Amazon co-founder Jeff Bezosand one of the world’s richest men is known to dislike powerpoint presentations. On many occasions he has expressed his open disdain using slideshow presentations for meetings. Bezos recently spoke with podcaster Lex Fridman about the way he likes his meetings to run. According to a report in Business Insider, the billionaire has a very specific way he likes his meetings to run.”I like a crisp document and a messy meeting,” Bezos said.
Instead of PowerPoints, Bezos prefers memos, which he says require much more time and effort from the author. The process, according to him, allows meeting participants to ask more productive questions and seek the truth instead of “hiding a lot of sloppy thinking in bullet points.”
“We have in our society and inside companies, a bunch of mechanisms we use to resolve these kinds of disputes,” Bezos said in the podcast. “A lot of them are, I think, really bad. An example of a really bad way of coming to an agreement is compromise.”
“Two pizza rule” for meetings
Bezos is said to have implemented a “two pizza rule” into his past work meetings. For those wondering how and what, it’s simple. The more people you pack into the meeting, the less productive the meeting will likely be, as per Bezos. The solution? Never have a meeting where two pizzas cannot feed the entire group. This means that if two pizzas are not enough to feed the whole group, then cancel that meeting.
Incidentally, this “two pizza rule” for meetings is said to be one of Bezos’ strategies for not losing entire days to unnecessary meetings.