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Jeff Bezos doesn't believe in PowerPoint, and his employees agree

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Re: Jeff Bezos doesn't believe in PowerPoint, and his employees agree

#21

Post by mytailorisrich »

perching_aix wrote: post #9

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 v…

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.""

Re: Jeff Bezos doesn't believe in PowerPoint, and his employees agree

#22

Post by rs186 »

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).

Re: Jeff Bezos doesn't believe in PowerPoint, and his employees agree

#23

Post by bluGill »

perching_aix wrote: post #9

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 v…

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)

Re: Jeff Bezos doesn't believe in PowerPoint, and his employees agree

#24

Post by supriyo-biswas »

xandrius wrote: post #12

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 prese…

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.

Re: Jeff Bezos doesn't believe in PowerPoint, and his employees agree

#26

Post by tester756 »

malthaus wrote: post #14

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"

Re: Jeff Bezos doesn't believe in PowerPoint, and his employees agree

#27

Post by rs186 »

perching_aix wrote: post #9

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 v…

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.

Re: Jeff Bezos doesn't believe in PowerPoint, and his employees agree

#28

Post by bryanrasmussen »

flappyeagle wrote: post #16
malthaus wrote: post #14

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.

Not hiring morons also reduces diversity in thinking

can you show that intelligent people think alike?

Re: Jeff Bezos doesn't believe in PowerPoint, and his employees agree

#29

Post by onion2k »

malthaus wrote: post #14

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.

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.

Re: Jeff Bezos doesn't believe in PowerPoint, and his employees agree

#30

Post by setgree »

malthaus wrote: post #14

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.

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.
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