We all know that Jeff Bezos has an untraditional style when it comes to his management of Amazon.
The billionaire previously revealed that he has a ‘pizza rule’ for every meeting that he organizes or takes part in, which basically means he won't engage with any meeting that two large pizzas wouldn’t be able to feed.
While it might sound tasty, Bezos’ focus is on a different type of dough and the ‘pizza rule’ is a money-saving tactic to avoid over-the-top and pricey company meetings.
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Another unusual switch-up on standard meeting practice is something that the entrepreneur revealed as being the 'smartest thing we ever did'.
At the Bush Center’s Forum on Leadership in 2018, Bezos disclosed that he put a ban on PowerPoint presentations at Amazon.
Instead, he started a new way of conducting the meetings which involves 30 minutes of silence.
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Yep, really.
While it might sound bizarre, Bezos has a very good reason for this, explaining how each attendee must silently read a 'six-page, narratively-structured memo' for the first half an hour of the meeting.
He explained: “Executives will bluff their way through the meeting as if they’ve read the memo because we’re busy and so you’ve got to actually carve out the time for the memo to get read.”
He added that before this new twist, Amazon was doing the 'more traditional thing'.
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Bezos said: “A junior executive comes in, they put a huge amount of effort into developing a PowerPoint presentation, they put the third slide up, and the most senior executive in the room has already interrupted them, thrown them off their game, asking questions about what is going to be presented in slide six, if they would just stay quiet for a moment...”
In a letter the billionaire wrote to shareholders in 2017, Bezos revealed that the authors' names would never appear on the meeting memos, because the memo is 'from the whole team'.
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He added: “The great memos are written and rewritten, shared with colleagues who are asked to improve the work, set aside for a couple of days, and then edited again with a fresh mind. They simply can’t be done in a day or two.”
“[It] is harder for the author, but it forces the author to clarify their own thinking,” he said at the Forum on Leadership.
“It totally revolutionizes the way we do meetings at Amazon.”
So, there really is method to the madness!