Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint”
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Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint”
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Re: Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint”
#2I'm guessing you copy/pasted the title in from the blog but you should probably remove the CAPS.
I like this way of doing meetings, I haven't heard of anything similar before. Although I've always hated slide shows. Do I read the bullet points? Listen to the presenter? Does the presenter read the bullets and go into detail on each one? What does it mean if there is a bullet but the presenter doesn't mention it during the presentation? There's too much going on at once. A good slide show can work very well (using a slide to illustrate your point with a graph etc.) but most people can't create good slide shows.
Re: Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint”
#3This reminds me of when I was back in school and the instructor would have stuff in Powerpoint on the projector screen. It was only interesting when a photograph or image would be displayed (this was an East Asian history class) but the rest of the time was just me listening to him speak about the topic rather than paying attention to the slides at hand.
Why? Because he was pretty much just narrating what he already had on the screen.
I have always found that Powerpoint is useless for displaying anything in a meeting or seminar and yet I still find myself doing that when I myself choose to give a presentation. Additionally, I have yet to see anything that replaces it well enough that also mimics the speed and simplicity of the application, and I also find more value in just listening to the person rather than seeing what is on the screen.
Re: Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint”
#4Should the title of the article match the visual type of the article... or ignore the 'text-transform: uppercase' css. I vote the latter :-)
Re: Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint”
#5This reminds me of when I was back in school and the instructor would have stuff in Powerpoint on the projector screen. It was only interesting when a photograph or image would be displayed (this was an East Asian history class) but the rest of the time was just me listening to him speak about the topic rather than paying attention to the slides at hand. Why? Because he was pretty much just narrating what he already…
I had so many professors that just read me the powerpoints. I would literally miss nothing from the lecture if I just downloaded the slides after every class, but no, attendance was mandatory. Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy to know that I'm still paying off an education I could've gotten most of by reading a few pages of bullet points every week.
Re: Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint”
#6Oh hey! This is exactly what Edward Tufte taught us at his course the other week. Now I'm curious as to who originated this practice...?
Re: Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint”
#7I'm not sure about just reading a six page memo out loud to everyone. That seems like a great thing to email to everyone. Some of my least favorite memories from college are the couple of classes I went to where the professor basically read the book to us. The difference is, I'm guessing, that attendance isn't optional at an Amazon meeting.
Personally I like keeping presentations on the short side - only using slide shows for ancillary data like citations (which I find awkward to fold into the flow of a speach) and graphical data. Unless something is really interesting or very important, it's only going to get 5-10 minutes of people's attention.
Re: Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint”
#8I'm guessing you copy/pasted the title in from the blog but you should probably remove the CAPS. I like this way of doing meetings, I haven't heard of anything similar before. Although I've always hated slide shows. Do I read the bullet points? Listen to the presenter? Does the presenter read the bullets and go into detail on each one? What does it mean if there is a bullet but the presenter doesn't mention it during…
Not the OP, but the last time I submitted an article on HN, it auto corrected the title to match what the link said (which was much more vague than the title I gave). Perhaps HN auto corrects verbatim, including caps.
Re: Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint”
#9I don't think powerpoints are inherently bad, but they're misused enough that I wouldn't begrudge anyone who wanted to ban them outright.
The two best ways to use them, from experience, seem to be:
- Super dense slides. These slides have a lot of text and are information-rich. You're not expected to read them, and the presenter will just skim over them, presenting a high-level view of each topic, but definitely not reading off of the slides. The slides are there as a rough guide to the talk, and as an in-depth resource afterwards. - Super spare slides. These slides have few-to-no bullet points, and are heavy on pictures. They're pretty much there to guide the speaker's narrative, and nothing else. At worst, there might be an inherently visual data element, like a graph.
The common element being that the slides are there to guide the talk, not be the talk. The reason powerpoints are so reviled is because people tend to just write a speech, put a bullet point in front of each sentence, and read it off a projected slide.
Re: Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint”
#10Oh hey! This is exactly what Edward Tufte taught us at his course the other week. Now I'm curious as to who originated this practice...?
Don't know how old this is, but it has been there a good many years: http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/