Why Jeff Bezos Banned PowerPoint at Amazon

No PowerPoints. No slides. Instead, Amazon only does six-page narratives for internal meetings.

Why?

Bullet points don't inspire, stories do.

"Slide decks can hide shallow thinking. Narratively structured memos are harder to write because they require better thinking. It’s worth it."

Maybe useful for persuasion — think sales calls. But you don’t want that for internal decision meetings." – Jeff Bezos

When something is well-written, it can't have a bad day. It transcends. Conversely, someone presenting can have a bad day and not get their narrative or idea across as intended.  Human nature is to over-index on the presenter and under-index on the idea.

• Bullet points
• Make the presenter
• Appear more competent

In his 2018 annual letter, here is what Bezos went on to explain:

Here’s what we’ve figured out. Often, when a memo isn’t great, it’s not the writer’s inability to recognize the high standard, but instead a wrong expectation on scope: they mistakenly believe a high-standards, six-page memo can be written in one or two days or even a few hours, when really it might take a week or more! They’re trying to perfect a handstand in just two weeks, and we’re not coaching them right. 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. They simply can’t be done in a day or two. The key point here is that you can improve results through the simple act of teaching scope – that a great memo probably should take a week or more. Beyond recognizing the standard and having realistic expectations on scope, how about skill? Surely to write a world class memo, you have to be an extremely skilled writer? Is it another required element? In my view, not so much, at least not for the individual in the context of teams. The football coach doesn’t need to be able to throw, and a film director doesn’t need to be able to act. But they both do need to recognize high standards for those things and teach realistic expectations on scope. Even in the example of writing a six-page memo, that’s teamwork. Someone on the team needs to have the skill, but it doesn’t have to be you. (As a side note, by tradition at Amazon, authors’ names never appear on the memos – the memo is from the whole team.)