Bezos on memos, messy meetings, and why powerpoints are bad

Crisp documents, messy meetings.

I like a crisp document and a messy meeting. And so the meeting is about asking questions that nobody knows the answer to and trying to wander your way to a solution. [...] you don’t want to pretend that the discussion should be crisp. Most meetings, you’re trying to solve a really hard problem. There’s a different kind of meeting, which we call [business reviews] that may be weekly or monthly or daily, whatever they are. But these business review meetings, that’s usually for incremental improvement. And you’re looking at a series of metrics, every time it’s the same metrics. Those meetings can be very efficient. They can start on time and end on time.

People will bluff. Use a portion of the meeting for "study hall" to read the memo.

the typical meeting, we’ll start with a six-page narratively structured memo and we do study hall. For 30 minutes, we sit there silently together in the meeting and read. [...] I would like everybody to read these memos in advance, but the problem is people don’t have time to do that. And they end up coming to the meeting having only skimmed the memo or maybe not read it at all, and they’re trying to catch up. And they’re also bluffing like they were in college having pretended to do the reading.

Powerpoints are designed to persuade. You don't want to sell internally.

So now we’re all on the same page, we’ve all read the memo, and now we can have a really elevated discussion. And this is so much better from having a slideshow presentation, [...] one of the problems is PowerPoint is really designed to persuade. It’s kind of a sales tool. And internally, the last thing you want to do is sell. Again, you’re truth seeking. You’re trying to find truth.

Powerpoints are easy for the author, but hard for the audience. Memos are the opposite.

the other problem with PowerPoint is it’s easy for the author and hard for the audience. And a memo is the opposite. It’s hard to write a six-page memo. A good six-page memo might take two weeks to write. You have to write it, you have to rewrite it, you have to edit it, you have to talk to people about it. They have to poke holes in it for you. You write it again, it might take two weeks. So the author, it’s really a very difficult job, but for the audience it’s much better.

Memos minimize interruptions. Powerpoints promote interruptions with questions that will be answered later.

there are little problems with PowerPoint presentations too. Senior executives interrupt with questions halfway through the presentation. That question’s going to be answered on the next slide, but you never got there. If you read the whole memo in advance… I often write lots of questions that I have in the margins of these memos, and then I go cross them all out because by the time I get to the end of the memo, they’ve been answered. That’s why I save all that time.

Memos make it more difficult to hide sloppy thinking behind bullet points.

It’s really got to be a real memo. So it means paragraphs have topic sentences. It’s verbs and nouns. That’s the other problem with PowerPoint presentations, they’re often just bullet points. And you can hide a lot of sloppy thinking behind bullet points. When you have to write in complete sentences with narrative structure, it’s really hard to hide sloppy thinking. So it forces the author to be at their best, and so they’re somebody’s best thinking. And then you don’t have to spend a lot of time trying to tease that thinking out of the person, and you’ve got it from the very beginning. So it really saves you time in the long run.