BIZARRE REASON JEFF BEZOS BANNED POWERPOINT PRESENTATIONS DURING MEETINGS

Your PowerPoint presentations will not be tolerated by Jeff Bezos. The founder of Amazon does not want to see any transitions, GIFs, or fancy fonts that you may have used. Bezos made it very evident by forbidding the use of PowerPoint in meetings attended by senior management at Amazon. As a result, his employees were forced to find other ways to deliver their information.

According to Management Today, the ban was first implemented in 2004 after Bezos sent out an email stating that he preferred "well-structured" text to PowerPoint presentations. He wrote: "We're after well-structured, narrative text, not just text," according to Ram Charan and Julia Yang's book The Amazon Management System. It would be equally as awful as PowerPoint if someone created a list of bullet points in Word.

You could, of course, counter that "well-structured" text could be included in PowerPoint presentations, but Bezos continued by explaining that a "good memo" would be more impactful than a fancy slideshow. "The narrative structure of a good memo forces better thought and a better understanding of what's more important than what, and how things are related," he added, explaining why writing a good four-page memo is more difficult than "writing" a 20-page PowerPoint.In some ways, PowerPoint-style presentations allow for the obfuscation of concepts, the erasure of any sense of relative importance, and the disregard for the interdependencies among ideas.

I would argue that I would be more interested in a few slides with interesting transitions than in pages of words, but Bezos reaffirmed his conviction in 2018, demonstrating that even the program's updated features weren't enough to impress him. In 2018, Bezos reiterated his claim that a memo's "narrative structure" was more effective than PowerPoint in an annual letter to staff members. Anyone attending a meeting is required to sit quietly for approximately half an hour to review the memo, which should be "narratively structured with real sentences, topic sentences, verbs, and nouns," according to Bezos, to make sure everyone understands it.

They discuss the points raised after everyone has had a chance to read the memo. Bezos asserted, "There are numerous reasons why it's so much superior to the standard PowerPoint presentation."

Bezos' approach is supported by some research, even though it may not seem like the most exciting way to receive information. According to a 2020 study by Future Presents, a UK-based presentation specialist, which BDaily cited, 58 percent of UK office workers had dozed off during a presentation in the previous year, and it takes less than six minutes for people to doze off.

"Taking in a lot of visual and auditory information can place high demands on the working memory, so by reducing the processing demands on the audience, you can avoid the mind wandering or switching off," continued Susie Phillips-Baker, an organizational psychologist with Future Presents.