Jeff Bezos is a person that many listen to to try to know some of the secrets that led him to be the richest person in the world, according to Forbes. Accumulate about 108 billion dollars. In that particular ranking is closely followed by another pharaoh of the digital industry, Bill Gates (Microsoft, 105 billion dollars). The podium is completed by Bernard Arnault, director of Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy (100 billion).
But it is Amazon’s top director who arouses curiosity today. More after his great revelation was known about “the smartest thing” he did with the rest of his team to make the company he commanded more efficient. Or at least their meetings.
The smartest thing Jeff Bezos ever did
“Many, many years ago, we banned PowerPoint presentations on Amazon”, Bezos said in the Bush Center Leadership Forum. “And it’s probably the smartest thing we’ve ever done”, he said in a presentation that CNBC published today.
As he explained, the richest man in the world replaced them with a particularity that did not expedite meetings, on the contrary. Each of the meetings should be started with a six-page memo that everyone there should read silently. This activity would take about 30 minutes and would serve as a trigger for further discussion between directors and managers.
The main goal
“The memo assumes that it would create the environment and context for a good discussion”, Bezos explained on that occasion. Those present should take notes on each idea that arose from the document presented so that it would then act as a trigger. The CEO reflected that this would be a good opportunity to ensure that the corporate staff would read the document. “You have to find the time for the memo to be read”, he said.
“(Before) we did it in the traditional way. A junior executive entered, put a great effort in developing a PowerPoint presentation, placed the third slide up and the senior executive in the room already interrupted him, took them out of the game and asked him questions about what will be presented on the slide six, if (the rest of the contestants) remain silent for a moment … ”, he said.
The difference between a PowerPoint and a memo
According to Bezos, is that the second one has “verbs and sentences and complete topics and paragraphs”, instead the slides of a visual presentation have “dark information”.
Amazon, however, is not the only place where you work this way. Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, also opted for a similar path: “Most of my meetings are now based on Google Docs, starting with 10 minutes of reading and comments directly on the document. This practice makes everyone have time to be on the same page, allows us to work from many locations and reaches critical thinking faster”.
Also published on Medium.