[malthaus]

nothing grinds my gears more than "management wisdom" like this and people who then attribute success to small details like that.

amazon could have thrived the same way had they used powerpoint, maybe even more. we will never know. also, different people communicate differently. dictating 6-pagers makes you select for people who prefer that, therefore having less diversity in thinking.

[tester756]

On the other hand having people at the beginning of the meeting to spend e.g 20 minutes reading and fully focusing on evaluating the proposal sounds really good, let's be honest.

It is easier to ask good questions and provide arguments for and against if you had time to think instead of trying to do it "at fly"

[efitz]

Nobody pre-reads documents except in the course of writing the document, so the 20min focus time (I’ve seen this go to 40min sometimes) is really a blessing.

And it’s not just “management wisdom”- it’s “intentional culture”.

I felt that Amazon was a little creepy and maybe even a little cultish when I first started because of the intentionality of culture. They are very intentional about many aspects of corporate culture and the internal jargon continuously reinforces that. For example, you hear references to the leadership principles all the time (every day) and people will regularly use the term “Amazonian” when describing whether actions align with the cultural norms or not. But altogether it works and was a very interesting place to have worked.

They have their own dysfunctions, but I think that the way they manage their corporate culture intentionally is a good thing.

[chistev]

But someone giving a PowerPoint presentation is going to explain their power points.

Or is the problem that no presentations are made?

[dathinab]

the problem is

- presentations inherently have a friction between them being fluent and them being detailed (to some degree that is why they work so well for sells, they make it easy to gloss over the parts you don't want attention on without having to worry someone claims you try to deceive them (if you don't overdo it))

- different people often have different stacks/focus points, so they need more details in different parts of an presentation. In a paper and similar you can decide what part you focus one and which you might skim over.

- language is ambiguous and concise precise writing is hard, presentations kind make that worse by a large factor (purely voice presentations even more so) (like I have seen way to often people leaving a meeting all thinking they have an agreement, but all heaving a subtle but in very important points different understanding).

- theoretically if you do a presentation right you anyway should have a handout with all presentation points + references + some additional details/footnotes etc. The approach described here basically say oh we have that anyway, then let's not bother with the presentation.

in general presentation have good use cases, like selling, shallow overviews, introductions, pitching a vague idea without deciding on implementing them

but for meetings which are about making decisions the traditional presentation approach is in my experience just very risk and backfires very often

[tester756]

Different people have different speed of analysis

Sometimes presentation moves too fast

[onion2k]

I'm not so sure about that. Specifically in the case of PowerPoint (or decks in general really) distilling ideas down to 4 bullet points that are 6 words each means you lose a lot of detail. People will fill those gaps with their own assumptions. That leads to a lot of confusion.

Jeff isn't really anyi-powerpoint. He's pro-detail. Rather than a deck he asks people to share a doc, and has time in meetings to make sure everyone has read it.

I wouldn't be that surprised if people having the same understanding of goals, projects, and ideas in detail had a material impact on Amazon's success. It leads to much better collaboration and far less waste.

[al_borland]

The point of PowerPoint isn’t to have a bunch of detail, it’s basically to provide the outline, visuals, and key points, while the presenter fleshes that out with all the details by presenting it. A PowerPoint deck on its own isn’t that valuable. The value comes from pairing it with the speech.

If you have an excessive amount or technical details, then having everything writing down and distributed to similarly technical people is probably the better way to go.

It’s important to know your audience and what you’re trying to convey to them. Adapt as needed to best solve for that.

[drflorl]

> far less waste.

While it’s much faster to create presentations today with AI, every time I’ve worked with PowerPoint on my own and especially SharePoint PPTs, it’s been a massive waste of time.

However, I’ve only seen a doc presented on big screen in a large company meeting once. It worked, but looked unprepared. I assume that the alternative is sending out the memo ahead of time and then just discussing it?

[unsnap_biceps]

Amazon's method was that you hand out hard copies of the doc at the start of the meeting and everyone reads the doc in silence for the first ~15 minutes. Once everyone has read the doc, then discussion starts.

[dathinab]

in general I agree

but also PowerPoint (the product) is kinda terrible at allowing you to efficiently, low time investment create presentations for am internal meeting which then get discarded. And the web version is even worse.

[theelous3]

This wisdom is at least certainly more true than claiming the inverse, which is a good indicator. Would amazon be what it is now if everything was powerpoints? It would almost certainly be significantly worse in many areas.

The point about bullet points being trash low effort ways to give information without rigorous thought is self evidently true.

Anyone who is considerate in how they formulate questions before seeking answers will tell you the same thing - often the dedicated formulation of the question leads directly to the answer. By just the same way, giving a full and complete answer can reveal to you a question - which may unravel and destroy your answer, or change the course of your idea.

[supriyo-biswas]

I feel like the article did not (the irony!) properly explain itself; I made a more detailed explanation of what they're trying to say in another place[1] in this discussion.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44700553

[theelous3]

This is exactly what I got from reading the article. Your explanation is a less detailed overview packed in to a smaller format. Oh... the double irony?

[rcxdude]

Perhaps, but at my current place I think we have suffered a lot from powerpoint thinking. It's basically impossible for us to look back at past information and make sense of it, because it's all powerpoint presentations which were intended to be given by someone who had the info fresh in their mind. It also encourages quite a loose form of thinking about something, compared to having to write a proper report with a well-presented argument: I'm trying to encourage people to put in the effort, and when I do so myself, I often find myself correcting my own errors just in the process of writing such a report, even if no-one else reads it.

[felixgallo]

You're missing the fundamental point. Early Amazon succeeded because it created an evangelical corporate culture of (my words) not permitting inane bullshit, falsity, dress-up, and cargo culting to infect its communications and processes. The Leadership Principles were set up as an intentional immune system to stave off what we now call enshittification. The rigid document and meeting structures were set up to focus on the facts and details rather than fonts and colors and theater.

All of that is orthogonal to diversity in thinking. I spent nearly a decade at Amazon, and I encountered a great deal of diverse thought and communication styles; the systems enhanced that, rather than suppressed it. As long as the baseline standards of clarity, factuality, and logic were upheld, people were free to make arbitrarily creative arguments. Standing in front of a 50-word powerpoint slide with colors and reciting it would not have improved anyone's thought process or enlightened the audience any faster or better.

[_DeadFred_]

Didn't early Amazon use doors for desks? Forget ergonomics, forget making sure tools are fit for purpose. Seems contradictory.

[slowmovintarget]

Deliberately avoiding a tool that typically results in superficial communications seems on point to me.

I don't think your reductio ad absurdum works here.

[_DeadFred_]

"not permitting inane bullshit, falsity, dress-up, and cargo culting"

Except for the performative austerity of executives building desks out of doors. That’s theater, not clarity.

[hansmayer]

It was a long-standing policy of Bezos to force this approach to explaining your ideas and I think it had contributed a great deal to Amazon's success. For all the complaints about Bezos, one cannot deny he actively built that company and is far from your typical corporate, employed manager, who spills their perls of wisdom on Linked. You see, powerpoint can be a great tool, but it can and will be misused by your typical grifter. Why explain a concept in detail and expose it for discussion, when you can tack on a few vague lines in combination with a few cool pictures and please the so-called 'reptilian brain'? I suspect the liberal usage of powerpoint enables the current dominance of grifters accross tech, and consequently causes a reduction in overall quality of the product (or service).

[bamboozled]

The navy seals have been on successful missions and they basically only use PowerPoint for meetings , at least the last time I read a book written by someone senior in the leadership…

[Xss3]

In a lot of teams, everyone has plenty of time to veto and workshop the plan pre powerpoint. The pp is more of a rehash of final decisions.

[Kinrany]

Having less diversity in thinking is not always a downside, e.g. there are good reasons why companies administer approximations of IQ tests

[baxtr]

Exactly. The best argument for me is the vast number of companies that have thrived with PowerPoint.

[dathinab]

honestly in my experience with tech companies

- you anyway have to create some non presentation handout; there is always a high risks of people having subtle misunderstandings about details and without handout they have no good place to double check after the meeting/in a follow up meeting etc.

- having long "seemingly" productive meetings with everyone leaving with slightly, but highly problematic, different opinions is the norm. Purely speaking based meetings tends to do this the worst, but power-point meetings have that issue too pretty badly as there is friction between a nice presentation and delivering subtle, but important, details

- different people need different times for different facts/parts of the presentation (e.g. because they are different stake holders with different concerns), but presentations have only one time progression

To some degree this points are why power point is so good for "selling" as you can take advantage of them to make a harder for the sales target to grasp the drawbacks you might want to gloss over.

It's also why it's fine in a shallow introduction, it's a) shallow anyway, and b) an introduction so always needs to be followed up if relevant for you.

Now you don't have to make a 6 page paper, but some source everyone can progress and focus on in their own peace where people can focus or gloss over on details as they find relevant is a pretty good idea.

Similar a 6-pager shouldn't be some time intensive supper well written paper with only text. It can (often should) have graphics, and diagram, etc. And there shouldn't be much scrutiny on how "perfectly" this is written or layed out.

And expecting: 1) some very basic ad-hoc writing skill, 2) some very basic reading comprehension/speed skill, you could say in general the skill set needed to read scientific papers and reasonably low effort create drafts in that direction is something you should be able to require in a leading/senior position. This has pretty much nothing to do with variety of mindset and similar. I'm saying that as a dyslexic person not good at any of that who has some form of attention deficit disorder. Because you know just because something isn't your strength doesn't mean you can't learn it to a _basic_ level.

IMHO there is only a problem if they expect a masterfully prefect grammar/spelling everything paper with only dense text to be written ad-hoc very every single meeting multiple times a day or similar.

[setgree]

Such advice is mainly useful politically; e.g., suppose you are having a dispute in your company about the overuse of presentations. Point to Jeff Bezos and say: he hates them too! if your adversary is an MBA type, he might find it challenging to respond.

[flappyeagle]

Not hiring morons also reduces diversity in thinking

[bryanrasmussen]

can you show that intelligent people think alike?

[Quarrel]

This is a damn good point.

I suspect you're (implied, perhaps) correct, that not hiring morons increases diversity of thought. I certainly hope so.

[Kinrany]

"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Not evidence but a good reference to this expectation.

[bryanrasmussen]

I'm not sure which you are equating happiness with here, is it intelligence or stupidity? At any rate many folk sayings around the world claim that only the stupid are truly happy.

[Kinrany]

Intelligence.

[bdangubic]

that sentence is silly as saying all fed families are the same, all starving of hunger are starving in their own way

[Kinrany]

How so?

Here's another version of the idea. All healthy k8s clusters are within the same healthy range, but there are many dimensions on which a cluster can be not healthy.

[bdangubic]

so you are setting up a baseline/norm “xyz is in healthy range” and then are expecting anomaly to be also to be in some same dimension as well?

[flappyeagle]

there are many more ways to be wrong than there are to be right

[ordu]

Intelligent people are much more creative at finding new ways to be wrong.

[Kinrany]

That's not the kind of diversity we want

[bryanrasmussen]

prove that? There are many more ways to be wrong if the question is something uninteresting like how many pennies are there in this jar, sure, but if the question is something interesting maybe there are the same amount of ways to be wrong or right, however there is, in my experience, a statistical likelihood that wrong answers converge on a few common idiotic ideas.

Relatively clever people will also converge on a number of statistically likely right answers, but I think the really bright people will find right answers nobody else ever suspected and which the moderately intelligent will say "that can't be right, can it?!?", and the really stupid people will still be inside the list of common stupid answers but probably focused on the ones that even moderately intelligent people will think, "huh that has to be wrong".

on edit: I probably should amend that to may find right answers that nobody else ever suspected, sometimes there may be a right answer that is the best right answer among the set of acceptable right answers, although that makes it a less interesting question I suspect.

[slowmovintarget]

For any question, there are nearly an infinite number of statements that either do not apply or make some error in fact, judgement, or conclusion. There are many more ways to be wrong. There will always be more answers that are beyond the context of any given question that we can lump into wrong.

Wrongness even has more categories:

- Fails to address premise

- Contradicts premise

- Fails to match goals

- Cannot be understood

- Makes claims not in evidence

- Based on claims not in evidence

- Is deliberately false

- Assumes impossible outcomes

- Assumes impossible preconditions

- Is untimely

- ...

"What should we do to pass the time?"

"We could go hang ourselves..."

You list three categories of being "right" for an answer, but each one has narrower possibilities than the next: Pragmatic (immediate), strategic, and innovative (novel solution). Each of these categories has fewer possible formulations than the categories for being wrong.

[bryanrasmussen]

>For any question, there are nearly an infinite number of statements that either do not apply or make some error in fact, judgement, or conclusion.

Q: should one vote for Trump A: No, because it will distract from his duties to distribute toys to good children once a year.

Is that a wrong answer or a right answer, assuming that one agrees on should not vote for Trump.

At any rate let us put it in the set of wrong answers, is it a wrong answer that will ever actually be given in seriousness to the question? Sure it is a potentially wrong answer to the question, as is "2 + 2 equals 5" but while potentially wrong is it ever going to be wrong in actuality.

The set of potential wrong answers to any question is infinite, the set of actual answers probably are not infinite, and as I noted from my experience seems to actually converge on a normative set of wrong / stupid answers.

> each one has narrower possibilities than the next: Pragmatic (immediate), strategic, and innovative (novel solution).

given your use of potential answers that are wrong to show how that set is much bigger I would think you would see that the innovative is probably bigger than immediate (depending on constraints of problem) and also unknowable.

>"What should we do to pass the time?" shows a question

>"We could go hang ourselves..." shows not a serious attempt to answer the question, in my experience, but a refusal to consider the question important enough to answer.

[bdangubic]

you obviously never worked there to write, the amount of morons surpasses like random DMV office in a random state :)