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Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint”
- k-mcgrady 13y agoI'm guessing you copy/pasted the title in from the blog but you should probably remove the CAPS. I like this way of doing meetings, I haven't heard of anything similar before. Although I've always hated slide shows. Do I read the bullet points? Listen to the presenter? Does the presenter read the bullets and go into detail on each one? What does it mean if there is a bullet but the presenter doesn't mention it during the presentation? There's too much going on at once. A good slide show can work very well (using a slide to illustrate your point with a graph etc.) but most people can't create good slide shows.
- yareally 13y agoNot the OP, but the last time I submitted an article on HN, it auto corrected the title to match what the link said (which was much more vague than the title I gave). Perhaps HN auto corrects verbatim, including caps.
- afreak 13y agoThis reminds me of when I was back in school and the instructor would have stuff in Powerpoint on the projector screen. It was only interesting when a photograph or image would be displayed (this was an East Asian history class) but the rest of the time was just me listening to him speak about the topic rather than paying attention to the slides at hand. Why? Because he was pretty much just narrating what he already had on the screen. I have always found that Powerpoint is useless for displaying anything in a meeting or seminar and yet I still find myself doing that when I myself choose to give a presentation. Additionally, I have yet to see anything that replaces it well enough that also mimics the speed and simplicity of the application, and I also find more value in just listening to the person rather than seeing what is on the screen.
- jrdn 13y agoI had so many professors that just read me the powerpoints. I would literally miss nothing from the lecture if I just downloaded the slides after every class, but no, attendance was mandatory. Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy to know that I'm still paying off an education I could've gotten most of by reading a few pages of bullet points every week.
- pestaa 13y agoHad to upvote you for the being in the same boat. Even worse though when the slide is two lines and contains the following only: [Title] * [Title] I'm not kidding, I've seen this a couple of times. And worse yet is that there is literally no extra content to listen to in the class. (Not all courses of mine are like this one, though.)
- iyulaev 13y agoIf you can get the content of the speech from a PowerPoint deck - the deck author is "doing it wrong."
- downvoter 13y agopower points are helpful for the presenter as a summary of topics to touch upon.
- kingnight 13y agoShould the title of the article match the visual type of the article... or ignore the 'text-transform: uppercase' css. I vote the latter :-)
- pshc 13y agoOh hey! This is exactly what Edward Tufte taught us at his course the other week. Now I'm curious as to who originated this practice...?
- cma 13y agoDon't know how old this is, but it has been there a good many years: http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/ http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/
- jasoncrawford 13y agoYeah, I think this practice originated at Amazon not long after Edward Tufte's article “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint” was published. I think I heard that Bezos read that article and was influenced by it.
- xaritas 13y agoProbably true. The reason I was introduced to Tufte is when he was invited to give a talk at an Amazon Fishbowl (informal, internal lecture/music series). This had a strong stamp of Jeff-approval. I don't think that this particular practice was adopted immediately but Bezos plays a long game and this was probably an opening move.
- ics 13y agoI'll just bask in the irony of having my drawing professors presenting some of Tufte's work to a class full of architects... in PowerPoint.
- damoncali 13y agoSun Microsystems banned PowerPoint years ago. Not sure if they were the first, though.
- Moto7451 13y agoI'm not sure about just reading a six page memo out loud to everyone. That seems like a great thing to email to everyone. Some of my least favorite memories from college are the couple of classes I went to where the professor basically read the book to us. The difference is, I'm guessing, that attendance isn't optional at an Amazon meeting. Personally I like keeping presentations on the short side - only using slide shows for ancillary data like citations (which I find awkward to fold into the flow of a speach) and graphical data. Unless something is really interesting or very important, it's only going to get 5-10 minutes of people's attention.
- jasoncrawford 13y agoYou don't read it out loud. You bring printed copies (or send electronically) and everyone reads it for themselves, in silence, at the beginning of the meeting.
- michaelhoffman 13y agoPeople read the memo silently.
- aclements18 13y agoFor clarification, the 6 page memo is not read aloud. Each person is provided a copy at the beginning of the meeting and the first 10-15 minutes of the meeting are completely silent. This actually works pretty well because in the real world people usually only skim the info provided in advance of most meetings because they only need to "get the gist" of what's being said. This forces everyone to have a thorough understanding and promotes more thoughtful discussion.
- cybernoodles 13y agoMemo read silently and then everyone asks questions after attendees are finished. This is for mid-small sized meetings.
- fishtoaster 13y agoI don't think powerpoints are inherently bad, but they're misused enough that I wouldn't begrudge anyone who wanted to ban them outright. The two best ways to use them, from experience, seem to be: - Super dense slides. These slides have a lot of text and are information-rich. You're not expected to read them, and the presenter will just skim over them, presenting a high-level view of each topic, but definitely not reading off of the slides. The slides are there as a rough guide to the talk, and as an in-depth resource afterwards. - Super spare slides. These slides have few-to-no bullet points, and are heavy on pictures. They're pretty much there to guide the speaker's narrative, and nothing else. At worst, there might be an inherently visual data element, like a graph. The common element being that the slides are there to guide the talk, not be the talk. The reason powerpoints are so reviled is because people tend to just write a speech, put a bullet point in front of each sentence, and read it off a projected slide.
- sliverstorm 13y agoMy preferred powerpoints support the talk. They provide things the speaker cannot- pictures, tables, graphs. Sometimes bullets are nice for openings and closings to summarize.
- Osiris 13y agoI did a presentation recently regarding Git and git-enabled workflows to a room of people with SVN and TFS backgrounds. The only slide I relied on was the git-flow workflow graph. Everything was a live demonstration of the workflow by actually using git live on the screen. A projector during a presentation should be used to show what you cannot say or to clarify a point graphically.
- cybernoodles 13y agoOf course they aren't inherently bad. Powerpoint is a tool. There are good ways and bad ways to use it. It's easier to use Powerpoint ineffectively than with other mediums.
- zobzu 13y ago
- IvyMike 13y agoIn my experience the people who give shitty presentations with powerpoint would also be perfectly capable of giving shitty presentations without powerpoint.
- jmspring 13y agoIt's not the tool, it is the presenter. Often times, they lean on the tool rather than actually thinking about their presentation.
- agent00f 13y agoThis is a witty point, but OTOH powerpoint has become the ubiquitous hammer of the business presentation which has everyone searching for nails. There is a time and place for slides with a few talking points per, but in many ways it's contorted most all meetings into PR events even when there's nothing to sell.
- ZeroGravitas 13y agoWhy are they giving a presentation in the first place? It seems mostly habit as this point. The article itself supports this as they don't just skip Powerpoint, they skip the presentation entirely in favour of a 6 page memo.
- tixocloud 13y agoWell said! I am in complete agreement. Why are we blaming tools when it's the presenters fault themselves for not being able to present? If your staff can't articulate his/her idea properly, train them. Not everyone knows everything right off the bat.
- SonicSoul 13y agoi think the idea is to remove powerpoint as a crutch. it may not make a bad presenter great, but it aims to force him to articulate his points better
- saosebastiao 13y agoIn my experience at amazon, a shitty presentation never gets presented. "I won't schedule a meeting with our VP if you don't fix this" is the basic filter they use, and it works.
- jonchang 13y agoA more in-depth treatment "no Powerpoint" at Amazon is given here by Steve Yegge: https://plus.google.com/110981030061712822816/posts/AaygmbzVeRq https://plus.google.com/110981030061712822816/posts/AaygmbzV...
- waster 13y agoThis just doubles my question from reading the original post: A full half-hour, for a six-page memo? Are these incredibly dense and full of new information to the readers? People don't really read that slowly. Average adult reading speed is something like 250 wpm. Average memo might be, what, 300 wpp? So, six minutes to read, maybe ten if you're taking your time? Not sure anyone has the answer, but that length of reading time vs. the presumed number of words to be read struck me as notable.
- mallipeddi 13y agoI worked at AWS for a while. So a lot of times when I've been in such meetings, the 6-page document was actually full of technical details (design docs, product FAQs, post-mortem reports, etc). So taking 20-30 mins to read through the full document, re-read some sections and write down questions/comments is not that unusual.
- gt384u 13y agoMaybe it's just being on a team that's more focused on nontechnical users, but I still see plenty of PowerPoint. Product, sales, and business process people seem to swim in the stuff.
- res0nat0r 13y agoWhen I was with AWS last year none of our meetings followed this type of structure. Someone put together a presentation in PowerPoint if needed, went through their items, people asked questions and action items were assigned. Pretty typical of any company I've worked for. Although I thought there were too many meetings to attend which took away many peoples development time.
- icoder 13y agoAlthough I've seen all the 'bad examples' come by, on average I don't have much of a problem following ppt backed presentations, contrary, apparently, to others. Nevertheless I think this is a great idea on itself. I've seen too many meetings where there was reading material but so few people read it that the talk actually focussed on them. There's one issue though, and only experience will tell whether it is relevant. I for myself am fond of taking in knowledge via paper but the effectiveness of this highly depends on the moment I'm reading. Also I've noticed I find it harder to concentrate when I'm reading 'together in a group'. I feel a bit rushed by it. But perhaps that's just me or something that is easy to get used to.
- kevinburke 13y agoWhen I was in high school I tried to ban powerpoint, arguing that it inhibited our ability to grow as public speakers. I wrote Edward Tufte and told him about it and he shipped me 20 copies of "The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within" (http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_pp http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_pp). Some teachers opposed it and I ended up losing. I'm sure Powerpoint was more convenient for them. I use deck.js for slides now but mostly for images - the other slides tend to have 3-4 words while I try and tell a story to draw in readers. My last project pitch to management I printed out copies of a written proposal and had everyone read for ten minutes to start the meeting. It was actually really nice.
- Maro 13y agoHave you tried Prezi? http://prezi.com http://prezi.com (I work there.)
- FrejNorling 13y agoMy girlfirend just showed me Prezi and I love it! Just waiting for an opportunity to using it in a real context!
- patrickaljord 13y agoYou should check ImpressJS http://bartaz.github.io/impress.js http://bartaz.github.io/impress.js
- enraged_camel 13y agoThat must be one of the worst demos I've ever seen. I got dizzy going through it. Ugh.
- draugadrotten 13y agoPrezi looks good but only replaces boring bullet points with pretty bullet points. To really focus the presentation to the speaker's voice I find that HAIKU DECK for iOS really removes bullet point syndrome. http://www.haikudeck.com/ http://www.haikudeck.com/ (I don't work there.)
- denrober 13y agoAmazon, when I worked there, had the worst meeting discipline of all the companies I have worked for. Meetings normally started 10 minutes late and most people didn't show up until 5 minutes after the start time. Being punctual it drove me up the wall.
- raphman 13y agoHow does this relate to the 'reading group' concept? Did people who arrived late just sit down quietly and start reading?
- Pfhreak 13y agoThis is pretty accurate. Most of the meetings start with reading, and if people arrive a few minutes late, they grab a memo and get to marking it up silently without disrupting everyone.
- downvoter 13y agoI can attest to this. Very few meetings started on time.
- zobzu 13y agoAs an audience person (ie, listening to talks) I believe "Powerpoint is easy for presenter, hard for audience" is crazy talk. I generally follow using the slides, not listening to the dude who's talking for 30min-1h thank you very much. Making things simple as you present something complex has nothing to do with having a powerpoint presentation or not. Nothing. Giving a paper to read is just the same as powerpoint, except if the speaker sucks, you don't have to endure that. So yeah. Wrong punch line, okay approach.
- r4dius 13y agoThe idea that everyone abides by a standard protocol is a dead giveaway that the author has never spoken with an actual Amazon employee.
- nivertech 13y agoThis reminded me the way we did Design Reviews at some multinational corporation. I would write and print a design document of 30-50 pages long, schedule a 1-2 hours meeting and send the document in advance to those 5-10 people attending. Off-course only 1-2 persons would actually read in advance. Then we were reading it page by page and discussing it, giving special attention to various diagrams, such as flow charts, sequence diagrams, FSMs and UMLs. We almost never were able to finish in time, so the next meeting should be scheduled (in 1 or 2 weeks because of scheduling constraints) ...
- nostromo 13y agoI'm in love with this idea. The information density (in terms of time) of a well written memo is much greater than that of a presentation. Many 30 minute presentations could be read in 5 minutes. The written word is also a great equalizer. A "presenter" can be judged based on their content rather than their public speaking ability.
- ekianjo 13y ago6 pages is a bit too long, though. In a famous Ranked 1st Consumer Goods company (i'll let you guess which one) all team memos to management are only allowed to be of a single page. This is really hard to adapt to it at the beginning but decision making is so much faster.
- _pmf_ 13y ago> This is really hard to adapt to it at the beginning but decision making is so much faster. Yeah. God forbid that anyone making decisions should have to deal with actual details; in the worst case, this would actually make them have to think.
- ekianjo 13y agoIt does not mean it does not have details, but you have to sort out the details that matter for management. That's how they can make decisions instead of drowning them in pages and pages of information.
- agent00f 13y agoWhile it is a valid goal to cut down on irrelevancies (like empty lingo), it's the exact the wrong mentality to consider detail the enemy of good decisions. Good decision making stems from understanding a problem comprehensively, not via often misleading generalities. I would even question whether it's possible to accurately summarize anything more trivial problems in a single page; the sort of menial issue that doesn't warrant a widely-distributed memo in the first place.
- dakrisht 13y agoOne of the hardest things I've learned over the years is how to condense information into quick slides, quick demos, quick presentations. People don't have the capacity that some of us might have. We're used to the material, so it's second nature to us. And other people don't see things that way. Especially when you're communicating with older people who will be lucky to understand 50% of a keynote, product demo, idea, task, problem, etc. They need the facts, and they need them quickly. I love the Amazon approach behind memos, and everything being shorter and to the point in general. The way to go. It's crazy how much you can condense that shouldn't have been there in the first place. Beautiful.
- lifeisstillgood 13y agoThis seems pretty much what Steve Yegge said a few years back - cannot find the ref but he had to write a essay for Bezos to read - no PowerPoint. I think it's sensible - you can write a PowerPoint in ten minutes and not have to think things through. Try not thinking while writing 6 pages of argument - it will be impossible or achingly clear when it's read.
- zozu 13y agoIt is a good point and I surely see its potential. However 6 pages seem a bit long. And my general opinion is that the presentation should be supportive towards the presentator. Not the other way around.
- jpalomaki 13y agoI think the best points: - Reserved time for everybody to read and understand the issues before meeting starts - Something tangible for those not able to participate in the meeting
- iyulaev 13y agoThe sad issue is that most people would gladly spend that time doing other things rather than reading :(
- lispython 13y agoEdward Tufte's article "PowerPoint Does Rocket Science--and Better Techniques for Technical Reports"(http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB&topic_id=1 http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...) has a wealthy of information about why and how to avoid Powerpoint.
- adrianhoward 13y agoIt's odd how tied some folk are to slides even when it's a completely inappropriate tool for the situation at hand. On the viewing side as as well as the presenter side. I occasionally workshops on various things. Some (not all) of them <gasp> don't have any slides. None. On the grounds that the point of the workshop, as far as I'm concerned, is to pay a lot of attention to what I'm telling you - and do the practical exercises. You learn by doing - not by reading. A slide deck just gets in the way of that. It's a barrier between me and the class. Every time there's one or two people who really hate that and complain about the lack of the deck. Not the quality of the workshop - that they're fine with - but the fact they don't have a slide deck. Occasionally it's because they want to take away the deck and run the workshop inside their own company for free (and hey - I don't mind about that. Honest. It actually helps sales ;-). But more often folk seem to need "a thing" to take away and look at again. Not so much as a learning tool, but as token that they were there. I'm seriously considering making some physical "things" for folk. Maybe postcards with the key learning points on and a reading list. Just to see if that'll help.
- gjm11 13y ago> I occasionally workshops on various things. Some (not all) of them <gasp> don't have any slides. Or verbs.
- eldridgea 13y agoI do a bit of magic (the performance art, not the card game) and attend lectures. Typically it's just a guy with no tech demoing new effects and methods. At the end they always sell lecture notes. It's a detailed overview of everything they did that night and it's usually indexed well so I can jump straight to a particular effect I want to learn. I really enjoy this approach. It allows my to pay attention without worrying about remembering or note taking during the presentation and still allows me an almost perfect reference.
- 6d0debc071 13y agoAll the meetings I do are voluntary. Most of the people who attend work with the problems in some way. Your time is incredibly valuable. If you're sitting there for 30 minutes while someone reads your memo, if you're getting everyone together in one place to read your memo, with all that implies for their schedules, then that's a waste of a lot of extremely important time for a lot of people. Meetings are for discussions that you can only have with everyone together. They're so that people who don't understand something can ask you questions, or so that you can work with others who do understand the problems. Not for reading groups.
- ozh 13y agoWhile this is totally true (what's the point in gathering people to get them to read instead of talk?) this is just how it works in most places. Ask people to read something before a meeting: 80% show up without having read, no matter how easy to read or important the paper is.
- hurfdurferson 13y agoBut what's great about this system is that under this 6-page system meetings are voluntary AND important. Knowing in advance that a meeting will start with 30 minutes of intense scrutiny makes it much more likely that people will not schedule meetings unless a problem /deserves/ that scrutiny.
- iyulaev 13y agoPowerPoint is a presentation tool, and like any tool it can be misused to the point of frustration. At best, PowerPoint offers a good way to provide a visual aid for a presentation. People who present crappy PowerPoint decks would have no trouble delivering a similarly crappy speech, or writing an indecipherable memo. One great book on delivering awesome presentations - Presentation Zen (http://www.amazon.com/Presentation-Zen-Simple-Delivery-Edition/dp/0321811984/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1368520578&sr=8-1&keywords=presentation+zen http://www.amazon.com/Presentation-Zen-Simple-Delivery-Editi...)
- agent00f 13y agoAs I mentioned to a similar comment, powerpoint has become the ubiquitous hammer of the business presentation which has everyone searching for nails. There is a time and place for slides with a few talking points per, but in many ways it's contorted most all meetings into PR events even when there's nothing to sell.
- grinich 13y agoEven better, check out anything by Nancy Duarte. She's incredible. Helped Al Gore on the Inconvenient Truth deck, regularly consults for Apple, etc. http://www.amazon.com/Nancy-Duarte/e/B002BMAA0K/?_encoding=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&linkCode=ur2&tag=whatismichath-20 http://www.amazon.com/Nancy-Duarte/e/B002BMAA0K/?_encoding=U...
- webdisrupt 13y agoThis article could not have been posted at a better time! I seriously think that these form of presentations do put their audience to sleep whilst also being non productive. I personally don't think one can do without slides as sometimes it helps the audience visualise what one is discussing. Therefore I believe it should be more about the essence of the content. In summary, just keep each slide to a max of 2-3 words or just one image that best describes the topic you are discussing. I feel that this could work well for many organisations, irrespective of their size, especially when one factors in how much time could saved on meetings.
- CurtMonash 13y agoI posted "Death to PowerPoints" -- http://www.strategicmessaging.com/powerpoints/2008/02/02/ http://www.strategicmessaging.com/powerpoints/2008/02/02/ -- 5 years ago, and still live by it. I almost never sit through a conventional presentation in a 1-on-1. I almost never attend presentations where a deck is presented to a group. That said, I frequently edit slide decks for my clients to inflict on other people. And on the rare occasions I give presentations, I use PowerPoint, commonly in old-fashioned bulleted-outline style. Complicating the discussion yet further: * I write stuff for people to read MUCH more than I give presentations. * My writing involves a lot of lists of bullet points. :)
- rlwolfcastle 13y agoPowerpoint is not the problem, it is the poor presentations people give using it.
- wjruoxue 13y agoI once went to an IDEO talk and noticed that all words in the speaker's Powerpoint are capital letters. After the talk, I asked the guy why he made it like that and his answer was that since capital letters make it harder to read, you would force yourself to write concisely on the Powerpoint. He also mentioned that many people inside IDEO follow this rule. Badly made Powerpoint is just useless while 6-page memo might be too time consuming and inconvenient. Capital letter approach could be a good compromise between those two.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- SCAQTony 13y agoOne sentence and an image or illustration to resonate that sentence or illustrate that sentence and a PowerPoint preso can be effective.
- Pfhreak 13y agoNo one is saying all powerpoint presentations are valueless. They are saying most powerpoint presentations are valueless.
- cobralibre 13y agoThe wonderful thing about the linked article is that it's essentially a bullet-pointed summary of a much longer source.
- VLM 13y ago"Powerpoint is easy for presenter, hard for audience" My observational experience is the opposite. A powerpoint must have "professional" design and "professional" multiple fonts and "professional" multiple colors, and "professional" multimedia such as stock photos and such. A lack of extensive customization shows a lack of motivation or a lack of respect. It doesn't matter if it contains actual content as long as it looks nice, because all actual content was already discussed interactively via email or phone call or written reports. So a presenter starts with generating 30 minutes of content then spends 6 hours adding meaningless flair, getting it approved by boss, bosses boss, then endless editorial changes to the multimedia, "move that stock photo a little to the left", etc. The graphics arts load on the presenter is huge and extremely expensive, yet provides no monetary value, especially for internal presentations. On the other hand the reviewer doesn't really learn anything because any important topic was discussed in written email format in detail, the presentation is a mere formality / dominance ritual. So powerpoint is pretty easy on the audience, if its a powerpoint, that means you should tune it out.
- VLM 13y agoI want to know the new dominance ritual. At non AMZN type companies a major dominance ritual lower ranks spending inordinate amounts of time adding meaningless flair to powerpoints, as an illuminated manuscript work of art rather than a professional business communication to show off to the boss. So whats the new dominance ritual if its not powerpoint anymore? Buying the audience coffee? Charging their cellphones for them? Traditional stuff like kissing up and brown nosing? Buy the audience ceremonial donuts? Physical trinkets/gifts? "Here's a printed out copy, of the email you already read, about the results we previously discussed on the phone, as a physical artifact to remind you of the meeting and your superiority over me"? You don't get rid of a behavior by suppressing one of its minor manifestations. You're just going to get a new manifestation of the same behavior. So what is it / will it be?
- pasbesoin 13y ago> flair Thank you for finally providing me a concise word for so much of what goes on with typical Powerpoint use. -- P.S. For those unfamiliar with the term (in this context). http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=flair http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=flair I was thinking particularly of its use in the movie "Office Space".
- VLM 13y ago"I was thinking particularly of its use in the movie "Office Space"." I didn't invent it, I have personally been subjected to a conversation right out of the movie WRT powerpoint at a previous employer, "Yes, I know you have the corporate minimum of 25 pieces of flair in your powerpoint, but you only have the minimum 25 pieces, and brownnoser over there has 47 pieces of flair in his powerpoint, isn't that great, and you wouldn't want my boss to think you only want to do the minimum, would you? I mean I'm not telling you that you have to add an animated dancing robot to card #72, but I'm hoping you yourself will want to add an animated dancing robot, without my having to tell you to do more than the minimum..." What a steaming pile of coaching. I am thankful not to work there anymore... It wasn't word for word outta the movie (didn't use the word flair, I believe it was "animations and font color changes") but close enough. Actually I think the coaching conversation happened before the movie?
- nell 13y agoI was at the Edward Tufte's class and he talked about this practice at Amazon. He was strongly advising all of us to follow it. He also mentioned that Apple uses a 11x17 information sheet that is shared to all meeting attendees.
- davidf18 13y agoDov Frohman, founder of Intel Israel (8,000 employees) and inventor of the flash memory states in his book, "Leadership the Hard Way" the following story about a five-page proposal sent to Andy Grove: Quote: 'Something about the very distance in my relationship with Andy seemed to invest small things with large significance. For example, when I was a young manger at Intel Israel, I sent Andy a five-page proposal for shifting the Jerusalem fab production line from memories to microprocessors. He returned it, unread, with a stamp reading “Please respect my time.” His message: the proposal was way too long. He wanted one page, not five. Grove’s request – “Please respect my time” – had an enormous impact on me.'
- fooooobar 13y agoWhich meetings is this for exactly?
- alan_cx 13y agoI think blanket rules like this are a bit silly. Clearly PP (Powerpoint) has its uses. A picture is still worth 1000 words. My suggestion would be to have a default ban, but insist that if a presenter really "needs" to use PP (s)he should have to get some sort of permission first. The reason for that is that the person wanting to use PP would then have to consider and justify its use before using it. Basically, just give them pause to think and consider.
- codex 13y agoDid Bezos learn this practice at DE Shaw?
- walshemj 13y agoSorry if you haven't read the papers prior to the start of the meeting with out a good excuse I would consider giving you a verbal warning and if repeated a written one and putting you on poor performance procedure.
- pgeorgi 13y agoTry that with someone superior in the corporate ladder.
- walshemj 13y agoIf I am chair I run the meeting - I once told the company founder to sit down and let some one else speak :-) This rule should come from the top if I was chairman of a company and any director/attendee turned up having not read the papers I woudl be having words with them.
- epo 13y agoThe real drawback to this approach is that it ensures no one will prepare for the meeting and the 'discussion' will consist of kneejerk reactions to what they have just read. It is eminently unsuitable for discussing anything important and if it is not important then why have the meeting in the first place.