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Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint”

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Re: Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint”

#71

Post by megablast »

webdisrupt wrote: post #60
kevinburke wrote: post #19

When I was in high school I tried to ban powerpoint, arguing that it inhibited our ability to grow as public speakers. I wrote Edward Tufte and told him about it and he shipped me 20 copies of "The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within" ( http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_pp ). Some teachers opposed it and I ended up losing. I'm sure Powerpoint was more convenient for them. I use deck.js fo…

I was so anti PowerPoint that I used to actually build presentations in Flash (im saying in the late 90s) so as to avoid using it. But most teachers would reject the option since traditionally everyone knew just about PowerPoint.

And it is a lot harder. And it misses the point of this article, and just replaces PP with something else producing slides.

Re: Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint”

#72

Post by hurfdurferson »

6d0debc071 wrote: post #51

All the meetings I do are voluntary. Most of the people who attend work with the problems in some way. Your time is incredibly valuable. If you're sitting there for 30 minutes while someone reads your memo, if you're getting everyone together in one place to read your memo, with all that implies for their schedules, then that's a waste of a lot of extremely important time for a lot of people. Meetings are for discuss…

But what's great about this system is that under this 6-page system meetings are voluntary AND important. Knowing in advance that a meeting will start with 30 minutes of intense scrutiny makes it much more likely that people will not schedule meetings unless a problem /deserves/ that scrutiny.

Re: Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint”

#73

Post by draugadrotten »

Maro wrote: post #49
kevinburke wrote: post #19

When I was in high school I tried to ban powerpoint, arguing that it inhibited our ability to grow as public speakers. I wrote Edward Tufte and told him about it and he shipped me 20 copies of "The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within" ( http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_pp ). Some teachers opposed it and I ended up losing. I'm sure Powerpoint was more convenient for them. I use deck.js fo…

Have you tried Prezi? http://prezi.com (I work there.)

Prezi looks good but only replaces boring bullet points with pretty bullet points.

To really focus the presentation to the speaker's voice I find that HAIKU DECK for iOS really removes bullet point syndrome. http://www.haikudeck.com/

(I don't work there.)

Re: Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint”

#74

Post by caw »

kevinburke wrote: post #19

When I was in high school I tried to ban powerpoint, arguing that it inhibited our ability to grow as public speakers. I wrote Edward Tufte and told him about it and he shipped me 20 copies of "The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within" ( http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_pp ). Some teachers opposed it and I ended up losing. I'm sure Powerpoint was more convenient for them. I use deck.js fo…

Edward Tufte hosts seminars, and this 1 page report is what he was talking about this year (I don't know how much content varies from year to year).

For information density, you can't beat paper, and there's a number of things you can do to make the paper very information dense, like sparklines. He argues that in some ways, sparklines are actually typography and not charts.

With the paper report people can drill into the information they want, and ask questions from there, as well as refer back to the information during Q&A. One quote he said was "They didn't get to become your peers because they can't read fast."

He also said to not give homework. When you make these reports, you spend meeting time reading the paper. It's not something they have to do before, because everyone is busy and no one will actually read it.

Re: Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint”

#75

Post by patrickaljord »

FrejNorling wrote: post #66
Maro wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried Prezi? http://prezi.com (I work there.)

My girlfirend just showed me Prezi and I love it! Just waiting for an opportunity to using it in a real context!

You should check ImpressJS http://bartaz.github.io/impress.js

Re: Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint”

#76

Post by eldridgea »

adrianhoward wrote: post #50

It's odd how tied some folk are to slides even when it's a completely inappropriate tool for the situation at hand. On the viewing side as as well as the presenter side. I occasionally workshops on various things. Some (not all) of them don't have any slides . None. On the grounds that the point of the workshop, as far as I'm concerned, is to pay a lot of attention to what I'm telling you - and do the practical exerc…

I do a bit of magic (the performance art, not the card game) and attend lectures. Typically it's just a guy with no tech demoing new effects and methods. At the end they always sell lecture notes. It's a detailed overview of everything they did that night and it's usually indexed well so I can jump straight to a particular effect I want to learn.

I really enjoy this approach. It allows my to pay attention without worrying about remembering or note taking during the presentation and still allows me an almost perfect reference.

Re: Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint”

#77

Post by seanmcdirmid »

Maro wrote: post #49
kevinburke wrote: post #19

When I was in high school I tried to ban powerpoint, arguing that it inhibited our ability to grow as public speakers. I wrote Edward Tufte and told him about it and he shipped me 20 copies of "The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within" ( http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_pp ). Some teachers opposed it and I ended up losing. I'm sure Powerpoint was more convenient for them. I use deck.js fo…

Have you tried Prezi? http://prezi.com (I work there.)

Prezi gives me motion sickness. I don't see the point.

Re: Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint”

#78

Post by wjruoxue »

I once went to an IDEO talk and noticed that all words in the speaker's Powerpoint are capital letters. After the talk, I asked the guy why he made it like that and his answer was that since capital letters make it harder to read, you would force yourself to write concisely on the Powerpoint. He also mentioned that many people inside IDEO follow this rule.

Badly made Powerpoint is just useless while 6-page memo might be too time consuming and inconvenient. Capital letter approach could be a good compromise between those two.

Re: Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint”

#79

Post by brk »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #77
Maro wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried Prezi? http://prezi.com (I work there.)

Prezi gives me motion sickness. I don't see the point.

Using it right is a little bit of a skill. Too much panning and zooming can be bad, but just the right amount makes the presentation seem more fresh and alive than a ppt.

I've been using prezi for a few years now, and almost always get good audience feedback. Like any tool, you still have to know how to use it, it will not do all the work for you.

Re: Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint”

#80

Post by wisty »

_pmf_ wrote: post #34
ekianjo wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

6 pages is a bit too long, though. In a famous Ranked 1st Consumer Goods company (i'll let you guess which one) all team memos to management are only allowed to be of a single page. This is really hard to adapt to it at the beginning but decision making is so much faster.

> This is really hard to adapt to it at the beginning but decision making is so much faster. Yeah. God forbid that anyone making decisions should have to deal with actual details; in the worst case, this would actually make them have to think.

Presumably management can (and should) drill down. I suppose it stops middle managers from covering their asses with excuses like "Yeah, I said there was a risk of it all exploding, in paragraph 3 of Appendix II".

If they find out something important was left out, they know there was an attempt to hide it.

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