Six Pages, No Slides: How Amazon Banned PowerPoint to Force Thinking

On June 9, 2004, at 6:02 p.m., Jeff Bezos emailed Amazon's senior leadership team and banned PowerPoint. The subject line had a typo in it: "No powerpoint presentations from now on at steam." He meant the S-Team.

The email made his reasoning plain. The reason a good four-page memo is harder than a 20-page PowerPoint, he wrote, is that "the narrative structure of a good memo forces better thought and better understanding of what's more important than what." A slide deck gives "permission to gloss over ideas."

What replaced the deck was stranger than a memo. It was a ritual.

At Amazon you don't present. You write a narratively structured memo, up to six pages, in complete sentences and paragraphs.

Then the meeting starts and everyone sits in silence, reading it start to finish, before anyone speaks. Bezos called it a kind of "study hall" in his 2017 letter to shareholders.

The memos aren't uniformly good. Some, he wrote, "have the clarity of angels singing." Others land at the opposite end.

And the gap, he found, is rarely the writer's talent. It's a wrong guess about scope. People "mistakenly believe a high-standards, six-page memo can be written in one or two days or even a few hours, when really it might take a week or more."

The great memos are written and re-written, handed to colleagues who are asked to make them better, set aside for days, then edited again with a fresh mind.

This reads like bureaucracy, the opposite of moving fast. Bezos told a business coach in 2012 that writing ideas out "in complete sentences, complete paragraphs it forces a deeper clarity." With a slide deck, he said, executives interrupt.

You're on slide three and a senior person is already asking about slide six, and the thread is gone. With a memo, a question on page two gets answered on page four.

A slide is a performance. A memo is a decision you've already been forced to make before the room even argues with you.

The cost is real and Bezos never hid it. Writing a good memo is harder on the author. It takes a week.

Amazon pays that price because the price is the product. A deck lets you skip the hard part, which is figuring out what's true and what matters more than what. A memo won't let you skip it.

The sentence has to land, so the thought has to land first.

The lesson for a founder is unromantic and cheap: write it down before you say it. A deck is how you persuade. A memo is how you think.

Sources

• Jeff Bezos's 2017 letter to shareholders (SEC filing)
• Jeff Bezos Email Against PowerPoint Presentations, Business Insider
• Why Jeff Bezos Doesn't Allow PowerPoint at Amazon Meetings, Observer
• Jeff Bezos on Narratives in Business Decision Making, Researchscape
• Why And How Every Company Should Use Amazon's Six-Page Memo Format, Forbes
• Narratives & Decision Making, Working Backwards