When someone as successful as Jeff Bezos gives a tip about business, it becomes an important topic to consider. The founder and CEO of Amazon believes that PowerPoint presentations are not that productive and he has banned them to use in Amazon.
Jeff revealed about this at the George W Bush Presidential Center’s Forum on Leadership and said that ‘narrative structure’ is much more effective than PowerPoint. In the meetings at Amazon, everyone gets to read to read a 6-page memo that’s narratively structured with real sentences, topic sentences, verbs, and nouns instead of bullet points on a PowerPoint slide.
You can watch the entire video on this below:
On asking about the reason, Jeff explained that this is his own way of ensuring everyone was on the same page and reading everything properly as bullet points in PowerPoint get ignored by most of the officials.
According to an Inc article, our minds don’t receive information through bullet points accurately, instead, they are programmed to learn something through storytelling. Other influential speakers including Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai, and Richard Branson also have trust in storytelling as stories are the best way of spreading a message.
Bezos even called it the ‘weirdest meeting culture‘ and joked that any new employee gets shocked when he sits silently for 30 minutes before meetings and gets to read a 6-page long memo which is in narrative structure and everyone’s point of view is discussed in the meeting.
