Powerpoint is Great for Hiding. Actually Communicating, Not So Much

I like to write, which is fortunate, since that’s how I make my living. It’s unfortunate, however, because I always have to defend the act of writing against people who believe one or more of the following:

I should use PowerPoint instead of writing prose
I should write less — I tend to write long pieces (thanks, law school)
I should use bullet points
Well, you know who’s on MY side of this debate? Jeff Bezos, that’s who. Amazon Guy. $59.1 billion Jeff Bezos. Him.

Bezos, who is widely regarded as not being stupid, hates PowerPoint, and has banned it at Amazon. If you work for or with him, you have to write good old-fashioned memos, and then discuss them with the group. Interestingly, this is exactly how my undergraduate college, Swarthmore, operates their Honors program.

Here’s what Bezos has to say about this process — he wrote this in 2004:

Well structured, narrative text is what we’re after rather than just text. If someone builds a list of bullet points in word, that would be just as bad as powerpoint.

The reason writing a 4 page memo is harder than “writing” a 20 page powerpoint is because the narrative structure of a good memo forces better thought and better understanding of what’s more important than what, and how things are related.

Powerpoint-style presentations somehow give permission to gloss over ideas, flatten out any sense of relative importance, and ignore the innerconnectedness of ideas.

Exactly. Writing forces people to think. It requires digging deep into the concepts they’re writing about, and both understand and clearly articulate how they’re connected, why they matter and what they do. In some detail. A carefully-written memo is a thing of beauty. It’s easy to read. It teaches you stuff. And it’s way, way better than PowerPoint.