Jeff Bezos Banned PowerPoint in Meetings in favor of narrative
Instead of reading bullet points on a PowerPoint slide, everyone sits silently for about 30 minutes to read a "six-page memo that's narratively structured with real sentences, topic sentences, verbs, and nouns."
After everyone's done reading, they discuss the topic. "It's so much better than the typical PowerPoint presentation for so many reasons," Bezos added.
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Aristotle is the father of persuasion. More than 2,000 years ago he revealed the three elements that all persuasive arguments must have to be effective. He called these elements "appeals." They are: ethos, logos, and pathos. Ethos is character and credibility. Logos is logic--an argument must appeal to reason. But ethos and logos are irrelevant in the absence of pathos--emotion.
Emotion is not a bad thing. The greatest movements in history were triggered by speakers who were gifted at making rational and emotional appeals: Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr.; and John F. Kennedy, who blended science and emotion to inspire America's moon program.
Neuroscientists have found emotion is the fastest path to the brain.
Interesting how the author also has an appeal to authority here, establishing how credibility.
Amazon uses "a ton of metrics" to measure success, explained Bezos. "I've noticed when the anecdotes and the metrics disagree, the anecdotes are usually right,"
He also said that Google's CEO doesn't use bullet points.
Bullets don't inspire. Stories do.
Simply put, the brain is not built to retain information that's structured as bullet points on a slide. It's well-known among neuroscientists that we recall things much better when when we see pictures of the object or topic than when we read text on a slide.
Google's CEO said:
"Since stories are best told with pictures, bullet points and text-heavy slides are increasingly avoided at Google,"
Also they avoid text in general:
we can't read text on the screen and listen to the speaker while retaining all of the information. It can't be done.
According to his book, Brain Rules, "We are incredible at remembering pictures. Hear a piece of information, and three days later you'll remember 10 percent of it. Add a picture and you'll remember 65 percent."
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