The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

by Brad Stone

The other change was also peculiar and perhaps unique in corporate history. Up until that time, Amazon employees had been using Microsoft’s PowerPoint and Excel spreadsheet software to present their ideas in meetings. Bezos believed that method concealed lazy thinking. “PowerPoint is a very imprecise communication mechanism,” says Jeff Holden, Bezos’s former D. E. Shaw colleague, who by that point had joined the S Team. “It is fantastically easy to hide between bullet points. You are never forced to express your thoughts completely.” Bezos announced that employees could no longer use such corporate crutches and would have to write their presentations in prose, in what he called narratives. The S Team debated with him over the wisdom of scrapping PowerPoint but Bezos insisted. He wanted people thinking deeply and taking the time to express their thoughts cogently. “I don’t want this place to become a country club,” he was fond of saying as he pushed employees harder. “What we do is hard. This is not where people go to retire.” There was a period of grumbling adjustment. Meetings no longer started with someone standing up and commanding the floor as they had previously at Amazon and everywhere else throughout the corporate land. Instead, the narratives were passed out and everyone sat quietly reading the document for fifteen minutes—or longer. At the beginning, there was no page limit, an omission that Diego Piacentini recalled as “painful” and that led to several weeks of e...