is eminently unsuitable for discussing anything important and if it is not important then why have the meeting in the first place.

I was at the Edward Tufte's class and he talked about this practice at Amazon. He was strongly advising all of us to follow it. He also mentioned that Apple uses a 11x17 information sheet that is shared to all meeting attendees.

Sorry if you haven't read the papers prior to the start of the meeting with out a good excuse I would consider giving you a verbal warning and if repeated a written one and putting you on poor performance procedure.

It is a good point and I surely see its potential. However 6 pages seem a bit long.

And my general opinion is that the presentation should be supportive towards the presentator. Not the other way around.

I think the best points: - Reserved time for everybody to read and understand the issues before meeting starts - Something tangible for those not able to participate in the meeting

Should the title of the article match the visual type of the article... or ignore the 'text-transform: uppercase' css. I vote the latter :-)

One sentence and an image or illustration to resonate that sentence or illustrate that sentence and a PowerPoint preso can be effective.

Did Bezos learn this practice at DE Shaw?

Dov Frohman, founder of Intel Israel (8,000 employees) and inventor of the flash memory states in his book, "Leadership the Hard Way" the following story about a five-page proposal sent to Andy Grove:

Quote:

'Something about the very distance in my relationship with Andy seemed to invest small things with large significance. For example, when I was a young manger at Intel Israel, I sent Andy a five-page proposal for shifting the Jerusalem fab production line from memories to microprocessors. He returned it, unread, with a stamp reading “Please respect my time.” His message: the proposal was way too long. He wanted one page, not five. Grove’s request – “Please respect my time” – had an enormous impact on me.'