Jeff Bezos doesn't use slides in his meetings, he uses something much better

[jrineakter]

“Content is king.” This phrase, repeated insistently in recent times, sums up the idea that many have about how to carry out the best SEO strategy. According to this mandate, Google rewards interesting content and does so because a well-structured narrative provides much more value than anything else in the digital environment.


But not only there.

In his 2018 annual letter, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos explained that PowerPoint presentations are banned at his company’s executive meetings. This isn’t a banal ban; the rule is actually intended to provide insight for the businesspeople and leaders who work with him.

As he argued in his letter and in speeches like the one he gave recently at the Brush Center Leadership Forum, Bezos believes that a “structured narrative” is always more effective than PowerPoint slides — an idea he has extended to all levels of his business’s corporate culture.

Amazon executives apparently begin their meetings in silence: Instead of listening to a PowerPoint presentation of bullet points, they sit quietly and spend half an hour reading a six-page report that is “narratively structured with real sentences, topics, verbs, and nouns.” When they finish reading, they discuss the topic of the report.

“It’s much better than the typical presentation for many reasons ,” the CEO added in a letter broken down by the website Inc. Then, under the authority granted by the fact greece number data that he has been a student of narrative in business for the last 20 years, Bezo explained the motivating reasons for his statement:

1/ Our brains are wired with the thread of narrative. Anthropologists say that the discovery of fire was a milestone for the obvious reasons (cooking food and heating), but also for the possibility of sitting around campfires to exchange stories.

Narratives served as instruction, warning, and inspiration. We process our world through narrative structures, we speak in these structures, and, importantly for leadership, people retain more information more effectively when it is presented in story form, not in PowerPoint.

2/ Stories are persuasive, or at least that’s what the ancient Greek philosophers believed. Aristotle is the father of persuasion: more than 2,000 years ago he outlined the three elements that every persuasive argument must have in order to be effective. He called these three elements “appeals” and made them coexist: these were ethos , logos and pathos . Ethos is character and credibility . Logos is logic: an argument must appeal to reason. And pathos is emotion: the first and second are irrelevant if they do not go hand in hand with the third.

Emotion is not necessarily bad in the business world, in fact, neuroscientists have discovered that emotion is the fastest route to the brain. Or put another way: for an idea to spread, telling a story about it is the best vehicle for it to be absorbed by another person.

“I’m a big fan of anecdotes in business,” Bezos said at the leadership forum, explaining why he reads customer emails and forwards them to the appropriate employee. Often, he said, customer anecdotes are more insightful than data.

“I realized that when stories and metrics don’t match, the stories are usually right,” Bezos said, understanding that the logic of the data must be directly related to the narrative for the business to move in the right direction.

3/ Key points are always less effective than a fleshed-out story. Google’s CEO doesn’t use slides to explain his ideas. Neither does Bezos, nor does Elon Musk or Richard Bronson. Most of the world’s most inspiring leaders dispense with the usual soulless bullet points. Flashbulbs don’t inspire, but stories do.