When I watch conference recordings from CCC, Defcon, Black Hat, GDC, etc., "powerpoints" (slidedecks) work just fine for me, I'm highly engaged for hours on end. Maybe it's not the format that's the issue but the content, and PPT is just being scapegoated?
In a way, even most high quality YouTube content is little more than a presentation.
FYI, site is down, so this is only in reaction to the title. Likely the only valid excuse for ever doing so.
In many ways they are showcases or demos. They are meant to convey author's viewpoints. There is a set narrative. Unlike the memos mentioned here, they are not drafts that need to be reviewed closely or discussed in meetings.
Good slides are hard to create. It is much easier to write you presentation out in slide format, which makes for bad presentations (but if someone misses you can send them the slides - which won't help for good slides)
I think your point and examples are addressed by this quote from the article:
""PowerPoint is really designed to persuade. It's kind of a sales tool," Bezos explained. "Internally, the last thing you want to do is sell. You want to be truth-seeking. You're trying to find truth.""
A lot of people are really bad at making slide decks, and PowerPoint often is the lazy presenters tool of choice, so it falls on the sword.
When I was last leading a team we prepared extensively for our demos. We used PowerPoint, as everyone did, but we reviewed the deck several times as a team, moving things 1 pixel this way or that way to make sure everything was lined up perfectly. If someone was getting into the weeds, we’d pull them out. If someone was talking about what they did instead of how it related to the user, we’d redirect their focus to make sure the presentation would be meaningful to the audience. If we were handing off between people, we’d practice that so it was smooth without and fumbling or people not knowing how to share a screen. We would spread this out over 3 separate meetings with time between for people to tweak and tune their parts. We’d also be thinking about the demo at the end of the sprint during sprint planning to make sure it was something we could show, and we collected what we needed along the way to show the value.
The end result was really positive feedback from everyone and even after a year our demos were very well attended. One manager with 30 years in the company showed up to one of our demos and said it was the best presentation he had ever seen at the company. The little things really matter to give a good impression at the end of the day.
When most people make a slide deck, they are doing it as an obligation to check a box, and it sucks. In my view, if we couldn’t properly explain to our stakeholders what it is we did and why it mattered, we might as well not do anything at all. Those demos were our public image to the organization and that was how people would see and judge us. In many ways, the demos mattered more than the work itself, and needed the same care (or more). Much like people judging the cleanliness of a restaurant’s kitchen by how clean the bathrooms are, the quality and inner workings of the team are judged by the demos. Lazy PowerPoints are indicative of issues throughout the team.
My current team (I’m an individual contributor on it) has garbage presentations put together by a lazy person, and it shows. I hate it. No one really knows what we do, and someone just got laid off for failing to properly explain the value of what he was working on to leadership. Poor presentations, and direct leadership not making this a priority, cost him his job as far as I can tell. Prior to the layoffs, he was very outspoken about our lack of quality demo and tried to champion making things better, as did I to some degree, but we got zero support, and I was explicitly told not to step in and help.
So yeah, it’s not PowerPoint, it’s the people who are being tasked with making most of them and their mental framework behind what they’re doing.
so true, but they can also be good for "overviews/shallow introductions"
the main issue is that some presentation programs are just way to clunky to use them for use cases like 6 times a year with low time investment create shallow introduction presentation (without needing to spend a lot of time to "learn" how to use the tool, that wouldn't be worth it for 6 times a year)
so outside of "selling" (or conferences etc.) the introduction/shallow overview point kinda dies, too.
As a side note how the f* did MS manage to make (web) Powerpoint in their Office360 suite so bad?
It's wild to me that the use of PP and being prepared are held up as antithetical. I don't see how the practices at Amazon aren't in service of the real problem with meetings: they're too often used for information transfer vs. problem solving. You can't expect people to have anything of value to say when you do the "big reveal" (often via the PP wall of text) and then immediately ask them to solution. I see this ALL THE TIME, including a recent meeting at work where the findings of a consultant - including this fact - were shown to everyone for the first time before we immediately jumped into a brainstorming session.
Saying "no PP" is the same as saying no to whiteboards, or taking notes or sync meetings, or any tool/process that can be mis-used. I went to business school so essentially have a Bachelor of PowerPoint degree, and one of the few-I-mean-great truths it left me was the hard work to make a good presentation; it's a different medium that most just phone-in with some quick copy & paste. I believe the process at Amazon is addressing the fact that everyone is very busy, and if they just start the meeting it's low-quality "advice-style" contributions, so it's better to eat the cost of waiting for everyone to read. This itself feels like a leadership trick that's actually for the executives who are too busy to consume everything async, but it seems better than the alternative for Amazon. I imagine it too is gamed, with people preparing before hand, then pretending to see memos for the first time yet having amazing, well-tought-out strategies ready to propose.
nothing grinds my gears more than "management wisdom" like this and people who then attribute success to small details like that.
amazon could have thrived the same way had they used powerpoint, maybe even more. we will never know. also, different people communicate differently. dictating 6-pagers makes you select for people who prefer that, therefore having less diversity in thinking.
On the other hand having people at the beginning of the meeting to spend e.g 20 minutes reading and fully focusing on evaluating the proposal sounds really good, let's be honest.
It is easier to ask good questions and provide arguments for and against if you had time to think instead of trying to do it "at fly"
Nobody pre-reads documents except in the course of writing the document, so the 20min focus time (I’ve seen this go to 40min sometimes) is really a blessing.
And it’s not just “management wisdom”- it’s “intentional culture”.
I felt that Amazon was a little creepy and maybe even a little cultish when I first started because of the intentionality of culture. They are very intentional about many aspects of corporate culture and the internal jargon continuously reinforces that. For example, you hear references to the leadership principles all the time (every day) and people will regularly use the term “Amazonian” when describing whether actions align with the cultural norms or not. But altogether it works and was a very interesting place to have worked.
They have their own dysfunctions, but I think that the way they manage their corporate culture intentionally is a good thing.
- presentations inherently have a friction between them being fluent and them being detailed (to some degree that is why they work so well for sells, they make it easy to gloss over the parts you don't want attention on without having to worry someone claims you try to deceive them (if you don't overdo it))
- different people often have different stacks/focus points, so they need more details in different parts of an presentation. In a paper and similar you can decide what part you focus one and which you might skim over.
- language is ambiguous and concise precise writing is hard, presentations kind make that worse by a large factor (purely voice presentations even more so) (like I have seen way to often people leaving a meeting all thinking they have an agreement, but all heaving a subtle but in very important points different understanding).
- theoretically if you do a presentation right you anyway should have a handout with all presentation points + references + some additional details/footnotes etc. The approach described here basically say oh we have that anyway, then let's not bother with the presentation.
in general presentation have good use cases, like selling, shallow overviews, introductions, pitching a vague idea without deciding on implementing them
but for meetings which are about making decisions the traditional presentation approach is in my experience just very risk and backfires very often
I'm not so sure about that. Specifically in the case of PowerPoint (or decks in general really) distilling ideas down to 4 bullet points that are 6 words each means you lose a lot of detail. People will fill those gaps with their own assumptions. That leads to a lot of confusion.
Jeff isn't really anyi-powerpoint. He's pro-detail. Rather than a deck he asks people to share a doc, and has time in meetings to make sure everyone has read it.
I wouldn't be that surprised if people having the same understanding of goals, projects, and ideas in detail had a material impact on Amazon's success. It leads to much better collaboration and far less waste.
The point of PowerPoint isn’t to have a bunch of detail, it’s basically to provide the outline, visuals, and key points, while the presenter fleshes that out with all the details by presenting it. A PowerPoint deck on its own isn’t that valuable. The value comes from pairing it with the speech.
If you have an excessive amount or technical details, then having everything writing down and distributed to similarly technical people is probably the better way to go.
It’s important to know your audience and what you’re trying to convey to them. Adapt as needed to best solve for that.
While it’s much faster to create presentations today with AI, every time I’ve worked with PowerPoint on my own and especially SharePoint PPTs, it’s been a massive waste of time.
However, I’ve only seen a doc presented on big screen in a large company meeting once. It worked, but looked unprepared. I assume that the alternative is sending out the memo ahead of time and then just discussing it?
Amazon's method was that you hand out hard copies of the doc at the start of the meeting and everyone reads the doc in silence for the first ~15 minutes. Once everyone has read the doc, then discussion starts.
but also PowerPoint (the product) is kinda terrible at allowing you to efficiently, low time investment create presentations for am internal meeting which then get discarded. And the web version is even worse.
This wisdom is at least certainly more true than claiming the inverse, which is a good indicator. Would amazon be what it is now if everything was powerpoints? It would almost certainly be significantly worse in many areas.
The point about bullet points being trash low effort ways to give information without rigorous thought is self evidently true.
Anyone who is considerate in how they formulate questions before seeking answers will tell you the same thing - often the dedicated formulation of the question leads directly to the answer. By just the same way, giving a full and complete answer can reveal to you a question - which may unravel and destroy your answer, or change the course of your idea.
I feel like the article did not (the irony!) properly explain itself; I made a more detailed explanation of what they're trying to say in another place[1] in this discussion.
Perhaps, but at my current place I think we have suffered a lot from powerpoint thinking. It's basically impossible for us to look back at past information and make sense of it, because it's all powerpoint presentations which were intended to be given by someone who had the info fresh in their mind. It also encourages quite a loose form of thinking about something, compared to having to write a proper report with a well-presented argument: I'm trying to encourage people to put in the effort, and when I do so myself, I often find myself correcting my own errors just in the process of writing such a report, even if no-one else reads it.
It was a long-standing policy of Bezos to force this approach to explaining your ideas and I think it had contributed a great deal to Amazon's success. For all the complaints about Bezos, one cannot deny he actively built that company and is far from your typical corporate, employed manager, who spills their perls of wisdom on Linked. You see, powerpoint can be a great tool, but it can and will be misused by your typical grifter. Why explain a concept in detail and expose it for discussion, when you can tack on a few vague lines in combination with a few cool pictures and please the so-called 'reptilian brain'? I suspect the liberal usage of powerpoint enables the current dominance of grifters accross tech, and consequently causes a reduction in overall quality of the product (or service).
The navy seals have been on successful missions and they basically only use PowerPoint for meetings , at least the last time I read a book written by someone senior in the leadership…
You're missing the fundamental point. Early Amazon succeeded because it created an evangelical corporate culture of (my words) not permitting inane bullshit, falsity, dress-up, and cargo culting to infect its communications and processes. The Leadership Principles were set up as an intentional immune system to stave off what we now call enshittification. The rigid document and meeting structures were set up to focus on the facts and details rather than fonts and colors and theater.
All of that is orthogonal to diversity in thinking. I spent nearly a decade at Amazon, and I encountered a great deal of diverse thought and communication styles; the systems enhanced that, rather than suppressed it. As long as the baseline standards of clarity, factuality, and logic were upheld, people were free to make arbitrarily creative arguments. Standing in front of a 50-word powerpoint slide with colors and reciting it would not have improved anyone's thought process or enlightened the audience any faster or better.
- you anyway have to create some non presentation handout; there is always a high risks of people having subtle misunderstandings about details and without handout they have no good place to double check after the meeting/in a follow up meeting etc.
- having long "seemingly" productive meetings with everyone leaving with slightly, but highly problematic, different opinions is the norm. Purely speaking based meetings tends to do this the worst, but power-point meetings have that issue too pretty badly as there is friction between a nice presentation and delivering subtle, but important, details
- different people need different times for different facts/parts of the presentation (e.g. because they are different stake holders with different concerns), but presentations have only one time progression
To some degree this points are why power point is so good for "selling" as you can take advantage of them to make a harder for the sales target to grasp the drawbacks you might want to gloss over.
It's also why it's fine in a shallow introduction, it's a) shallow anyway, and b) an introduction so always needs to be followed up if relevant for you.
Now you don't have to make a 6 page paper, but some source everyone can progress and focus on in their own peace where people can focus or gloss over on details as they find relevant is a pretty good idea.
Similar a 6-pager shouldn't be some time intensive supper well written paper with only text. It can (often should) have graphics, and diagram, etc. And there shouldn't be much scrutiny on how "perfectly" this is written or layed out.
And expecting: 1) some very basic ad-hoc writing skill, 2) some very basic reading comprehension/speed skill, you could say in general the skill set needed to read scientific papers and reasonably low effort create drafts in that direction is something you should be able to require in a leading/senior position. This has pretty much nothing to do with variety of mindset and similar. I'm saying that as a dyslexic person not good at any of that who has some form of attention deficit disorder. Because you know just because something isn't your strength doesn't mean you can't learn it to a _basic_ level.
IMHO there is only a problem if they expect a masterfully prefect grammar/spelling everything paper with only dense text to be written ad-hoc very every single meeting multiple times a day or similar.
Such advice is mainly useful politically; e.g., suppose you are having a dispute in your company about the overuse of presentations. Point to Jeff Bezos and say: he hates them too! if your adversary is an MBA type, he might find it challenging to respond.
Here's another version of the idea. All healthy k8s clusters are within the same healthy range, but there are many dimensions on which a cluster can be not healthy.
prove that? There are many more ways to be wrong if the question is something uninteresting like how many pennies are there in this jar, sure, but if the question is something interesting maybe there are the same amount of ways to be wrong or right, however there is, in my experience, a statistical likelihood that wrong answers converge on a few common idiotic ideas.
Relatively clever people will also converge on a number of statistically likely right answers, but I think the really bright people will find right answers nobody else ever suspected and which the moderately intelligent will say "that can't be right, can it?!?", and the really stupid people will still be inside the list of common stupid answers but probably focused on the ones that even moderately intelligent people will think, "huh that has to be wrong".
on edit: I probably should amend that to may find right answers that nobody else ever suspected, sometimes there may be a right answer that is the best right answer among the set of acceptable right answers, although that makes it a less interesting question I suspect.
For any question, there are nearly an infinite number of statements that either do not apply or make some error in fact, judgement, or conclusion. There are many more ways to be wrong. There will always be more answers that are beyond the context of any given question that we can lump into wrong.
Wrongness even has more categories:
- Fails to address premise
- Contradicts premise
- Fails to match goals
- Cannot be understood
- Makes claims not in evidence
- Based on claims not in evidence
- Is deliberately false
- Assumes impossible outcomes
- Assumes impossible preconditions
- Is untimely
- ...
"What should we do to pass the time?"
"We could go hang ourselves..."
You list three categories of being "right" for an answer, but each one has narrower possibilities than the next: Pragmatic (immediate), strategic, and innovative (novel solution). Each of these categories has fewer possible formulations than the categories for being wrong.
There will be many negative comments here so let me add a positive: writing helps you think. More so than making ppt. My guess that it is helpful in some cases to force this level of detailed thought.
The purpose of presenting isn't for you, it's for audiences. The thought process or lack of it will happen either way, and can be accomplished either way.
Not really a counterpoint, but a “yes, and”: I’ve often made an “internal” presentation that is mostly for myself and maybe a few others, which distills the key concepts of something into a coherent narrative. While it can help others, I also have found the process of creating a presentation, outline, or summary helps me to properly organize (and sometimes change) my thoughts at least as much as it helps convey those thoughts to others.
While disliking most of Jeff Bezo's philosophy including "leadership principles" nonsense, I agree with this hard. Docs/memos are just better. Too bad it's all PowerPoint at my company, and in some cases, we would already have internal document as "formal specs", then create a separate PowerPoint file for review discussions. Any modification is done twice. This is just ridiculous.
One thing I don't see mentioned: in internal technical presentations, I often find myself working hard to make something fit into one PowerPoint slide or manage the layout, and think about whether something should be on slide A or slide B. All of that is just time wasted, and a problem that does not exist with docs (mostly).
I hate Powerpoint, it's pointless. It forces linear flow, when in a meeting presenting ideas, linear flow works against being clear, presenting new ideas to people with the authority to stop and ask clarifying questions from earlier. Far too often, a presenter interrupted and asked to reverse their presentation gets discombobulated and the presentation goes south.
For this reason, almost 30 years ago, I abandoned PowerPoint and I only use web browsers and web pages, with links on the pages providing non-linear flow through the material. I can be as verbose or high level as the audience desires, and the presentation material works regardless.
I really don't understand why this perspective is not more widespread. Anytime I discuss it with someone that does presentations for a living, they act like the sun just rose for the first time.
I agree in terms to how it's mostly used. I think PowerPoint can be PowerFul when it's used as a visual tool to explain things that need complex diagrams.
However those situations aren't that common. And even when they occur the person making the ppt might not have the skill to design it properly, it needs some graphical design chops and ppt is a pretty poor graphical tool with a ton of nasty quirks.
But how I see it mostly used is for endless rows of standard template slides full of text. This is where the term death by PowerPoint comes from.
The site appears to be down. HM hug of death, maybe?
Writing isn't just communication—it's a thinking tool that forces clarity and precision. Yet I still get pushback when advocating for written narratives over slide decks in technical decision-making. Writing is frequently considered "extra work" :(
I feel like this is like only reading fiction and then deciding that "books are only for lying" or only seeing Mr. Beast videos on YouTube and deciding YouTube is only brainrot
People should figure out what works in a given situation. Sometimes a PowerPoint is the right tool, sometimes not. Blanket rules, “X is bad,” just close options.
Same for schools. We only had one teacher use the shiny new digital projector regularly and his lessons were a complete waste of time. Now it's the default lesson format, it seems. Good for teachers, as you can just recycle the same slides forever, good for admins as you can see the teacher's lessons via email, good for schools because it looks high tech, so it must be good, but on average, crap for learning. Not least, everyone is watching the screen, not the teacher.
Even acetate-based overhead projectors and premade transparencies are better than just clicking though slides. If you worry about facing the class while teaching, and OHPs the modern solution is ones that have a camera facing down and you draw on paper are quite neat and a lot less bulky.
I'm not talking about the occasional video or animation or detailed drawing, obviously there are good things you can put up on a high-res digital screen. But most slideshows are just "click, narrate, click, narrate".
True, but OHP lessons are somehow still a lot more interactive than clicking through bullet points one at a time (not that all PowerPoint lessons are like that, but lots are).
Maybe it's simply the physical act of changing the sheet, but my memory of the lessons was that they played a much smaller part in the lesson than a PowerPoint usually does in a PowerPoint lesson (and later lecture).
Blaming the tool for poor/lazy use of it is a cheap and easy attack.
At the end of the day PowerPoint is nothing special, it's just that many people start preparing a topic/subject by making bullet lists. If you're lazy, your job is done: you copy 1to1 that list into a sequence of slides and call it a day.
If you're slightly less lazy, you might look for images/graphs/content from somewhere else to support your presentation.
Everything changes when you regard the slides as being 100% for the audience and not for you, the speaker. That's when you start thinking about the UX of that, putting yourself into the shoe of who's forced to sit through what you're trying to deliver.
But again, blaming the tool is easy and doesn't address the root cause: many people who give presentations, either don't want to give them (someone might have told them that they must) or they do it purely for themselves (or don't really care about the audience).
It's not a "lazy attack" on the tool, but rather the fact that presentations are mostly used for a unidirectional storytelling and thus most typically suited for all-hands or sales meetings with a specific agenda that is meant to be accepted without discussion or argumentation.
For design documents, strategy discussions and the like, it is very useful for both the author/presenter to be able to think through the entire thing and present it as a consistent, interconnected document that does not lend itself to a list of bullet points; bullet points typically imply that there is a cutoff between the individual concepts being addressed, whereas things often occupy some position in the latent space and it is helpful to be able for authors to find inconsistencies in their reasoning, discovering new ways of doing things, and for other reviewers to be able to validate the presented reasoning and data points and reach the same conclusion as a way of ensuring that the document is in fact, correct, and thus arrive at an agreement regarding the topic at hand.
There are many organizations which mostly see document writing as a way to satisfy the bureaucratic machine, and therefore reasoning often turns out to be not as important. These places love presentations; and in an ironic twist, the very blog we're discussing offers such a product that is mostly aimed at said bureaucracies.
I think this sentence in the article (and quote from Jeff) says it all: "PowerPoint is really designed to persuade. It's kind of a sales tool".
And by Powerpoint, Jeff I believe refers to the concept of slides, and not the tool itself.
> And by Powerpoint, Jeff I believe refers to the concept of slides, and not the tool itself.
pretty sure about that
but also every time I have to use PowerPoint instead of some other tools for presentations I'm surprised how bad it somehow is (at least the Office360 web version)
I think Jeff Bezos is not blaming the tool, but rather the concept of Powerpoint/slides and how people usually communicate when they are using that tool. As an example, Powerpoint is really a tool for selling, and internally in the company the last thing you want is to sell, as you want to hear opinions, open a discussion, encourage questions, and wonder your way as a team to a solution.
I actually worked at a company where someone’s job was to just make nice Power Point presentations. I’m not being facetious, that’s how the guys actually described his role as.
Jeff Bezos doesn't belive in toilet breaks or healthy working environments either... when is the next clickbait "Billionaire c*t does this, maybe you should too?" article?
When I watch conference recordings from CCC, Defcon, Black Hat, GDC, etc., "powerpoints" (slidedecks) work just fine for me, I'm highly engaged for hours on end. Maybe it's not the format that's the issue but the content, and PPT is just being scapegoated?
In a way, even most high quality YouTube content is little more than a presentation.
FYI, site is down, so this is only in reaction to the title. Likely the only valid excuse for ever doing so.
In many ways they are showcases or demos. They are meant to convey author's viewpoints. There is a set narrative. Unlike the memos mentioned here, they are not drafts that need to be reviewed closely or discussed in meetings.
Good slides are hard to create. It is much easier to write you presentation out in slide format, which makes for bad presentations (but if someone misses you can send them the slides - which won't help for good slides)
I think your point and examples are addressed by this quote from the article:
""PowerPoint is really designed to persuade. It's kind of a sales tool," Bezos explained. "Internally, the last thing you want to do is sell. You want to be truth-seeking. You're trying to find truth.""
A lot of people are really bad at making slide decks, and PowerPoint often is the lazy presenters tool of choice, so it falls on the sword.
When I was last leading a team we prepared extensively for our demos. We used PowerPoint, as everyone did, but we reviewed the deck several times as a team, moving things 1 pixel this way or that way to make sure everything was lined up perfectly. If someone was getting into the weeds, we’d pull them out. If someone was talking about what they did instead of how it related to the user, we’d redirect their focus to make sure the presentation would be meaningful to the audience. If we were handing off between people, we’d practice that so it was smooth without and fumbling or people not knowing how to share a screen. We would spread this out over 3 separate meetings with time between for people to tweak and tune their parts. We’d also be thinking about the demo at the end of the sprint during sprint planning to make sure it was something we could show, and we collected what we needed along the way to show the value.
The end result was really positive feedback from everyone and even after a year our demos were very well attended. One manager with 30 years in the company showed up to one of our demos and said it was the best presentation he had ever seen at the company. The little things really matter to give a good impression at the end of the day.
When most people make a slide deck, they are doing it as an obligation to check a box, and it sucks. In my view, if we couldn’t properly explain to our stakeholders what it is we did and why it mattered, we might as well not do anything at all. Those demos were our public image to the organization and that was how people would see and judge us. In many ways, the demos mattered more than the work itself, and needed the same care (or more). Much like people judging the cleanliness of a restaurant’s kitchen by how clean the bathrooms are, the quality and inner workings of the team are judged by the demos. Lazy PowerPoints are indicative of issues throughout the team.
My current team (I’m an individual contributor on it) has garbage presentations put together by a lazy person, and it shows. I hate it. No one really knows what we do, and someone just got laid off for failing to properly explain the value of what he was working on to leadership. Poor presentations, and direct leadership not making this a priority, cost him his job as far as I can tell. Prior to the layoffs, he was very outspoken about our lack of quality demo and tried to champion making things better, as did I to some degree, but we got zero support, and I was explicitly told not to step in and help.
So yeah, it’s not PowerPoint, it’s the people who are being tasked with making most of them and their mental framework behind what they’re doing.
> PowerPoint is for selling not truth seeking
so true, but they can also be good for "overviews/shallow introductions"
the main issue is that some presentation programs are just way to clunky to use them for use cases like 6 times a year with low time investment create shallow introduction presentation (without needing to spend a lot of time to "learn" how to use the tool, that wouldn't be worth it for 6 times a year)
so outside of "selling" (or conferences etc.) the introduction/shallow overview point kinda dies, too.
As a side note how the f* did MS manage to make (web) Powerpoint in their Office360 suite so bad?
It's wild to me that the use of PP and being prepared are held up as antithetical. I don't see how the practices at Amazon aren't in service of the real problem with meetings: they're too often used for information transfer vs. problem solving. You can't expect people to have anything of value to say when you do the "big reveal" (often via the PP wall of text) and then immediately ask them to solution. I see this ALL THE TIME, including a recent meeting at work where the findings of a consultant - including this fact - were shown to everyone for the first time before we immediately jumped into a brainstorming session.
Saying "no PP" is the same as saying no to whiteboards, or taking notes or sync meetings, or any tool/process that can be mis-used. I went to business school so essentially have a Bachelor of PowerPoint degree, and one of the few-I-mean-great truths it left me was the hard work to make a good presentation; it's a different medium that most just phone-in with some quick copy & paste. I believe the process at Amazon is addressing the fact that everyone is very busy, and if they just start the meeting it's low-quality "advice-style" contributions, so it's better to eat the cost of waiting for everyone to read. This itself feels like a leadership trick that's actually for the executives who are too busy to consume everything async, but it seems better than the alternative for Amazon. I imagine it too is gamed, with people preparing before hand, then pretending to see memos for the first time yet having amazing, well-tought-out strategies ready to propose.
nothing grinds my gears more than "management wisdom" like this and people who then attribute success to small details like that.
amazon could have thrived the same way had they used powerpoint, maybe even more. we will never know. also, different people communicate differently. dictating 6-pagers makes you select for people who prefer that, therefore having less diversity in thinking.
On the other hand having people at the beginning of the meeting to spend e.g 20 minutes reading and fully focusing on evaluating the proposal sounds really good, let's be honest.
It is easier to ask good questions and provide arguments for and against if you had time to think instead of trying to do it "at fly"
Nobody pre-reads documents except in the course of writing the document, so the 20min focus time (I’ve seen this go to 40min sometimes) is really a blessing.
And it’s not just “management wisdom”- it’s “intentional culture”.
I felt that Amazon was a little creepy and maybe even a little cultish when I first started because of the intentionality of culture. They are very intentional about many aspects of corporate culture and the internal jargon continuously reinforces that. For example, you hear references to the leadership principles all the time (every day) and people will regularly use the term “Amazonian” when describing whether actions align with the cultural norms or not. But altogether it works and was a very interesting place to have worked.
They have their own dysfunctions, but I think that the way they manage their corporate culture intentionally is a good thing.
But someone giving a PowerPoint presentation is going to explain their power points.
Or is the problem that no presentations are made?
the problem is
- presentations inherently have a friction between them being fluent and them being detailed (to some degree that is why they work so well for sells, they make it easy to gloss over the parts you don't want attention on without having to worry someone claims you try to deceive them (if you don't overdo it))
- different people often have different stacks/focus points, so they need more details in different parts of an presentation. In a paper and similar you can decide what part you focus one and which you might skim over.
- language is ambiguous and concise precise writing is hard, presentations kind make that worse by a large factor (purely voice presentations even more so) (like I have seen way to often people leaving a meeting all thinking they have an agreement, but all heaving a subtle but in very important points different understanding).
- theoretically if you do a presentation right you anyway should have a handout with all presentation points + references + some additional details/footnotes etc. The approach described here basically say oh we have that anyway, then let's not bother with the presentation.
in general presentation have good use cases, like selling, shallow overviews, introductions, pitching a vague idea without deciding on implementing them
but for meetings which are about making decisions the traditional presentation approach is in my experience just very risk and backfires very often
Different people have different speed of analysis
Sometimes presentation moves too fast
I'm not so sure about that. Specifically in the case of PowerPoint (or decks in general really) distilling ideas down to 4 bullet points that are 6 words each means you lose a lot of detail. People will fill those gaps with their own assumptions. That leads to a lot of confusion.
Jeff isn't really anyi-powerpoint. He's pro-detail. Rather than a deck he asks people to share a doc, and has time in meetings to make sure everyone has read it.
I wouldn't be that surprised if people having the same understanding of goals, projects, and ideas in detail had a material impact on Amazon's success. It leads to much better collaboration and far less waste.
The point of PowerPoint isn’t to have a bunch of detail, it’s basically to provide the outline, visuals, and key points, while the presenter fleshes that out with all the details by presenting it. A PowerPoint deck on its own isn’t that valuable. The value comes from pairing it with the speech.
If you have an excessive amount or technical details, then having everything writing down and distributed to similarly technical people is probably the better way to go.
It’s important to know your audience and what you’re trying to convey to them. Adapt as needed to best solve for that.
> far less waste.
While it’s much faster to create presentations today with AI, every time I’ve worked with PowerPoint on my own and especially SharePoint PPTs, it’s been a massive waste of time.
However, I’ve only seen a doc presented on big screen in a large company meeting once. It worked, but looked unprepared. I assume that the alternative is sending out the memo ahead of time and then just discussing it?
Amazon's method was that you hand out hard copies of the doc at the start of the meeting and everyone reads the doc in silence for the first ~15 minutes. Once everyone has read the doc, then discussion starts.
in general I agree
but also PowerPoint (the product) is kinda terrible at allowing you to efficiently, low time investment create presentations for am internal meeting which then get discarded. And the web version is even worse.
This wisdom is at least certainly more true than claiming the inverse, which is a good indicator. Would amazon be what it is now if everything was powerpoints? It would almost certainly be significantly worse in many areas.
The point about bullet points being trash low effort ways to give information without rigorous thought is self evidently true.
Anyone who is considerate in how they formulate questions before seeking answers will tell you the same thing - often the dedicated formulation of the question leads directly to the answer. By just the same way, giving a full and complete answer can reveal to you a question - which may unravel and destroy your answer, or change the course of your idea.
I feel like the article did not (the irony!) properly explain itself; I made a more detailed explanation of what they're trying to say in another place[1] in this discussion.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44700553
Perhaps, but at my current place I think we have suffered a lot from powerpoint thinking. It's basically impossible for us to look back at past information and make sense of it, because it's all powerpoint presentations which were intended to be given by someone who had the info fresh in their mind. It also encourages quite a loose form of thinking about something, compared to having to write a proper report with a well-presented argument: I'm trying to encourage people to put in the effort, and when I do so myself, I often find myself correcting my own errors just in the process of writing such a report, even if no-one else reads it.
It was a long-standing policy of Bezos to force this approach to explaining your ideas and I think it had contributed a great deal to Amazon's success. For all the complaints about Bezos, one cannot deny he actively built that company and is far from your typical corporate, employed manager, who spills their perls of wisdom on Linked. You see, powerpoint can be a great tool, but it can and will be misused by your typical grifter. Why explain a concept in detail and expose it for discussion, when you can tack on a few vague lines in combination with a few cool pictures and please the so-called 'reptilian brain'? I suspect the liberal usage of powerpoint enables the current dominance of grifters accross tech, and consequently causes a reduction in overall quality of the product (or service).
Having less diversity in thinking is not always a downside, e.g. there are good reasons why companies administer approximations of IQ tests
Exactly. The best argument for me is the vast number of companies that have thrived with PowerPoint.
The navy seals have been on successful missions and they basically only use PowerPoint for meetings , at least the last time I read a book written by someone senior in the leadership…
You're missing the fundamental point. Early Amazon succeeded because it created an evangelical corporate culture of (my words) not permitting inane bullshit, falsity, dress-up, and cargo culting to infect its communications and processes. The Leadership Principles were set up as an intentional immune system to stave off what we now call enshittification. The rigid document and meeting structures were set up to focus on the facts and details rather than fonts and colors and theater.
All of that is orthogonal to diversity in thinking. I spent nearly a decade at Amazon, and I encountered a great deal of diverse thought and communication styles; the systems enhanced that, rather than suppressed it. As long as the baseline standards of clarity, factuality, and logic were upheld, people were free to make arbitrarily creative arguments. Standing in front of a 50-word powerpoint slide with colors and reciting it would not have improved anyone's thought process or enlightened the audience any faster or better.
Didn't early Amazon use doors for desks? Forget ergonomics, forget making sure tools are fit for purpose. Seems contradictory.
Deliberately avoiding a tool that typically results in superficial communications seems on point to me.
I don't think your reductio ad absurdum works here.
honestly in my experience with tech companies
- you anyway have to create some non presentation handout; there is always a high risks of people having subtle misunderstandings about details and without handout they have no good place to double check after the meeting/in a follow up meeting etc.
- having long "seemingly" productive meetings with everyone leaving with slightly, but highly problematic, different opinions is the norm. Purely speaking based meetings tends to do this the worst, but power-point meetings have that issue too pretty badly as there is friction between a nice presentation and delivering subtle, but important, details
- different people need different times for different facts/parts of the presentation (e.g. because they are different stake holders with different concerns), but presentations have only one time progression
To some degree this points are why power point is so good for "selling" as you can take advantage of them to make a harder for the sales target to grasp the drawbacks you might want to gloss over.
It's also why it's fine in a shallow introduction, it's a) shallow anyway, and b) an introduction so always needs to be followed up if relevant for you.
Now you don't have to make a 6 page paper, but some source everyone can progress and focus on in their own peace where people can focus or gloss over on details as they find relevant is a pretty good idea.
Similar a 6-pager shouldn't be some time intensive supper well written paper with only text. It can (often should) have graphics, and diagram, etc. And there shouldn't be much scrutiny on how "perfectly" this is written or layed out.
And expecting: 1) some very basic ad-hoc writing skill, 2) some very basic reading comprehension/speed skill, you could say in general the skill set needed to read scientific papers and reasonably low effort create drafts in that direction is something you should be able to require in a leading/senior position. This has pretty much nothing to do with variety of mindset and similar. I'm saying that as a dyslexic person not good at any of that who has some form of attention deficit disorder. Because you know just because something isn't your strength doesn't mean you can't learn it to a _basic_ level.
IMHO there is only a problem if they expect a masterfully prefect grammar/spelling everything paper with only dense text to be written ad-hoc very every single meeting multiple times a day or similar.
Such advice is mainly useful politically; e.g., suppose you are having a dispute in your company about the overuse of presentations. Point to Jeff Bezos and say: he hates them too! if your adversary is an MBA type, he might find it challenging to respond.
Not hiring morons also reduces diversity in thinking
can you show that intelligent people think alike?
This is a damn good point.
I suspect you're (implied, perhaps) correct, that not hiring morons increases diversity of thought. I certainly hope so.
"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
Not evidence but a good reference to this expectation.
that sentence is silly as saying all fed families are the same, all starving of hunger are starving in their own way
How so?
Here's another version of the idea. All healthy k8s clusters are within the same healthy range, but there are many dimensions on which a cluster can be not healthy.
there are many more ways to be wrong than there are to be right
Intelligent people are much more creative at finding new ways to be wrong.
That's not the kind of diversity we want
prove that? There are many more ways to be wrong if the question is something uninteresting like how many pennies are there in this jar, sure, but if the question is something interesting maybe there are the same amount of ways to be wrong or right, however there is, in my experience, a statistical likelihood that wrong answers converge on a few common idiotic ideas.
Relatively clever people will also converge on a number of statistically likely right answers, but I think the really bright people will find right answers nobody else ever suspected and which the moderately intelligent will say "that can't be right, can it?!?", and the really stupid people will still be inside the list of common stupid answers but probably focused on the ones that even moderately intelligent people will think, "huh that has to be wrong".
on edit: I probably should amend that to may find right answers that nobody else ever suspected, sometimes there may be a right answer that is the best right answer among the set of acceptable right answers, although that makes it a less interesting question I suspect.
For any question, there are nearly an infinite number of statements that either do not apply or make some error in fact, judgement, or conclusion. There are many more ways to be wrong. There will always be more answers that are beyond the context of any given question that we can lump into wrong.
Wrongness even has more categories:
- Fails to address premise
- Contradicts premise
- Fails to match goals
- Cannot be understood
- Makes claims not in evidence
- Based on claims not in evidence
- Is deliberately false
- Assumes impossible outcomes
- Assumes impossible preconditions
- Is untimely
- ...
"What should we do to pass the time?"
"We could go hang ourselves..."
You list three categories of being "right" for an answer, but each one has narrower possibilities than the next: Pragmatic (immediate), strategic, and innovative (novel solution). Each of these categories has fewer possible formulations than the categories for being wrong.
you obviously never worked there to write, the amount of morons surpasses like random DMV office in a random state :)
There will be many negative comments here so let me add a positive: writing helps you think. More so than making ppt. My guess that it is helpful in some cases to force this level of detailed thought.
The purpose of presenting isn't for you, it's for audiences. The thought process or lack of it will happen either way, and can be accomplished either way.
Not really a counterpoint, but a “yes, and”: I’ve often made an “internal” presentation that is mostly for myself and maybe a few others, which distills the key concepts of something into a coherent narrative. While it can help others, I also have found the process of creating a presentation, outline, or summary helps me to properly organize (and sometimes change) my thoughts at least as much as it helps convey those thoughts to others.
This looks like low quality ChatGPT based content marketing.
They should hire you to be an AI-spotter.
While disliking most of Jeff Bezo's philosophy including "leadership principles" nonsense, I agree with this hard. Docs/memos are just better. Too bad it's all PowerPoint at my company, and in some cases, we would already have internal document as "formal specs", then create a separate PowerPoint file for review discussions. Any modification is done twice. This is just ridiculous.
One thing I don't see mentioned: in internal technical presentations, I often find myself working hard to make something fit into one PowerPoint slide or manage the layout, and think about whether something should be on slide A or slide B. All of that is just time wasted, and a problem that does not exist with docs (mostly).
I hate Powerpoint, it's pointless. It forces linear flow, when in a meeting presenting ideas, linear flow works against being clear, presenting new ideas to people with the authority to stop and ask clarifying questions from earlier. Far too often, a presenter interrupted and asked to reverse their presentation gets discombobulated and the presentation goes south.
For this reason, almost 30 years ago, I abandoned PowerPoint and I only use web browsers and web pages, with links on the pages providing non-linear flow through the material. I can be as verbose or high level as the audience desires, and the presentation material works regardless.
I really don't understand why this perspective is not more widespread. Anytime I discuss it with someone that does presentations for a living, they act like the sun just rose for the first time.
I agree in terms to how it's mostly used. I think PowerPoint can be PowerFul when it's used as a visual tool to explain things that need complex diagrams.
However those situations aren't that common. And even when they occur the person making the ppt might not have the skill to design it properly, it needs some graphical design chops and ppt is a pretty poor graphical tool with a ton of nasty quirks.
But how I see it mostly used is for endless rows of standard template slides full of text. This is where the term death by PowerPoint comes from.
You can embed diagrams in documents too. Every scientific paper does this
Yes but Word is also terrible for designing diagrams.
Insert one line of text above it and everything gets kicked out of whack.
The site appears to be down. HM hug of death, maybe?
Writing isn't just communication—it's a thinking tool that forces clarity and precision. Yet I still get pushback when advocating for written narratives over slide decks in technical decision-making. Writing is frequently considered "extra work" :(
I was even so frustrated that I've put together https://www.bobek.cz/written-narratives/
This doesn't sound like anything new, see Edward Tufte on the Columbia disaster and the role powerpoint played there.
I feel like this is like only reading fiction and then deciding that "books are only for lying" or only seeing Mr. Beast videos on YouTube and deciding YouTube is only brainrot
People should figure out what works in a given situation. Sometimes a PowerPoint is the right tool, sometimes not. Blanket rules, “X is bad,” just close options.
I have to agree, the most painful and uninformative meetings I have been at all have one thing in common, powerpoint.
Best meetings, no presentations and they get into details. His rule/method interests me.
Same for schools. We only had one teacher use the shiny new digital projector regularly and his lessons were a complete waste of time. Now it's the default lesson format, it seems. Good for teachers, as you can just recycle the same slides forever, good for admins as you can see the teacher's lessons via email, good for schools because it looks high tech, so it must be good, but on average, crap for learning. Not least, everyone is watching the screen, not the teacher.
Even acetate-based overhead projectors and premade transparencies are better than just clicking though slides. If you worry about facing the class while teaching, and OHPs the modern solution is ones that have a camera facing down and you draw on paper are quite neat and a lot less bulky.
I'm not talking about the occasional video or animation or detailed drawing, obviously there are good things you can put up on a high-res digital screen. But most slideshows are just "click, narrate, click, narrate".
> you can just recycle the same slides forever,
This has been true since overhead projectors were invented.
True, but OHP lessons are somehow still a lot more interactive than clicking through bullet points one at a time (not that all PowerPoint lessons are like that, but lots are).
Maybe it's simply the physical act of changing the sheet, but my memory of the lessons was that they played a much smaller part in the lesson than a PowerPoint usually does in a PowerPoint lesson (and later lecture).
How much content can you remember in 30 minutes powerpoint demo?
The reasoning is sound and coherent
Blaming the tool for poor/lazy use of it is a cheap and easy attack.
At the end of the day PowerPoint is nothing special, it's just that many people start preparing a topic/subject by making bullet lists. If you're lazy, your job is done: you copy 1to1 that list into a sequence of slides and call it a day.
If you're slightly less lazy, you might look for images/graphs/content from somewhere else to support your presentation.
Everything changes when you regard the slides as being 100% for the audience and not for you, the speaker. That's when you start thinking about the UX of that, putting yourself into the shoe of who's forced to sit through what you're trying to deliver.
But again, blaming the tool is easy and doesn't address the root cause: many people who give presentations, either don't want to give them (someone might have told them that they must) or they do it purely for themselves (or don't really care about the audience).
It's not a "lazy attack" on the tool, but rather the fact that presentations are mostly used for a unidirectional storytelling and thus most typically suited for all-hands or sales meetings with a specific agenda that is meant to be accepted without discussion or argumentation.
For design documents, strategy discussions and the like, it is very useful for both the author/presenter to be able to think through the entire thing and present it as a consistent, interconnected document that does not lend itself to a list of bullet points; bullet points typically imply that there is a cutoff between the individual concepts being addressed, whereas things often occupy some position in the latent space and it is helpful to be able for authors to find inconsistencies in their reasoning, discovering new ways of doing things, and for other reviewers to be able to validate the presented reasoning and data points and reach the same conclusion as a way of ensuring that the document is in fact, correct, and thus arrive at an agreement regarding the topic at hand.
There are many organizations which mostly see document writing as a way to satisfy the bureaucratic machine, and therefore reasoning often turns out to be not as important. These places love presentations; and in an ironic twist, the very blog we're discussing offers such a product that is mostly aimed at said bureaucracies.
I think this sentence in the article (and quote from Jeff) says it all: "PowerPoint is really designed to persuade. It's kind of a sales tool". And by Powerpoint, Jeff I believe refers to the concept of slides, and not the tool itself.
> And by Powerpoint, Jeff I believe refers to the concept of slides, and not the tool itself.
pretty sure about that
but also every time I have to use PowerPoint instead of some other tools for presentations I'm surprised how bad it somehow is (at least the Office360 web version)
I think Jeff Bezos is not blaming the tool, but rather the concept of Powerpoint/slides and how people usually communicate when they are using that tool. As an example, Powerpoint is really a tool for selling, and internally in the company the last thing you want is to sell, as you want to hear opinions, open a discussion, encourage questions, and wonder your way as a team to a solution.
I don't think you get the article's point at all, almost like you only read the title but not the content.
While the site is down:
What are the alternatives?
Word.
Amazon were making so much money that all non executive employees could not make a mistake that could not be trivially corrected.
Every meeting decision point was either correct or a rounding error cost and quick firing for incompetence.
It’s why ex-Amazon is the 2x resume line to look for even now.
I actually worked at a company where someone’s job was to just make nice Power Point presentations. I’m not being facetious, that’s how the guys actually described his role as.
Advertorial.
Site getting the HN hug of death?
Jeff Bezos doesn't belive in toilet breaks or healthy working environments either... when is the next clickbait "Billionaire c*t does this, maybe you should too?" article?
Surprise, this article is not a clickbait, but full of good arguments that people agree with.
Having sat thriugh an AWS team PowerPoint I’m not sure I believe this.
Bezos hasn't been there for years and AWS was always given pretty wide latitude to differ from retail Amazon under jassy even when he CEO
3.5 years at Amazon the only PowerPoints I saw were intern presentations
I work for a big enterprise customer. We get them.
Usually a good time to get some work done.