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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

#41

Post by grues-dinner »

jmclnx wrote: post #4

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".

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

#42

Post by supriyo-biswas »

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 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

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

#43

Post by crinkly »

laidoffamazon wrote: post #3
crinkly wrote: post #2

Having sat thriugh an AWS team PowerPoint I’m not sure I believe this.

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.

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

#44

Post by flappyeagle »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #28
flappyeagle wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not hiring morons also reduces diversity in thinking

can you show that intelligent people think alike?

there are many more ways to be wrong than there are to be right

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

#45

Post by bsenftner »

rs186 wrote: post #22

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…

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.

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

#47

Post by chistev »

tester756 wrote: post #26
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"

But someone giving a PowerPoint presentation is going to explain their power points.

Or is the problem that no presentations are made?

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

#48

Post by drflorl »

onion2k wrote: post #29
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…

> 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?

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

#49

Post by felixgallo »

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.

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.

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

#50

Post by wkat4242 »

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.

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