When it comes to the head honcho, it tends to be a case of them saying to jump, and you saying how high. It’s a mantra that’s clearly worked for Jeff Bezos, with the founder of Amazon being the second richest man in the world. Even though Bezos’ net worth is some way off Elon Musk’s current $439.4 billion, his $237 billion bank balance is nothing to be sniffed at. While it’s wild to think Amazon grew from his garage in Washington in 1994, there’s no denying its success and the fact that Bezos is one of the best-known business moguls alive today.
Business has come a long way since 1994, after all, it was a time of overhead projectors, fax machines, beepers, and the Nokia 2010. Still, while that tech is obsolete, PowerPoint is still going strong.
Jeff Bezos banned PowerPoint from Amazon in 2004 (Danny Kamin / Contributor / Getty)
Having been first introduced in 1987, PowerPoint has stood the test of time and is still some people’s go-to way to host a meeting. Bezos has never really been a fan, and in a 2004 email, the Amazon CEO explained why he ‘banned’ PowerPoint from all Amazon meetings.
The 2004 email was sent to the STeam (senior team) and has the subject line: “No powerpoint presentations from now on at steam.”
Shared by former Amazon employee Pete Abilla, Bezos’ email explains how he wants “well structured, narrative text” rather than just ‘text’: “If someone builds a list of bullet points in word, that would be just as bad as powerpoint.”
Bezos continues: “The reason writing a 4 page memo is harder than ‘writing’ a 20 page powerpoint is because the narrative structure of a good memo forces better thought and better understanding of what’s more important than what, and how things are related.”
A clearly vexed Bezos accuses PowerPoint and PowerPoint-style presentations of glossing over ideas as well saying they flatten “any sense of relative importance, and ignore the innerconnectedness of ideas.”
Amazon employees are told to pitch via ‘narratives’ (10’000 Hours / Getty)
So what do you do if you want to pitch Amazon’s next big thing to Bezos but aren’t allowed a Star Wars-inspired opening crawl? Instead, Amazon employees are encouraged to pitch ideas in a four-to-six-page memo that the company calls a ‘narrative’. Pitches are then taken to team meetings where the memo is read for up to 30 minutes and the presenter takes questions. Bezos reiterated his PowerPoint ban during his 2018 annual letter, hyping narratives and saying: “It’s so much better than the typical PowerPoint presentation for so many reasons.”
In their book, The Amazon Management System, Ram Charan and Julia Yang say the memo method tends to be more time-consuming and can require multiple edits, however, Bezos thinks that putting time in at this early stage will likely save time further down the line.
To be honest, we still think a PowerPoint would probably be easier.
