[brimble]

> That is part of the reason Powerpoint is everywhere. You cannot assume that people have read anything before the meeting, you cannot assume they will read during the meeting, so you need to read it out loud to have a decent chance of it being received.

I've been told—very seriously—by multiple management consultants that public and private sector executives alike won't read a damn thing unless it shows up in powerpoint format, and even then you have to walk them through point by point or they'll miss most of it. This, when the documents are coming from people they're paying tons of money specifically to tell them stuff.

The company in question (you've heard of them, if you've heard of any management consulting companies at all) quite literally had an off-shored office dedicated to producing PowerPoints decks from notes overnight, while everyone on an actual engagement was sleeping. The primary tangible output of an engagement, as I understand it, is, overwhelmingly, PowerPoint decks. It's the Final Draft of the upper-end management world—apparently, you'll be dismissed and lose face if you show up with anything else, or even send something else in an email.

[db48x]

It’s not like that everywhere. Apparently at Amazon, the first 20–30 minutes of any meeting are dedicated to reading and taking notes on a memo, then the rest of the time can be spent discussing the contents of that memo. This ensures that nobody has to sit through any presentations, and also that everyone actually has time to read an in–depth document with the information that they actually need for every single meeting that they attend.

I wouldn’t want to give up engineering, but I think that sounds like something I could put up with if someone forced me to be an executive.

[wil421]

100% believable. I know someone who is a COO of a smaller company by employee count but very high revenue. They literally pay an offshore company to produce basic bullet points overnight based on notes.