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Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint”
81–90 of 126 posts
Re: Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint”
#82In my experience the people who give shitty presentations with powerpoint would also be perfectly capable of giving shitty presentations without powerpoint.
Well said! I am in complete agreement. Why are we blaming tools when it's the presenters fault themselves for not being able to present? If your staff can't articulate his/her idea properly, train them. Not everyone knows everything right off the bat.
Re: Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint”
#83In my experience the people who give shitty presentations with powerpoint would also be perfectly capable of giving shitty presentations without powerpoint.
i think the idea is to remove powerpoint as a crutch. it may not make a bad presenter great, but it aims to force him to articulate his points better
Re: Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint”
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I looked at a sample Prezi, and it had way too much panning and zooming. Of course, then again, I was quickly clicking through it, whereas normally I'd imagine there'd be a couple minutes of talking and delay between each step.
Re: Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint”
#85I'm in love with this idea. The information density (in terms of time) of a well written memo is much greater than that of a presentation. Many 30 minute presentations could be read in 5 minutes. The written word is also a great equalizer. A "presenter" can be judged based on their content rather than their public speaking ability.
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.
So do they write their memos in a word processor or something, to get a page count? Most of our "memos" are just emails.
Re: Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint”
#86This 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…
power points are helpful for the presenter as a summary of topics to touch upon.
Re: Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint”
#87Amazon, when I worked there, had the worst meeting discipline of all the companies I have worked for. Meetings normally started 10 minutes late and most people didn't show up until 5 minutes after the start time. Being punctual it drove me up the wall.
I can attest to this. Very few meetings started on time.
Re: Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint”
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "6 pages is a bit too long, though..." It does depend on the structure of those 6 pages. If I had to do these regularly I can easily imagine settling on a (largely) routine format, e.g 1st page is overview, 2nd page is problem detail, 3rd page is solution/implementation, 4th page risks/mitigation blah blah blah. Note that the article says the first 30 minutes of the meeting is reading the memo. It doesn't take 5min…
Isn't it an indicator when you are defending 6 pages not being too long with a "blah blah blah" already?
5th page: Links/resources
uhh.. 6th page: "Questions?" page with a cute picture
Re: Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint”
#89In my experience the people who give shitty presentations with powerpoint would also be perfectly capable of giving shitty presentations without powerpoint.
In my experience at amazon, a shitty presentation never gets presented. "I won't schedule a meeting with our VP if you don't fix this" is the basic filter they use, and it works.
Re: Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint”
#90Oh 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...?
Sun Microsystems banned PowerPoint years ago. Not sure if they were the first, though.