A typical meeting at any mega corporation is pretty common: a big boardroom, a glowing screen, and senior executives clicking through a PowerPoint presentation, mostly created by the overburdened juniors. It may work for others, but not for Amazon and Jeff Bezos.
And in 2004, Jeff Bezos had figured out this problem. He found that PowerPoint, and more specifically, the bullet-point system in any presentation, led to sloppy thinking. It simply allowed presenters to gloss over gaps with catchy phrases.
To tackle this, Bezos pulled off something that has never been seen before. He sent an internal email that would change corporate history forever, as he banned the usage of PowerPoint at the senior level. In its place, he proposed the idea that you had to write the entire thing down in a six-page narrative memo.
This idea helped shape Amazon as we know it today and is a big reason why they are able to move forward so fast. As Jeff Bezos says, “Failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment. Most large organizations embrace the idea of invention, but are not willing to suffer the string of failed experiments necessary to get there.”
In this edition of the Digit Game Changers, we examine Jeff Bezos’ corporate strategy that still impacts the way Amazon operates till this day.
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Bezos wanted to change how Amazon conducted meetings at the senior level. With the switch to the six-page memo system, he didn’t just want meetings to start in a normal way. Rather, it was switched up, and instead of starting with a speech, they started with 30 minutes of silence. Where every person attending the meeting, including Bezos himself, would sit in the room and read the printed, six-page memo in total silence.
And the philosophy behind this implementation was pretty simple: Bezos believed that quality writing is the way forward for quality thinking. Writing a narrative forces the author to understand and bridge the gap between ideas. By the time the silence ends and the discussion begins, everyone in the room has a deep, yet shared, understanding of the agenda.
Along with the focus on switching up the way meetings are conducted, Bezos also changed the way the senior management looks at the business. Rather than blindly chasing trying to chase profits, he wanted the team to understand why they’re working. Safe to say, Bezos had an obsession with the customer.
In the early days of Amazon, he was famous for keeping one chair empty in every conference room, and he told his staff that the chair was occupied by the most important person in the company, the customer. Interestingly, the obsession over the customer experience didn’t just stop there.
Before a single line of code was written for a new product, Bezos wanted the team to write an internal press release. In the release, he wanted the team to imagine it as a launch day and describe exactly how the product will change the customer’s life.
If the press release doesn’t sound revolutionary to the team, then the project was altogether scrapped. By obsessing over the customer’s experience so much, Amazon really ensured that it never built an app or a solution that was in search of a problem.
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Eventually, this is the analogy that took Amazon to the next level. Look at Amazon Prime, for example; while on paper, the unlimited shipping service for an annual fee looks like a financial liability, it still worked out for Amazon. If the idea had been proposed on the traditional PowerPoint logic, it would have been dismissed completely.
Since it would have showcased how the company would lose money on every package. But rather than that, the company switched the narrative, as Prime was targeted at the long-term psychology of the customer, and that’s how it worked out in the end.
Something similar went down with Amazon Web Services, aka AWS. At the start, it didn’t start as a plan to dominate the internet’s infrastructure. Rather, it was started as an internal memo about how to make Amazon’s own developers more efficient. But because the narrative for AWS was so logically sound, it scaled from an internal tool to a multi-billion-dollar industry leader.
While the ban on PowerPoint may have sounded a bit too extreme at first, it also helped foster a unique approach to failure. In many companies, a failed project is often seen as something that would end up getting you fired. But Amazon really changed that narrative. Even if a project failed, it wasn’t seen as a complete failure; rather, if the idea behind it was good enough, it was viewed as a good experiment.
One of the best examples is the infamous failure of the Amazon Fire Phone. While many might remember how badly the product flopped and how heavily it was criticised. But at the same time, Amazon realised that the concept showed a lot of potential. While the voice-recognition system was not the best available in the market, it was still a starting point for them.
It helped set up the stepping stone from a project that we today know as the Echo. Learning from the mistakes of the Fire Phone is what massively helped with the success of the Amazon Echo, which we know today.
Today, Amazon is one of the most complex yet fast-moving organisations. They’re present all across the globe, yet they still operate on the simple act of writing. By banning the usage of PowerPoint and focusing more on writing, Jeff Bezos ensured that Amazon would value ideas.
In today’s fast-moving world, thanks to the age of AI, Jeff Bezos’ idea of the six-page piece of paper is still something that dominates the senior corporate level at Amazon.
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