Finished listening to Jeff Bezos’s interview (with Lex Fridman). I liked the part about how to conduct perfect business meetings. I compare this to what I read about fifteen years ago in Barbara Minto’s book about her “pyramid” for organizing thoughts.
(Probably everyone knew this, I just missed it. Someone will probably recommend I read some business book about it now.)
Bezos’s perfect meeting starts with all participants receiving a well-prepared document — a meeting memo (“Clarity that it’s like angels singing from on high”). The document must be written with such clarity that it sets the tone for the meeting. Essentially, it’s the agenda, only characterized by its thoroughness and structure. Typically, it spans six pages and is presented in a narrative form.
Jeff explains that a typical meeting at Amazon and Blue Origin (I assume, starting from a certain level) begins with a six-page memorandum. The first 30 minutes are devoted to quiet reading and note-taking. Jeff says that this often scares new managers because a bunch of people gather and silently stare at computers or papers. This “classroom learning” approach is necessary because people often don’t find the time to read the memos beforehand, leading to unpreparedness and bluffing. “Reading together raises the level of discussion,” Jeff says.
Comparing it to PowerPoint presentations, he notes that they lose out significantly to the memorandum, because they are more about persuasion than about seeking answers. PowerPoint allows careless thinking to hide behind bullet points, whereas the memorandum requires full sentences and narrative structure, making it hard to hide flaws in reasoning. Writing a good six-page memorandum is a challenging task requiring time, but ultimately it proves more useful for the audience, saving time for the entire team, and in the long term, by providing clear, well-thought-out content and a precise definition of what we want to achieve from the meeting.
Interestingly, when someone starts the meeting by presenting something with PowerPoint, they not only persuade people of something, but also attach the formulation of the problem to their own persona, existing reputation, authority, etc. This makes developing objective solutions difficult. In the case of a memorandum, the discussion revolves more around the problem, and it is less tied to the ability to sell, as well as to who brought it and “sells” it. Bluntly speaking, if a boss gathers subordinates and feeds them something via a presentation, there’s a high chance he will get unanimous support, regardless of the content.
Also, Bezos says that when a presentation unfolds slide by slide, the audience constantly has questions, answers to which might appear on subsequent slides, then new questions arise, and ultimately there’s no time left for proper thinking, instead it’s spent on posing questions that could have been avoided (waiting until the end where there will be answers).
Bezos calls the work of writing these memorandums an entire art and science, as it requires making sure that in half an hour the audience not only understands everything but also leaves comments in the margins: clear topic sentences, precise words — verbs and nouns, avoiding bullet points.
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 