Revealed: ‘Smartest ever business move’ made by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos that made his career

Mr Bezos, founder and CEO of the tech giant Amazon, was the wealthiest man on the planet until last week, when rival Microsoft giant Bill Gates swiftly overtook him. However, Mr Bezos’s business know-how got him to the number 1 spot in the first place. Most assume this success was through capitalising on the growth of the internet through Amazon, but his approach to working life can also be credited. He has an estimated net worth of $108.2billion (£84.1billion) and Amazon is believed to be the world’s largest online sales company.

In a 2019 article on Inc.com, Geoffrey James explored how Mr Bezos managed to make his office more efficient with, what the writer described as “arguable the smartest management move that he’s ever made”.

Mr James said: “Jeff Bezos recently banned PowerPoint from meetings at Amazon, insisting instead that meetings start with the attendees silently reading a hard-copy document containing the information needed to discuss the issue.”

Mr Bezos asks “whoever called the meeting to prepare a one to three page briefing document” which attendees read in the first five minutes of the meeting.

Mr James explained: “Creating a fully-former, readable stand-alone document demands that you thoroughly think your ideas through and then express yourself clearly.

“This is more work than creating an outline of bullet points, but ensures that you communicate with greater precision, which is to everyone’s benefit.

He added: “The problem isn’t the quality of the presentation but the fact that displaying words while speaking words creates cognitive overload, which blurs the message.”

Mr James went on to say this “isn’t just good science; it’s also an incredibly smart financial move”.

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He added: “Banning PowerPoint in favour of briefing documents cost Bezos and Amazon exactly $0.00. For all practical purposes, that’s an ROI of, well, infinity.”

Mr James explored how this method saved time too.

He said: “PowerPoint communicates at the speed that the presenter talks; a briefing document communicates at the speed that the audience reads. A presentation that would take an hour (without interruptions or discussion) is condemned to merely five minutes.”

He also mentioned how people who need the information but don’t need to participate “can simply read the document and skip the meeting”.

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“As I’ve pointed out previously, the average executive spends around 50 percent of their time in meetings (one third of which are totally useless).

“This is a huge productivity drain, above and beyond PowerPoints infamous ability to reduce organisational intelligence.

“Since briefing documents are (at least) twice as time-efficient as PowerPoint and moreover tend to eliminate the most useless meetings, by replacing PowerPoint with briefing documents, Bezos effectively increased company-wide management productivity by at least 25 percent.”

Mr James also referred to his own expertise in the field and how Mr Bezos’ technique measures up.