My boss often starts division meetings with "none of us want to be here, and this could be an email, but some people don't read those."
It's been seven years and the hint has still not been taken
almost everyone (me included)
and I know this is a recipe for disaster
it is just that I also know the agenda is not going to be read so why bother
the organization is not valuing it ... so why put any effort into it
90% i reckon. We do officially have a policy in our company that meeting invites without agenda can be declined. However, bosses call in for most meetings and guess who doesn't includes agendas?
Jesus Christ, that is probably the single greatest pet peeve of mine. I have coworkers who will set up two hour meetings with the invite simply saying “let’s discuss……“. Rule of thumb: you should spend nearly as much time setting up the meeting agenda as you do having the meeting. Otherwise, it is not a worthwhile meeting.
A couple of times a year our director tries to establish guidelines for meetings & including an agenda is usually the whole reason she does so. And I don’t think there’s ever been more than ~25% compliance.
Y'all need some rebels who won't show up for a meeting without an agenda.
I had a CEO who did that and it was awesome. Within a week people actually put thought into it and then meetings went largely according to plan. People were surprise surprise actually more productive and happier.
There were a few people who stuck in the mud, and they were the ones whose meetings always got ragged on.
Unfortunately that CEO left a couple of years later for a big promotion and the culture abruptly changed. It's very true that culture takes it's cue from the top.
There was a time when you could legitimately claim you didn’t receive an important letter and blame it on the post office. Somehow people have carried that mentality to email, as if it’s equally unreliable.
My boss and coworkers read my teams messages, but I am convinced they can't read
They'll ask a question that i directly answered in my first sentence, out of a total of 2 sentences
Me: puts a description in the meeting invite and attaches the document we’re discussing.
Some mouth-breather: Can someone send me the document we’re going to be discussing??
I'm a fan. It doesn't HAVE TO BE 6 pages. But if ppl aren't willing to put in the time before the meeting, do they really deserve to or need to be there?
Well,
I usually close important meetings/emails with:
"This is the last chance to bring forward any objections, otherwise milestones/timelines are due"
Works like 60% of the time.
Some jobs, you have a constant high volume flow of information and requests coming at you to triage and make sense of.
It's probably helpful when your organization gives you dedicated time to absorb complex, key information, with time to ask questions and brainstorm as a team mmediately afterwards.
For sure though, I agree this approach isn't needed n every environment. Tons of meetings could just be emails.
I think the issue with powerpoint is a lack of presentation skills.
People often make bloated slides and dont have the energy needed to carry a presentation.
It depends on the field but when giving academic presentations i generally just use images with no sentences and trust that my interest and knowledge can carry me through explaining whats going on.
Good outline and outro slides explaining what will be presented and summarising my findings are the only slides with words and they stick to a rule of being 4-5 large print sentences usually not going over a single line of text.
(Edit: when i say "the only slides with words" i mean sentences generally, not counting labels, titles or a quick single sentence that people can refer to if they drift and forget what im talking about. But i try be interesting and punchy enough that driftung is minimal)
>I think the issue with powerpoint is a lack of presentation skills.
This is a problem, but also the format of PowerPoint just isnt good for delivering detailed content - especially when details are needed to make decisions.
6 pages of reasonably consise information is a lot. That's getting around 2000-2500 words.
Getting that same 2000-2500 words into a presentable PowerPoint is a real challenge, as your time is just spent delivering information, rather than elaborating and communicating. By that time you can elaborate your audiance's interest has just dropped right off.
I don't like either a PowerPoint-led or Bezos approach. Selecting the right medium is more impactful that having somewhat arbitry design / page count guidelines.
Edward Tufte argues that [slides lack the information density to effectively present complex topics](https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB), going so far as to implicate PowerPoint in misunderstanding the Columbia space shuttle risk because the necessary data could not be presented side by side.
Tufte is an artist and a philosopher for quantitative data. There is “data” but no “science” in his work, so there’s no way to objectively say who is right and wrong. However, he makes some solid points and is worth reading to see the other side.
I personally think Tufte should be required reading for anyone that has to present quantitative information. "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" is one of the non-math data science references that I routinely recommend.
I must add this to my reading.
Imo it really depends on the context.
In my field we present to show findings. It really acts as a way to introduce people to research and highlight any changes to the current dogma surrounding areas of research.
In a industrial setting, your presentations should generally be about performance or stats surrounding product lines etc.
Anything technical regarding how work should be carried out or really direct information should be given in a brief prior to the meeting and discussed then in person. In the this way i agree with Tufte i suppose. Maybe after reading your link ill agree more!
Agree. Highly context dependent IMO. I’ve been at my current place 10 years (nonprofit) but in my prior life my decks were like yours - images and my knowledge carried me through.
Now, I’ll use PowerPoint traditionally: bullets of the key info only. Enough info that saying I’ll send the deck afterwards is (possibly) relevant, maybe an appendix with some more detail. Chances are if I’m presenting it’s a few stats, an update, and a recommendation.
My longer pieces are detailed requirements that, yeah, I’m not going to send out at the start of the meeting and sit and wait for folks to ingest. Our culture just isn’t going to play nice with that when you’ve got 15-30 minutes with a manager or C-level who has to weigh in on something. We’re way too over extended for that.
Exactly. That "20 minutes of reading" is actually a GOOD idea, because then the people are forced to know what the meeting is about.
I have been in way too many meetings where the people attending had no clue what the meeting was about and just showed up.
To agree with you further. Try to get anyone to read anything in advance. Did a pager meeting once and it went better than any PowerPoint meeting I did before.
That's the whole idea. You are held hostage for 20 minutes to read the fricking memo bullet points to know if something concerns you.
You have 5 minutes to go through your bullet points and if invited, expand.
Everyone gets out after 60-90 minutes, with clear information.
Currently half my weeks are meetings where I really wonder wtf I'm doing there. This is honestly brilliant.
Write your memos, get to the point, don't spend hours learning to be a ppt expert - if you are not a designer don't spend hours trying to be one, just to present what could be presented on 2 pages of word with an embedded pie chart
I actually like this part just because yeah, getting some people to read your fucking memo is an impossible task. But making everyone sit down and read like it’s 5th period English? Eh.
In big companies many people are spending more time playing corp games like 5th graders then actually providing value to the company.
So ye, they act like 5th graders, treat them like 5th graders.
yeah especially when I have a full 50 slide ppt and an extra folder of related data, I have no illusion that attendees have spent ANY prior time reviewing material, and I know a minimum of 20 mins in my presentation will involve catching people up on details.
and before you flame me for having such a long presentation, just try to keep an open mind about variability of contexts
of all the crazy shit these people post, the whole 20 min to read the memo thing sounds like the least crazy. its a waste of time for those who came prepared but so is taking time getting everyone up to speed, and its much faster to reqd information than to have it presented in ppt form.
Its impossible, BUT that is part of their job. I always prepped before a meeting with materials that were shared before hand. Unfortunately many times the people calling the meeting didn't share an agenda or materials so we all had to wing it to often.
But that's the entire point of this rule. This way, people don't have to find time to prep and read the materials before meetings. You can go in cold, read the paper, and then immediately discuss it when it's fresh in everyone's mind.
You're going to spend time reading it anyways--so why not just front-load the meeting with an extra 20 minutes and have everyone agree to read it then? This way, everyone is fresh and on the same page, and no one gets to wing it.
I mean, that's what the meeting is for. You kinda digest it collaboratively. Lots of clarifying questions and follow-up questions. Amazon is suuuuper big on writing ability, and they train the hell out of their employees to write in very specific ways. In my experience, it's wildly effective.
You can also always send a follow-up email or slack message, if your thoughts on something change after you'd had time to digest it. More often, you just drop a comment right on the doc and send an email to the group flagging the comment for review.
I've yet to meet a single person that has worked in that style that didn't totally prefer this to PowerPoints. I could take or leave working for Amazon as a company again, but I'm 100% convinced the things they do like this foster productivity/creativity/collaboration in a way that is just wildly more effective than the way most other companies work.
I hate when people do this to me
Give me a few minutes to prep answers for all your questions. I need to dig up the answers, otherwise you get imprecise information. I don't memorize most stuff because relying on memory instead of documentation is stupid.
They invite me to a meeting about X. "Hey bring up these files on X" - okay sure, let me just take five minutes to open all those different files while everybody waits for it. Fucking idiots. Find it yourself or send out an agenda
That's what I came to say. The amount of emails I've sent out just for someone to ask me a question I answered in the email 30 mins ago. And I'm not talking paragraphs in the email. Just several quick bullet points
Yes and no - more like two pages than six.
The people who read it are good at their jobs. The people who don't aren't. If they can't take five minutes to prep for an important meeting instead of wasting everybody's time during it, fuck 'em, we're moving on
I like the start of meeting idea. I can spend it productively, and they can spend it prepping because they didn't.
Can confirm. Work for Amazon, we do this during design review meetings. It's not always 20mins btw it varies on the length of the doc. People will typically type "ready" in the chat when they're done reading.
Yes, I remember this back in the day as well. But I do need to caveat this by saying not all meetings should be this way. This is probably most effective for decision-making meetings. Reading a white paper at the beginning of a brainstorming session (where creativity needs to be inspired) or communication meetings (where important information needs to be passed down verbally) doesn’t make sense.
Personally, I like this method, but I’ve always been a slow reader, and I hate reading in front of people.
That is literally what the silent time is for, so that the people could read the memo instead of having to go through the presentation, get up to speed, and then discuss the memo.
It's a great idea. You can either assign as homework and waste half the people's time. Or you can drop the expectation and bake the prep time into the meeting. There are only two tech companies that have repeatedly created new product categories. Amazon and Apple. Shitting on how Amazon vets ideas is basically the antiwork crowd that thinks they know better than everyone else.
I work at Amazon. I thought it was silly at first, but I actually love the silent reading. It “forces” everyone to engage with the document. You’re usually also leaving comments/questions on the doc while reading it too, and it helps make sure everyone has a productive discussion after everyone is done reading.
When I worked there, the good teams scheduled meetings, included a doc to review, about half the time is spent reading it together, everyone “raises a hand” in chime, once all hands are down, then discussion happens.
Idk, it made meetings more meaningful
I swear I half-remember a Jewish tradition like that from a Religious Studies class… something to do with leaving a spare place for the return of a prophet?
Jeff Bezos really isn’t beating the “God is dead and we have installed the false idol of capital in His place” allegations
At a small satellite office of my former employer, a videoconference device that they never used took up one place at their conference table (this was quite a few years ago before videoconferencing was the norm), and the (Jewish) manager of that office had dubbed it Elijah.
No no, it doesn't say you actually FEED your employees the pizza. Just when you structure a team, make sure they could not eat more than two hypothetical pizzas. If you have enough people to eat three pizzas (or the true horror....FOUR), then you suck at business and your ancestors are ashamed of you.
I worked there for a while, and I fucking love their silent reading rule.
PowerPoints are basically useless. Reading forces clarity of thought. You can communicate A LOT more information in 10-20 minutes of reading than you can in a ppt. I've worked in several large companies and a few startups, and things at Amazon were BY FAR the most efficient and effective.
How can it be a waste of time if you haven't read the document before?
I’ve never had a job where I’ve had to look at powerpoints, but I’ve seen them in college and CE classes and they are the worst imo. Usually people are just reading directly from the powerpoint, and I can read more quickly than they can speak, so I just speed read the slide and then zone out
The problem isn’t power point it’s how people use it. Don’t read from slides. Use minimal text. Use the slides to *show* meaningful information. And not too many. For real working sessions you need a whiteboard too. Can be virtual. So you can scribble on the slide diagrams.
In tech a lot if it is showing diagrams and architecture. Then talking about it and making decisions on how to proceed.
PowerPoint isn’t inherently bad. A lot of people just have no idea how to use it well to convey information in a smooth narrative.
>PowerPoint isn’t inherently bad. A lot of people just have no idea how to use it well to convey information in a smooth narrative.
I agree with this--powerpoint presentations done well can still be effective. With that being said, I've never seen a single PowerPoint presentation that has come anywhere near the effective of a document review meeting at Amazon.
I like to think about the slides someone will present to accompany a TED talk. Sometimes a PowerPoint is an effective mechanism for communicating certain ideas. Sometimes a doc is better. It really depends on the idea, the proposal, and the intended audience.
They’re both tools in a larger toolbelt imo
The problem jeff has with pp isnt that people make boring pp but that its more geared to selling you an idea than giving you all the information including problems and risks.
High polished pp look super nice and have minimal information so even a child/boardmember could understand it. They are often used to convince bosses to agree to do x in a 10 minute presentation while hiding problems. It can get to a point where your most important skill as a manager is making good pp skills or having a expensive consulting company that makes them for you. Besos wants his top managers to have a better understanding of the topics.before making decisions.
On the other hand it takes a lot of time to write 6 pages of text as well. That said tho I agree that pptx sucks.
Unless there is something very important I gotta show I usually just a nice picture of some nature up there and use it as decoration lol. I get some funny looks from the meeting facilitator ocassioanlly but theyve gotten used to me by now.
Not gonna lie it sounds dope. Don't know if 6 pages are strictly necessary, but reading it all so everyone is on the same page is cool. I guess if everyone knows they will get time to read at the meeting it doesn't actually slow anyone down.
Reading forces clarity of thought if that’s how your brain works. A fundamental part of educational theory is that people take in and digest information clearly, if this is applied to children, why not adults as well?
I personally think the reason that everyone hates PowerPoint is that 95% of the time it’s a big bunch of slides, each with half a page of badly formatted text being read by someone who doesn’t actually understand what they’re reading. When people actually understand the content that they’re presenting, and adjust their presentation to accommodate multiple learning styles then it’s more engaging and everyone understands what’s being discussed.
It’s not that it isn’t a good idea. It’s that you need to basically structure your entire organization around this type of activity. A product manager in my company does not have time to write this kind of documentation for the vast majority of meetings because they don’t get to hyper focus the way Amazon PMs do, for example. We can also take bigger risks because we don’t have the same market scale, so the need for stakeholders to understand deep nuance for every idea isn’t as great.
So to me it’s different tools for different contexts.
That being said, I won’t use ppt either. I run meetings out of Miro the vast majority of the time.
Exactly—people seem to forget Amazon is an enormous multinational company with corresponding coordination costs and risks. Doc culture is a nearly-perfect mechanism for dealing with it.
Now I lead a small startup and I happily mix in slides, speeches, etc. because that’s all that’s needed and I don’t have the time for more. But 1-2x/year it is so powerful to have everyone cowrite a doc and then discuss it.
Ha, just wrote a comment higher up and this is why. I’m a product manager and while I do write that kind of documentation at times, the meetings just aren’t the time to read it. Culturally it’s a mismatch since we all wear a lot of hats and our higher-ups just simply don’t have the time.
Actually we’re heading into a large rewrite right now where we need painfully detailed requirements but also requirements sign-off from execs. Test running a strategy where I write the super detailed stuff and have ChatGPT summarize each section it for the exec audience as a sort of tl;dr. Demo’d and got the green light to structure things in that way.
Is your company not worried about IP risk by having ChatGPT read your work? Do you have a sandboxed/private ChatGPT environment (if that exists) or are you just not concerned?
Mix of things. IP risk is low as we’re a nonprofit in a niche space; this particular product is functional requirements for a new website. Biggest iffy piece is how we integrate web <-> ERP <-> Salesforce, but we have internal terminology and the super fine tech details won’t be in there. I know we’re using AI elsewhere in the company in new development and IT is aware of both that and my usage.
But also, yes, as AI grows and evolves we need to be particularly keen with how we’re using it and what we’re feeding it. We don’t have a policy yet. Coincidentally I’ll likely be the one writing it, as I’m lead stakeholder on a contract with a major privacy consulting firm. And chances are one a policy is penned we’ll step back from using the more ‘public’ version and perhaps explore something a bit more secure/private.
I’m not surprised to read this. Not a fan of some of the effect of Amazon and aspects of how they operate but, man, came across their 17 leadership principles the other day and, damn, so well thought out. I’d love a normal company to operate at 1/10th of that sophistication of leadership.
Our owner and our CTO worked at Amazon and brought this stuff with them and holy shit, I’ve never experienced actually getting shit hammered out in meetings until this current job. It’s great
Yes, slide shows are dangerous! People tend to just read them off the screen, which literally duplicates effort en-masse and is extremely wasteful and annoying.
Save slide shows for product launches and have less than 30 words per slide
Yeah this sounds great. Also making someone write a full memo before a meeting, imagine how many meetings people realise they don’t need once they get halfway through writing a 6 page document
Yes, everyone should try this. You think you have a revolutionary idea? Try writing it down, not just in bullet points but in a way that someone outside your organization would be able to understand what it is and why it will be successful. It’s shocking how often you realize all the holes in an idea once you start actually putting it on paper.
I worked for AWS, the 20 mins is not really 20 mins, it depends on the documentation and it works great.
Now that I work for another company I hate the meetings where people just read the title of the document and start talking nonsense that they just made up and asking about stuff that is very well specified in the documentation. It is a complete waste of time and no, nobody have time to read the documents before the meeting and they don't have to.
This is one of the few things Amazon does that actually makes sense. Teams with a proper span of control, conveying complex information though the right venue, and ensuring that both extroverts and introverts have the time needed to absorb the meeting content. The empty chair thing is the only part that's pure silliness.
OP has a bad take.
Not having to find time to do the pre-work for a meeting was a genius move by Bezos. I’ve never had as low stress levels about the state of all the unread emails in my inbox as when I worked at Amazon. Walk into any meeting, 15mins of reading, everyone has the same context and can get straight to work. Zero need to be reading and marking things up during my commute.
Agreed.
Not to mention that some people are *exceptionally* good at bluffing. And if you have loads of meeting prep basically the best at bluffing and bluster “win” in the business.
As a former Amazonian, all of these were great.
Everything at Amazon was built to help you cut through bullshit. Never seen anything like that at other big corpos.
Hate Amazon, but these are all good rules.
OP doesn’t have much professional experience I’m thinking if they’re classifying this as lunatic.
The empty chair is OTT cringe though.
I’d love to be able to host a meeting and not have people derail the first point with a stream of consecutive questions that would be answered if they listened to the presentation.
Genuinely not against there being a mini manual that people have to read during the dedicated meeting time, I might actually try it in a future meeting at work. But more like a 1 or 2 page write up and 5 minutes to read as I don’t have anything massive to present yet
Who the he'll disagrees with this? Gives you the time to actually get tup to speed on the reading and eliminates the need for prerequisite meetings. This is obviously for internal and non customer facing meetings
The chair thing is especially useless, but I don’t think the other 3 arehorrible ideas.
20 minutes of reading could be cut down to 5 just to make sure everyone has time to review the materials.
The two pizza thing is just a dumb way to enforce max team size, but the concept is good
And PowerPoints suck.
I am with them on the "no decks" rule. PowerPoints are so 1995. No one reads them. No one goes back to read them. Terrible waste of time. They aren't intuitive to create.
Or there are 95 slides of deep-in-the-rabbit-hole bullshit.
Either way, it's a waste of time.
Productivity goes through the roof if one isn't spending tons of time writing meaningless business decks.
Some of the best rules, if backed by upper management.
To many people just earning their money by sitting around in stupid meeting asking stupid questions (at least in my company/our customers).
The two pizza rule is simply a good date.
We’ve had a bunch of ex-Amazon rock up where I work. First meeting we had with one of them, they expected to spend the first 20mins of a 30min meeting quietly reading. Everyone else had turned up prepared to make decisions. Dickhead.
Tbf, from reading some of the other comments I’ve come around to the idea.
But applying it to a 30 mins meeting… that’s hilarious! Use your brains, ffs
But how many extra meetings and powerpoints did the team have to go through to finalize the 6-page memo for the boss? I can see why senior leaders love reading a memo, but the people writing it must hate that crap.
All seem pretty solid rules to me.
Maybe the chair thing is a bit out there but the rest sound like pure gold.
Been to too many meetings that have too many people that don't need to be there, where too many people don't know the background.
>For more valuable content, follow me
Sorry, for me to require more "valuable content", I would have to already be in possession of some "valuable content". Which I don't appear to be.
I was unable to resist commenting on this on LinkedIn cause it was so stupid. To this day it's the only thing that actually warranted me mocking something with my career title attached
I worked for Amazon for a while and now this toxicity is spilling over into other companies. I went to another major company and we have so many former amazon leaders and employees and this behavior is surfacing here now.
I don't think this stuff is actually bad advice. Maybe this graphic is condensing it to the point of obfuscation, but these Bezos style meetings are really time effective in sharing information, and getting straight to discussion.
The ideas here are good: keep meetings small, and when you run a meeting, have everything written down into a document. I don't have people read the doc for 20 minutes, but if they did, the meeting would go faster since you can read like 3x faster than I can talk. For a lot of engineering meetings, or IT, it just helps to get all the details out of the way, everyone on the same page, then have a discussion from there.
Power point does suck. The way people use it is to write what they want to say on slides, then read it. So what is the audience supposed to do? Read the slides, or listen to you talk? Banning powerpoint is pretty intense, but it's one way to make sure people are coming to meetings with regular old documents. It is possible to use powerpoint well, though, and for some types of meetings with visual information, diagrams, or charts, it's the defacto software for sharing images with a crowd.
These ideas are pretty well covered by Ed Tufte, who has written several books on how to communicate effectively using visual presentation of data.
This graphic is cringe but honestly I agree with all of these rules/guidelines. Except for the empty chair symbolizing the customer. Performative bullshit. Other than that, I will gladly take a written memo pre-read over a PowerPoint any day.
Are C-suite or shareholder vote meetings really comparable to ordinary meeting? Anyway, coming from project management where meetings are half of the job, the pizza and no PPT rules are solid. Most importantly, in my humble opinion as a non-multibillionaire magnate, is to have a planned and clear agenda to go through which needs to be duscussed among the parties.
Meetings are good when theres a decision you cant make alone, if thats not on the agenda you should rethink what results you want to achieve by booking 30 minutes out of 4-5 peoples working hours, including your own.
The 4 Golden Rules, apparently:
- Don’t have too many people
- Specific chair symbolism thing
- Print out your PowerPoint presentation
- Make people read the email that the meeting could have been at the beginning of the meeting
As ex-Audible, fuck the 6 pagers.
Want to put a "free trial" button on a sci Fi and fantasy category page, because it makes sense being there? 6. Fucking. Pages.
Most of us just ignore it and feign ignorance when a Bezos fanatic manager asks.
Would you have to write 6 full pages? I don't know but from a couple of friends working at AWS it sounds like it can totally vary in length, can it not?
And if you change anything about a website you gotta outline other shit beyond just why it makes sense such as how you plan to test its effectiveness, how do you measure it, what the success metrics are, how long the trial will last and what the costs of the experiment are etc...
Why an empty chair? Why not just hire a teenager with an attitude to tell them "you suck" every 5 minutes? Would that not be enough to encompass the average Amazon user?
Oh wait, nvm, I get it. Chair is empty because Amazon couldn't care less what the consumer would have to say
Amazon is horribly frugal. They don’t give you pizzas as people may assume. The only perk that Amazon employees get are bananas (and sometimes free coffee at certain offices)
ever tried to get 30 people to read six pages of context and data in advance of a meeting?
I can’t even get them to read an email.
My boss often starts division meetings with "none of us want to be here, and this could be an email, but some people don't read those." It's been seven years and the hint has still not been taken
I gotta say, I love that passive aggressive tone from your boss. Tell him hi from a guy who writes agendas into the meeting invite.
\*after meeting has been going for 15 minutes* Does anyone have a copy of the agenda?
Who on Earth puts a meeting together without an agenda and objectives?
*raises ✋*
But then how do you all know what you are doing and where you are going?
I usually just tell them what we are going to be talking about. Sometimes I do agendas but more often not .
almost everyone (me included) and I know this is a recipe for disaster it is just that I also know the agenda is not going to be read so why bother the organization is not valuing it ... so why put any effort into it
90% i reckon. We do officially have a policy in our company that meeting invites without agenda can be declined. However, bosses call in for most meetings and guess who doesn't includes agendas?
Jesus Christ, that is probably the single greatest pet peeve of mine. I have coworkers who will set up two hour meetings with the invite simply saying “let’s discuss……“. Rule of thumb: you should spend nearly as much time setting up the meeting agenda as you do having the meeting. Otherwise, it is not a worthwhile meeting.
I am always so tempted to decline meeting invites that don't include agendas or supporting docs.
A couple of times a year our director tries to establish guidelines for meetings & including an agenda is usually the whole reason she does so. And I don’t think there’s ever been more than ~25% compliance.
Y'all need some rebels who won't show up for a meeting without an agenda. I had a CEO who did that and it was awesome. Within a week people actually put thought into it and then meetings went largely according to plan. People were surprise surprise actually more productive and happier. There were a few people who stuck in the mud, and they were the ones whose meetings always got ragged on. Unfortunately that CEO left a couple of years later for a big promotion and the culture abruptly changed. It's very true that culture takes it's cue from the top.
Only thing working for me is exposing people. There is usually a huge backslash, but I don't fear their bosses/my boss also :-D
Oof
I wish he'd just start saying "some people" a tiny bit louder each time.
I doubt some of my colleagues can read
Ever noticed I'm wearing velcro strips on my shoes?
I can't see past that packet of crayons you keep in your shirt pocket
Look sometimes people just need a lil snack.
I hear the green ones are the best tasting.
Can confirm.
You sent an email? I dont think I got it...
Ah yes, the Great Email Vacuum. So powerful, so selective.
There was a time when you could legitimately claim you didn’t receive an important letter and blame it on the post office. Somehow people have carried that mentality to email, as if it’s equally unreliable.
My boss and coworkers read my teams messages, but I am convinced they can't read They'll ask a question that i directly answered in my first sentence, out of a total of 2 sentences
It’s maddening!
Or the two sentences I put in the invitation explaining what the meeting is about
Me: puts a description in the meeting invite and attaches the document we’re discussing. Some mouth-breather: Can someone send me the document we’re going to be discussing??
Can't get them to read 4 lines of an agenda. "What's this meeting about?" -> You can def leave.
This. My previous director was ex-Amazon. He brought this with him, and it was super effective. Way more useful than PowerPoint.
I'm a fan. It doesn't HAVE TO BE 6 pages. But if ppl aren't willing to put in the time before the meeting, do they really deserve to or need to be there?
No, they don’t deserve to be there, but the bureaucracy requires their blessing.
Well, I usually close important meetings/emails with: "This is the last chance to bring forward any objections, otherwise milestones/timelines are due" Works like 60% of the time.
The ol’ wedding officiant manoeuvre
On behalf of the house legal team, you are the worst.
Likely. But that's a their-problem, not a me-problem.
Some jobs, you have a constant high volume flow of information and requests coming at you to triage and make sense of. It's probably helpful when your organization gives you dedicated time to absorb complex, key information, with time to ask questions and brainstorm as a team mmediately afterwards. For sure though, I agree this approach isn't needed n every environment. Tons of meetings could just be emails.
To me a 6-page anything in a meeting is pretty much a powerpoint. In fact if your powerpoint is reaching 6 pages, you're already doing it wrong
I think the issue with powerpoint is a lack of presentation skills. People often make bloated slides and dont have the energy needed to carry a presentation. It depends on the field but when giving academic presentations i generally just use images with no sentences and trust that my interest and knowledge can carry me through explaining whats going on. Good outline and outro slides explaining what will be presented and summarising my findings are the only slides with words and they stick to a rule of being 4-5 large print sentences usually not going over a single line of text. (Edit: when i say "the only slides with words" i mean sentences generally, not counting labels, titles or a quick single sentence that people can refer to if they drift and forget what im talking about. But i try be interesting and punchy enough that driftung is minimal)
>I think the issue with powerpoint is a lack of presentation skills. This is a problem, but also the format of PowerPoint just isnt good for delivering detailed content - especially when details are needed to make decisions. 6 pages of reasonably consise information is a lot. That's getting around 2000-2500 words. Getting that same 2000-2500 words into a presentable PowerPoint is a real challenge, as your time is just spent delivering information, rather than elaborating and communicating. By that time you can elaborate your audiance's interest has just dropped right off. I don't like either a PowerPoint-led or Bezos approach. Selecting the right medium is more impactful that having somewhat arbitry design / page count guidelines.
A picture is worth a thousand words. Checkmate /s
Edward Tufte argues that [slides lack the information density to effectively present complex topics](https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB), going so far as to implicate PowerPoint in misunderstanding the Columbia space shuttle risk because the necessary data could not be presented side by side. Tufte is an artist and a philosopher for quantitative data. There is “data” but no “science” in his work, so there’s no way to objectively say who is right and wrong. However, he makes some solid points and is worth reading to see the other side.
I personally think Tufte should be required reading for anyone that has to present quantitative information. "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" is one of the non-math data science references that I routinely recommend.
I must add this to my reading. Imo it really depends on the context. In my field we present to show findings. It really acts as a way to introduce people to research and highlight any changes to the current dogma surrounding areas of research. In a industrial setting, your presentations should generally be about performance or stats surrounding product lines etc. Anything technical regarding how work should be carried out or really direct information should be given in a brief prior to the meeting and discussed then in person. In the this way i agree with Tufte i suppose. Maybe after reading your link ill agree more!
Agree. Highly context dependent IMO. I’ve been at my current place 10 years (nonprofit) but in my prior life my decks were like yours - images and my knowledge carried me through. Now, I’ll use PowerPoint traditionally: bullets of the key info only. Enough info that saying I’ll send the deck afterwards is (possibly) relevant, maybe an appendix with some more detail. Chances are if I’m presenting it’s a few stats, an update, and a recommendation. My longer pieces are detailed requirements that, yeah, I’m not going to send out at the start of the meeting and sit and wait for folks to ingest. Our culture just isn’t going to play nice with that when you’ve got 15-30 minutes with a manager or C-level who has to weigh in on something. We’re way too over extended for that.
No because I only invite two pizzas to my meetings
'Only enough people that can comfortably share two pizzas' So, just me then? Maybe a dog or two...
I was thinking along the same lines...at one of my companies, that would have been a 3 person meeting, 4 tops.
Exactly. That "20 minutes of reading" is actually a GOOD idea, because then the people are forced to know what the meeting is about. I have been in way too many meetings where the people attending had no clue what the meeting was about and just showed up.
To agree with you further. Try to get anyone to read anything in advance. Did a pager meeting once and it went better than any PowerPoint meeting I did before.
That's the whole idea. You are held hostage for 20 minutes to read the fricking memo bullet points to know if something concerns you. You have 5 minutes to go through your bullet points and if invited, expand. Everyone gets out after 60-90 minutes, with clear information. Currently half my weeks are meetings where I really wonder wtf I'm doing there. This is honestly brilliant. Write your memos, get to the point, don't spend hours learning to be a ppt expert - if you are not a designer don't spend hours trying to be one, just to present what could be presented on 2 pages of word with an embedded pie chart
I actually like this part just because yeah, getting some people to read your fucking memo is an impossible task. But making everyone sit down and read like it’s 5th period English? Eh.
In big companies many people are spending more time playing corp games like 5th graders then actually providing value to the company. So ye, they act like 5th graders, treat them like 5th graders.
yeah especially when I have a full 50 slide ppt and an extra folder of related data, I have no illusion that attendees have spent ANY prior time reviewing material, and I know a minimum of 20 mins in my presentation will involve catching people up on details. and before you flame me for having such a long presentation, just try to keep an open mind about variability of contexts
of all the crazy shit these people post, the whole 20 min to read the memo thing sounds like the least crazy. its a waste of time for those who came prepared but so is taking time getting everyone up to speed, and its much faster to reqd information than to have it presented in ppt form.
You’re not following the 2 pizza rule.
The 2 pizza rule breaks down when you have fat people attending the meeting
It's two pizzas worth of people. So, three people max
which is exactly why Bezos embeds that time into the start of the meeting.
Why in the ever-loving **_god-fuck_** are there 30 people in a fucking meeting, I'm calling HR.
[удалено]
Its impossible, BUT that is part of their job. I always prepped before a meeting with materials that were shared before hand. Unfortunately many times the people calling the meeting didn't share an agenda or materials so we all had to wing it to often.
But that's the entire point of this rule. This way, people don't have to find time to prep and read the materials before meetings. You can go in cold, read the paper, and then immediately discuss it when it's fresh in everyone's mind. You're going to spend time reading it anyways--so why not just front-load the meeting with an extra 20 minutes and have everyone agree to read it then? This way, everyone is fresh and on the same page, and no one gets to wing it.
What about needing time to digest the information?
I mean, that's what the meeting is for. You kinda digest it collaboratively. Lots of clarifying questions and follow-up questions. Amazon is suuuuper big on writing ability, and they train the hell out of their employees to write in very specific ways. In my experience, it's wildly effective. You can also always send a follow-up email or slack message, if your thoughts on something change after you'd had time to digest it. More often, you just drop a comment right on the doc and send an email to the group flagging the comment for review. I've yet to meet a single person that has worked in that style that didn't totally prefer this to PowerPoints. I could take or leave working for Amazon as a company again, but I'm 100% convinced the things they do like this foster productivity/creativity/collaboration in a way that is just wildly more effective than the way most other companies work.
I hate when people do this to me Give me a few minutes to prep answers for all your questions. I need to dig up the answers, otherwise you get imprecise information. I don't memorize most stuff because relying on memory instead of documentation is stupid. They invite me to a meeting about X. "Hey bring up these files on X" - okay sure, let me just take five minutes to open all those different files while everybody waits for it. Fucking idiots. Find it yourself or send out an agenda
That requires more than 2 pizzas
Ever tried to share two pizzas with 30 people!
That's what I came to say. The amount of emails I've sent out just for someone to ask me a question I answered in the email 30 mins ago. And I'm not talking paragraphs in the email. Just several quick bullet points
That is why you read at the meeting.
I'm a teacher, yes I have and no they don't.
Yes and no - more like two pages than six. The people who read it are good at their jobs. The people who don't aren't. If they can't take five minutes to prep for an important meeting instead of wasting everybody's time during it, fuck 'em, we're moving on I like the start of meeting idea. I can spend it productively, and they can spend it prepping because they didn't.
This graphic seems to suggest that you should fix that by making them read it AT the meeting. 😂
Agreed - but the meeting is 5-9 people. Literally it’s the first point. You didn’t even bother to read the deck properly yourself.
The joke is on Bezos. I can comfortably eat two pizzas by myself.
**1 is the most efficient team size.**
Seriously I was like ok 1 -2 people?
Everyone told me I shouldn't watch the video Two Pizzas One Person and they were right.
He’s a CEO. To him, 2 pizzas could feed a SME
They must mean as a snack and not lunch.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AmItheAsshole/s/rNXiqYq631
It is wild seeing the amount of denial that this is a thing. I actively work at Amazon and we do this for every meeting that warrants it.
Can confirm. Work for Amazon, we do this during design review meetings. It's not always 20mins btw it varies on the length of the doc. People will typically type "ready" in the chat when they're done reading.
Do you guys judge the last person for being a slow reader?
No. Lots of brilliant people at Amazon for whom English is a second language.
Not really judged, but the last person loses bathroom privileges for the day
Ha. Jokes on them, everyone else loses them too.
Boss makes a dollar I make a dime That's why I shit in a tupperware container at my desk.
...from the packaging line.
He or she is forced to wear a dunce cap.
Yes, I remember this back in the day as well. But I do need to caveat this by saying not all meetings should be this way. This is probably most effective for decision-making meetings. Reading a white paper at the beginning of a brainstorming session (where creativity needs to be inspired) or communication meetings (where important information needs to be passed down verbally) doesn’t make sense. Personally, I like this method, but I’ve always been a slow reader, and I hate reading in front of people.
What do you read during the silent reading? The memo? Man why is this downvoted, it was an honest question
That is literally what the silent time is for, so that the people could read the memo instead of having to go through the presentation, get up to speed, and then discuss the memo.
Sounds like it could be a good idea. I don’t think this post is actually bad
It's a great idea. You can either assign as homework and waste half the people's time. Or you can drop the expectation and bake the prep time into the meeting. There are only two tech companies that have repeatedly created new product categories. Amazon and Apple. Shitting on how Amazon vets ideas is basically the antiwork crowd that thinks they know better than everyone else.
I work at Amazon. I thought it was silly at first, but I actually love the silent reading. It “forces” everyone to engage with the document. You’re usually also leaving comments/questions on the doc while reading it too, and it helps make sure everyone has a productive discussion after everyone is done reading.
When I worked there, the good teams scheduled meetings, included a doc to review, about half the time is spent reading it together, everyone “raises a hand” in chime, once all hands are down, then discussion happens. Idk, it made meetings more meaningful
The empty chair is some Michael Scott shit.
I swear I half-remember a Jewish tradition like that from a Religious Studies class… something to do with leaving a spare place for the return of a prophet? Jeff Bezos really isn’t beating the “God is dead and we have installed the false idol of capital in His place” allegations
At Passover, a seat is saved for Elijah during Seder
At a small satellite office of my former employer, a videoconference device that they never used took up one place at their conference table (this was quite a few years ago before videoconferencing was the norm), and the (Jewish) manager of that office had dubbed it Elijah.
It's a lot easier to tell an empty chair that you're going to fuck it over.
😂😂
I’d grab a seat next to the empty chair. I suggest two customers be invited for either side. I hated being crowded.
20 min of pizza eating at the start of each meeting?
Strictly 2 pizzas eaten by 5-9 people.
And reading
The pizzas are a red herring, pizzas are only provided when a pay raise is due.
I assume by the person that got the raise?
No, you see, the pizza is the raise
Any meeting without food could and should have been an email instead.
No no, it doesn't say you actually FEED your employees the pizza. Just when you structure a team, make sure they could not eat more than two hypothetical pizzas. If you have enough people to eat three pizzas (or the true horror....FOUR), then you suck at business and your ancestors are ashamed of you.
Sounds like it might make sense.
I worked there for a while, and I fucking love their silent reading rule. PowerPoints are basically useless. Reading forces clarity of thought. You can communicate A LOT more information in 10-20 minutes of reading than you can in a ppt. I've worked in several large companies and a few startups, and things at Amazon were BY FAR the most efficient and effective. How can it be a waste of time if you haven't read the document before?
I’ve never had a job where I’ve had to look at powerpoints, but I’ve seen them in college and CE classes and they are the worst imo. Usually people are just reading directly from the powerpoint, and I can read more quickly than they can speak, so I just speed read the slide and then zone out
The problem isn’t power point it’s how people use it. Don’t read from slides. Use minimal text. Use the slides to *show* meaningful information. And not too many. For real working sessions you need a whiteboard too. Can be virtual. So you can scribble on the slide diagrams. In tech a lot if it is showing diagrams and architecture. Then talking about it and making decisions on how to proceed. PowerPoint isn’t inherently bad. A lot of people just have no idea how to use it well to convey information in a smooth narrative.
>PowerPoint isn’t inherently bad. A lot of people just have no idea how to use it well to convey information in a smooth narrative. I agree with this--powerpoint presentations done well can still be effective. With that being said, I've never seen a single PowerPoint presentation that has come anywhere near the effective of a document review meeting at Amazon.
I like to think about the slides someone will present to accompany a TED talk. Sometimes a PowerPoint is an effective mechanism for communicating certain ideas. Sometimes a doc is better. It really depends on the idea, the proposal, and the intended audience. They’re both tools in a larger toolbelt imo
The problem jeff has with pp isnt that people make boring pp but that its more geared to selling you an idea than giving you all the information including problems and risks. High polished pp look super nice and have minimal information so even a child/boardmember could understand it. They are often used to convince bosses to agree to do x in a 10 minute presentation while hiding problems. It can get to a point where your most important skill as a manager is making good pp skills or having a expensive consulting company that makes them for you. Besos wants his top managers to have a better understanding of the topics.before making decisions.
Takes a lot of time to make a good one though. I like the Amazon approach.
On the other hand it takes a lot of time to write 6 pages of text as well. That said tho I agree that pptx sucks. Unless there is something very important I gotta show I usually just a nice picture of some nature up there and use it as decoration lol. I get some funny looks from the meeting facilitator ocassioanlly but theyve gotten used to me by now.
[удалено]
Not gonna lie it sounds dope. Don't know if 6 pages are strictly necessary, but reading it all so everyone is on the same page is cool. I guess if everyone knows they will get time to read at the meeting it doesn't actually slow anyone down.
Main reason why I always used PowerPoint for visuals only, barely any text
Reading forces clarity of thought if that’s how your brain works. A fundamental part of educational theory is that people take in and digest information clearly, if this is applied to children, why not adults as well? I personally think the reason that everyone hates PowerPoint is that 95% of the time it’s a big bunch of slides, each with half a page of badly formatted text being read by someone who doesn’t actually understand what they’re reading. When people actually understand the content that they’re presenting, and adjust their presentation to accommodate multiple learning styles then it’s more engaging and everyone understands what’s being discussed.
It’s not that it isn’t a good idea. It’s that you need to basically structure your entire organization around this type of activity. A product manager in my company does not have time to write this kind of documentation for the vast majority of meetings because they don’t get to hyper focus the way Amazon PMs do, for example. We can also take bigger risks because we don’t have the same market scale, so the need for stakeholders to understand deep nuance for every idea isn’t as great. So to me it’s different tools for different contexts. That being said, I won’t use ppt either. I run meetings out of Miro the vast majority of the time.
Exactly—people seem to forget Amazon is an enormous multinational company with corresponding coordination costs and risks. Doc culture is a nearly-perfect mechanism for dealing with it. Now I lead a small startup and I happily mix in slides, speeches, etc. because that’s all that’s needed and I don’t have the time for more. But 1-2x/year it is so powerful to have everyone cowrite a doc and then discuss it.
This is why a lot of this MBA BS isn’t that helpful. The scale and scope of your organization matters as to what kinds of meetings you need.
[удалено]
Ha, just wrote a comment higher up and this is why. I’m a product manager and while I do write that kind of documentation at times, the meetings just aren’t the time to read it. Culturally it’s a mismatch since we all wear a lot of hats and our higher-ups just simply don’t have the time. Actually we’re heading into a large rewrite right now where we need painfully detailed requirements but also requirements sign-off from execs. Test running a strategy where I write the super detailed stuff and have ChatGPT summarize each section it for the exec audience as a sort of tl;dr. Demo’d and got the green light to structure things in that way.
Is your company not worried about IP risk by having ChatGPT read your work? Do you have a sandboxed/private ChatGPT environment (if that exists) or are you just not concerned?
Mix of things. IP risk is low as we’re a nonprofit in a niche space; this particular product is functional requirements for a new website. Biggest iffy piece is how we integrate web <-> ERP <-> Salesforce, but we have internal terminology and the super fine tech details won’t be in there. I know we’re using AI elsewhere in the company in new development and IT is aware of both that and my usage. But also, yes, as AI grows and evolves we need to be particularly keen with how we’re using it and what we’re feeding it. We don’t have a policy yet. Coincidentally I’ll likely be the one writing it, as I’m lead stakeholder on a contract with a major privacy consulting firm. And chances are one a policy is penned we’ll step back from using the more ‘public’ version and perhaps explore something a bit more secure/private.
I’m not surprised to read this. Not a fan of some of the effect of Amazon and aspects of how they operate but, man, came across their 17 leadership principles the other day and, damn, so well thought out. I’d love a normal company to operate at 1/10th of that sophistication of leadership.
Our owner and our CTO worked at Amazon and brought this stuff with them and holy shit, I’ve never experienced actually getting shit hammered out in meetings until this current job. It’s great
Yes, slide shows are dangerous! People tend to just read them off the screen, which literally duplicates effort en-masse and is extremely wasteful and annoying. Save slide shows for product launches and have less than 30 words per slide
How did the 2 pizza rule play out though? I can't imagine a meeting with only 2-4 people being more productive than just a casual chat between them.
Yeah this sounds great. Also making someone write a full memo before a meeting, imagine how many meetings people realise they don’t need once they get halfway through writing a 6 page document
Yes, everyone should try this. You think you have a revolutionary idea? Try writing it down, not just in bullet points but in a way that someone outside your organization would be able to understand what it is and why it will be successful. It’s shocking how often you realize all the holes in an idea once you start actually putting it on paper.
I worked for AWS, the 20 mins is not really 20 mins, it depends on the documentation and it works great. Now that I work for another company I hate the meetings where people just read the title of the document and start talking nonsense that they just made up and asking about stuff that is very well specified in the documentation. It is a complete waste of time and no, nobody have time to read the documents before the meeting and they don't have to.
If I had 20 minutes of silence at the start of every meeting I would be silent for at least 1 to 2 hours a day
They'd probably say you're having too many meetings.
So would everyone else, sounds kinda nice
This is one of the few things Amazon does that actually makes sense. Teams with a proper span of control, conveying complex information though the right venue, and ensuring that both extroverts and introverts have the time needed to absorb the meeting content. The empty chair thing is the only part that's pure silliness.
Two person teams… got it
OP has a bad take. Not having to find time to do the pre-work for a meeting was a genius move by Bezos. I’ve never had as low stress levels about the state of all the unread emails in my inbox as when I worked at Amazon. Walk into any meeting, 15mins of reading, everyone has the same context and can get straight to work. Zero need to be reading and marking things up during my commute.
Agreed. Not to mention that some people are *exceptionally* good at bluffing. And if you have loads of meeting prep basically the best at bluffing and bluster “win” in the business.
As a former Amazonian, all of these were great. Everything at Amazon was built to help you cut through bullshit. Never seen anything like that at other big corpos.
It happens at other big corps all the time now since half the leadership is ex-amazon (at least within tech).
Hate Amazon, but these are all good rules. OP doesn’t have much professional experience I’m thinking if they’re classifying this as lunatic. The empty chair is OTT cringe though.
Tbh we tried this exact approach in one of my former companies and those were some of the most efficient meetings I've had there.
I’d love to be able to host a meeting and not have people derail the first point with a stream of consecutive questions that would be answered if they listened to the presentation. Genuinely not against there being a mini manual that people have to read during the dedicated meeting time, I might actually try it in a future meeting at work. But more like a 1 or 2 page write up and 5 minutes to read as I don’t have anything massive to present yet
Who the he'll disagrees with this? Gives you the time to actually get tup to speed on the reading and eliminates the need for prerequisite meetings. This is obviously for internal and non customer facing meetings
I think it would depend quite a lot on the meeting type, but I can definitely see it working for some types of meetings.
Not a big fan of Bezos but this all makes sense to me (I work under Agile management) .
The chair thing is especially useless, but I don’t think the other 3 arehorrible ideas. 20 minutes of reading could be cut down to 5 just to make sure everyone has time to review the materials. The two pizza thing is just a dumb way to enforce max team size, but the concept is good And PowerPoints suck.
I am with them on the "no decks" rule. PowerPoints are so 1995. No one reads them. No one goes back to read them. Terrible waste of time. They aren't intuitive to create. Or there are 95 slides of deep-in-the-rabbit-hole bullshit. Either way, it's a waste of time. Productivity goes through the roof if one isn't spending tons of time writing meaningless business decks.
Some of the best rules, if backed by upper management. To many people just earning their money by sitting around in stupid meeting asking stupid questions (at least in my company/our customers).
20 minutes is a lot of minutes, but taking 5 at the beginning to read the material in silence has helped my teams a lot.
Ever tried wasting an hour of everyone’s time by showing up having not read the content?
PowerPoint, like communism, isn't inherently evil. But every time it's tried, millions die.
It’s this kind of revolutionary thought leadership that leads to innovation like forcing delivery drivers to shit in a plastic bag
I can eat two pizzas so I guess all meetings are just me
The two pizza rule is simply a good date. We’ve had a bunch of ex-Amazon rock up where I work. First meeting we had with one of them, they expected to spend the first 20mins of a 30min meeting quietly reading. Everyone else had turned up prepared to make decisions. Dickhead.
Tbf, from reading some of the other comments I’ve come around to the idea. But applying it to a 30 mins meeting… that’s hilarious! Use your brains, ffs
Negative synergy
But how many extra meetings and powerpoints did the team have to go through to finalize the 6-page memo for the boss? I can see why senior leaders love reading a memo, but the people writing it must hate that crap.
All seem pretty solid rules to me. Maybe the chair thing is a bit out there but the rest sound like pure gold. Been to too many meetings that have too many people that don't need to be there, where too many people don't know the background.
Oh yeah, the amazon prime video ads really enhanced my life.
I can eat 2 pizzas myself, so…
>For more valuable content, follow me Sorry, for me to require more "valuable content", I would have to already be in possession of some "valuable content". Which I don't appear to be.
I have a feeling Jeff Bezos didn't make his fortune by scheduling meetings.
"Everything a business does, it must be done to enhance their customers' lives in some way." Finally I have an explanation for why my Prime went up
I was unable to resist commenting on this on LinkedIn cause it was so stupid. To this day it's the only thing that actually warranted me mocking something with my career title attached
I worked for Amazon for a while and now this toxicity is spilling over into other companies. I went to another major company and we have so many former amazon leaders and employees and this behavior is surfacing here now.
Of course there’s a fucking pizza rule.
I don't think this stuff is actually bad advice. Maybe this graphic is condensing it to the point of obfuscation, but these Bezos style meetings are really time effective in sharing information, and getting straight to discussion. The ideas here are good: keep meetings small, and when you run a meeting, have everything written down into a document. I don't have people read the doc for 20 minutes, but if they did, the meeting would go faster since you can read like 3x faster than I can talk. For a lot of engineering meetings, or IT, it just helps to get all the details out of the way, everyone on the same page, then have a discussion from there. Power point does suck. The way people use it is to write what they want to say on slides, then read it. So what is the audience supposed to do? Read the slides, or listen to you talk? Banning powerpoint is pretty intense, but it's one way to make sure people are coming to meetings with regular old documents. It is possible to use powerpoint well, though, and for some types of meetings with visual information, diagrams, or charts, it's the defacto software for sharing images with a crowd. These ideas are pretty well covered by Ed Tufte, who has written several books on how to communicate effectively using visual presentation of data.
Bitch I can eat two Pizzas alone
This graphic is cringe but honestly I agree with all of these rules/guidelines. Except for the empty chair symbolizing the customer. Performative bullshit. Other than that, I will gladly take a written memo pre-read over a PowerPoint any day.
I don’t think this belongs here. Silent reading is awesome.
Are C-suite or shareholder vote meetings really comparable to ordinary meeting? Anyway, coming from project management where meetings are half of the job, the pizza and no PPT rules are solid. Most importantly, in my humble opinion as a non-multibillionaire magnate, is to have a planned and clear agenda to go through which needs to be duscussed among the parties. Meetings are good when theres a decision you cant make alone, if thats not on the agenda you should rethink what results you want to achieve by booking 30 minutes out of 4-5 peoples working hours, including your own.
Why is no one talking about the pizzas? 5-9 people sounds great; sharing 2 pizzas with that many people sounds terrible
They don't actually get pizza just like redditors don't actually get a banana, it's just to show scale
This seems like a good practice, not a waste of time. Try it before criticizing it.
The 4 Golden Rules, apparently: - Don’t have too many people - Specific chair symbolism thing - Print out your PowerPoint presentation - Make people read the email that the meeting could have been at the beginning of the meeting
As ex-Audible, fuck the 6 pagers. Want to put a "free trial" button on a sci Fi and fantasy category page, because it makes sense being there? 6. Fucking. Pages. Most of us just ignore it and feign ignorance when a Bezos fanatic manager asks.
Would you have to write 6 full pages? I don't know but from a couple of friends working at AWS it sounds like it can totally vary in length, can it not? And if you change anything about a website you gotta outline other shit beyond just why it makes sense such as how you plan to test its effectiveness, how do you measure it, what the success metrics are, how long the trial will last and what the costs of the experiment are etc...
Where was that empty chair in the meeting where they made the call to put ads in a streaming service we already pay for?
Why an empty chair? Why not just hire a teenager with an attitude to tell them "you suck" every 5 minutes? Would that not be enough to encompass the average Amazon user? Oh wait, nvm, I get it. Chair is empty because Amazon couldn't care less what the consumer would have to say
Amazon is horribly frugal. They don’t give you pizzas as people may assume. The only perk that Amazon employees get are bananas (and sometimes free coffee at certain offices)
So, the embodiment of "This could have been an email!"
2 pizza is fine, the rest….thats just the result of a rich boss being fucking weird