PowerPoint Presentations

From Craig Timberg and Jia Lynn Yang, "Jeff Bezos, The Post’s incoming owner, known for a demanding management style at Amazon," Washington Post:

Bezos also has agreed to keep the newspaper’s top executives in place, though they may need to work without a popular corporate management tool: PowerPoint presentations.

Bezos all but banned such presentations at Amazon around the time Edward Tufte, a computer science professor at Yale, wrote an essay saying that their bullet points encouraged lazy thinking. Amazon employees are required to write papers, known as “narratives,” that are no longer than six pages.

The idea for Bezos, former employees say, is that the act of writing forces people to focus their thoughts and think them through. Bezos’s faith in the enduring power of words is evident in his own annual letters to shareholders.