[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