It's wild to me that the use of PP and being prepared are held up as antithetical. I don't see how the practices at Amazon aren't in service of the real problem

It's wild to me that the use of PP and being prepared are held up as antithetical. I don't see how the practices at Amazon aren't in service of the real problem with meetings: they're too often used for information transfer vs. problem solving. You can't expect people to have anything of value to say when you do the "big reveal" (often via the PP wall of text) and then immediately ask them to solution. I see this ALL THE TIME, including a recent meeting at work where the findings of a consultant - including this fact - were shown to everyone for the first time before we immediately jumped into a brainstorming session. Saying "no PP" is the same as saying no to whiteboards, or taking notes or sync meetings, or any tool/process that can be mis-used. I went to business school so essentially have a Bachelor of PowerPoint degree, and one of the few-I-mean-great truths it left me was the hard work to make a good presentation; it's a different medium that most just phone-in with some quick copy & paste. I believe the process at Amazon is addressing the fact that everyone is very busy, and if they just start the meeting it's low-quality "advice-style" contributions, so it's better to eat the cost of waiting for everyone to read. This itself feels like a leadership trick that's actually for the executives who are too busy to consume everything async, but it seems better than the alternative for Amazon. I imagine it too is gamed, with people preparing before hand, then pretending to see memos for the first time yet having amazing, well-tought-out strategies ready to propose.