Ditching PowerPoint for a six-pager
‘No more PowerPoint!”...
Wouldn’t those words be music to your ears? I suspect your answer is “yes”. Well, if that’s the case, why not make the slide-free dream a reality?
Jeff Bezos did, and I must admit, I am a huge fan of the alternative he came up with.
The CEO of Amazon is famed for banning PowerPoint. In fact, he made the decision well over a decade ago. At the ecommerce giant, every meeting starts with participants reading a six-page narrative on the topic for discussion. Bezos’ rationale is that having everyone understand the basic facts and context from the outset makes the meeting better informed.
As a result, decision quality rises, and time is used more efficiently.
Why am I just now writing about a well-established practice that has been around since 2004? I recently had dinner with two former Amazon executives who were there when Bezos introduced what he called a “weird meeting culture”, and hearing their perspective got me hooked.
Bezos chose to ban PowerPoint because, as he pointed out, you get very little information from slide decks. They are usually filled with bullet points or, in my case, pictures and as few words as possible. While PowerPoint presentations are easy for the presenter, they’re difficult for the audience and, as slide follows slide, boredom, distraction and lack of retention set in.
The problem with the typical slide presentation is that it misses the narrative. Today, Amazon executives must refine their proposals so fully that they are able to express them in narrative form, in a way that everyone is able to understand.
Bezos believes in vividly telling a story, rather than relying on data or graphics, or packaging the business case into bullet points on a slide.
Before every meeting, the Amazon executive who calls it spends hours preparing the six-pager. You may think this is a waste of time. But actually, those hours avoid wasting everyone’s precious time in meetings. You can’t show up ill-prepared and try to bluff your way through.
What really hooked me on this practice is the notion that if you can’t put your idea down on paper in a way that others can understand, then you’re not ready to share it.
Putting your idea down on paper isn’t a quick exercise. You may believe that you can just write it out in a few hours, but you’d be mistaken. The Amazon experience is that great sixpagers are written and rewritten, shared with colleagues for feedback, set aside for a couple of days and then edited again with a fresh mind. This can take up to a week.
The reason that writing a six-pager is harder than preparing a 20-slide presentation is that narrative structure forces better thought and better understanding of the point you are really making. Reading the short write-up often consumes the firsthalf of an hourlong meeting. The six-pager forces everyone to prepare there and then, and minimises the distractions of illprepared leaders jumping in and offering up their uninformed opinions. I’m such a huge fan of this, that we’ve adopted it internally. Perhaps, it’s time for you to throw away your slides and replace them with a six-pager.