Amazon boss Jeff Bezos lays down ‘weird’ meeting rule

With Jeff Bezos at the helm, in an atmosphere more akin to a Trappist monastery than a boardroom, meetings start with ... 30 minutes of silence.

No bluffing in Jeff Bezos’s meetings — everyone reads the memo. Pic: Getty Images

The problem with business meetings is that they involve the ambitious and the self-important talking too much for too long, usually at the expense of listening to anyone else.

Not at Amazon: there, in an atmosphere more akin to a Trappist monastery than a boardroom, meetings start with ... 30 minutes of silence.

Jeff Bezos, the company’s chief executive, has described what he calls the “weird” meeting culture he has ordained, which bans PowerPoint presentations and replaces them with lengthy memos. In a style akin to a university tutorial, he insists on meetings starting with a document that participants read and then discuss.

“No PowerPoints are used inside Amazon,” Mr Bezos said in an onstage interview at the George W Bush Presidential Center in Dallas, Texas. “When we hire a new executive from outside (we warn): ‘This is the weirdest meeting culture you ever encounter’.”

He added: “For every meeting, someone from the meeting has prepared a six-page, narratively structured memo that has real sentences and topic sentences and verbs. It’s not just bullet points. It’s supposed to create the context for the discussion.”

The meeting starts with everyone reading the memo in silence, which can take at least half an hour. Only when everyone has read the memo does the discussion begin. These meetings are “so much better than the typical PowerPoint presentation for so many reasons”, Mr Bezos said. A “brilliant and thoughtful” memo will “set up the meeting for high-quality discussion”.

One of the benefits is that everyone reads the memo, he said. “We read in the room. Just like high-school kids, executives (elsewhere) will bluff their way through the meeting as if they’ve read the memo. So you have to carve out time so everyone has actually read the memo — they are not just pretending.”

He explained his approach in a recent letter to shareholders. “We write narratively structured six-page memos. We silently read one at the beginning of each meeting in a kind of ‘study hall’.

“Not surprisingly, the quality of these memos varies widely. Some have the clarity of angels singing. They are brilliant and thoughtful and set up the meeting for high-quality discussion. Sometimes they come in at the other end of the spectrum.

“It would be extremely hard to write down the detailed requirements that make up a great memo. Nevertheless, I find that much of the time, readers react to great memos very similarly. They know it when they see it. The standard is there, and it is real, even if it’s not easily describable.

“Often, when a memo isn’t great, it’s not the writer’s inability to recognise the high standard, but instead a wrong expectation on scope: they 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! They simply can’t be done in a day or two ... a great memo probably should take a week or more.

The Times