Maybe it's time to ban PowerPoint again.
A note before you read : I spent time working within Amazon and alongside its people. Amazon is a vast organisation and operates differently across its businesses, geographies, and teams. My personal experiences and observations do not reflect Amazon's position, nor should they be read as a comprehensive account of how the company operates in the past or today. Everything in this article is based on publicly cited references, listed at the bottom of this article. This is one practitioner's view, offered in the spirit of understanding what made something great, and what it takes to keep it that way.
In June 2004, Jeff Bezos sent a short email to his senior leadership team. The subject line was blunt:
"No PowerPoint presentations from now on at STeam."
In its place, Amazon would use what became known as the doc read. A narratively structured document, written in full sentences with real arguments, read in silence at the start of every meeting. No slides. No bullet points. No presenter hiding behind a deck.
Jeff explained his reasoning simply. “Writing a four-page document is harder than producing a twenty-page presentation because the narrative structure forces you to think. PowerPoint”, he wrote, "gives permission to gloss over ideas, flatten out any sense of relative importance, and ignore the interconnectedness of ideas."
He later called it "probably the smartest thing we ever did."
He was right. But not for the reasons most people repeat.
What the doc read actually was
Most coverage of Amazon's document culture focuses on the format. Six pages. Narrative structure. No bullet points. Silent reading.
That misses the point entirely.
The doc read was an accountability mechanism. When you write in full sentences you cannot hide. The logic either holds or it does not. The argument either connects or it falls apart. There is no animation, no charisma, no seniority in the room to compensate for incomplete thinking. As Jeff wrote in his 2017 shareholder letter, the quality of memos varied widely. "Some have the clarity of angels singing. They are brilliant and thoughtful and set up the meeting for high-quality discussion." Others did not.
Jeff admitted openly that the silent reading was not optional. If they skipped it, he said, "the executives, like high school kids, will try to bluff their way through a meeting."
The doc read was also a democracy mechanism. Anyone in the organisation could write a document. A junior software engineer named Charlie Ward wrote the document that became Amazon Prime in 2004. He had an idea. He wrote it down. It reached Jeff. One hundred million Prime members later, that is not a footnote.
The Working Backwards process worked the same way. Before AWS launched S3 and EC2, Andy Jassy and his team spent more than a year writing, revising, and debating the PR/FAQ documents that defined what AWS would be and why it would matter to customers. Thirty-one drafts of the initial press release. That is not bureaucracy. That is thinking made visible.
Ideas moved on the quality of the argument. Not the title of the person making it.
If you want to learn how to “Write like an Amazonian”, the free guide below will get you started.
Then COVID happened
Amazon grew fast during the pandemic. Large numbers of new hires, including myself joined, most remotely, many of them experienced professionals from outside Amazon who were good at their jobs and highly motivated to prove it quickly.
We never sat in a doc read.
We learned about doc reads, saw the finished documents land in our inboxes. I asked colleagues how common they were. Very, they said, then they slowly started fading away. We read the outputs of the culture, alone, without ever being immersed in the practice of building it. For me, Amazon had an onboarding program called Embark, specifically designed to slow new hires down, to immerse them in how Amazon thinks before they were let loose. Remote onboarding made that transmission much harder to sustain at scale. It is one thing to read how something is supposed to be done, another to experience and practise it.
I can only assume senior leadership kept writing and demanding narratives. The S-team and the leaders around them probably continued operating the way they always had. The doc read survived at the top.
But in the middle of the organisation, a different pattern emerged. A group of well meaning people who knew enough of the rules to comply with them, but had never struggled through writing a real document. Never spent a weekend rewriting. Never had a colleague tear apart their argument at paragraph level. Never experienced the mechanism. Only seen the artefacts, and heard the fire side stories of how it used to be.
Jeff had anticipated this risk. He borrowed the physics concept of entropy specifically because he understood that organisational cultures decay without deliberate, sustained effort to maintain them. "Day 2 is stasis," he wrote. "Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline."
What COVID accelerated was exactly that entropy. Not through any deliberate decision. Through the compounding effect of broken transmission at scale.
The middle layer problem
Here is the dynamic that makes this worse.
The people who kept writing real documents during COVID were mostly senior. They had been doing it for years. The doc read was second nature to them. I can only assume they continued to produce and consume documents because that is how they operate.
Which meant that in the middle of the organisation, I saw a new skill emerge. Not writing. Compliance. Producing a document that satisfied the format requirement without using mechanism the format was designed to force. Following the letter of the law without understanding why the law existed.
Call it the middle layer problem. People exposed to what senior leadership demanded, without the battle scars of being in a room and living the process that naturally produces it. They saw the outputs. They learned to mimic the form, and they became effective at generating documents that pass inspection.
But the accountability mechanism, the democracy mechanism, the innovation mechanism, and the ideas that must serve an audience of one in a silent reading session. All that Jeff built, lost when the document is a compliance exercise rather than a thinking exercise.
The ideas that survive are no longer the ideas that come from anywhere in the organisation. They come from the people who write the documents. Which, one must assume are mostly the people who were there before COVID, and the people senior enough to have been properly trained. The junior engineer with the next Prime-level idea is absent. Because the tool that would have carried their voice no longer works the way it was built to.
Now add AI
This is where it gets serious.
AI writing tools can produce a narratively structured document in minutes. Proper sentences. Topic sentences. Logical flow. Arguments that connect. It looks, on the surface, exactly like what Jeff was asking for.
But Jeff’s insight was never about the document. It was about what producing the document forced you to do. "When you have to write your ideas out in complete sentences and complete paragraphs," he said in a 2012 interview with Charlie Rose, "it forces a deeper clarity of thinking."
The difficulty was the point. The rewriting was the point. The setting aside and coming back with fresh eyes was the point. Great memos, Jeff wrote, "simply can't be done in a day or two."
AI does it in twenty minutes.
Which means the accountability mechanism is now completely bypassable. The leadership layer does not need to understand the argument. They need to write a prompt. The output looks right. The thinking never happened.
And the democracy mechanism breaks in a different way. The junior engineer with the next great idea does not need to struggle through thirty-one drafts to find clarity. They generate a polished document instantly. Which sounds like an improvement. Except that the thirty-one drafts were not wasted effort. They were how Andy Jassy figured out what AWS actually was.
So, maybe it is time to ban presentations again?
In 2004, Jeff Bezos did not tinker around the edges. He made a hard call and enforced it from the top. The doc read did not emerge organically from the culture. It was mandated, practised, and transmitted deliberately until it became the culture.
The conditions that threaten it now are different, but the response has the same shape.
Someone with authority has to call it. Not as a policy memo about AI usage, not as a reminder that documents should be written in full sentences, but as a genuine reset on what counts as thinking in a meeting room. A document produced by AI and submitted without genuine engagement is not a doc read. It is a very polished bluff, which is precisely what Jeff designed the process to prevent.
That reset has three parts. First, bring back the struggle: the re-drafts, the peer challenge, the setting aside and coming back with fresh eyes. These are not inefficiencies to be optimised away. They are the mechanism. Second, rebuild how the practice is transmitted to new people. Not by showing them what a good document looks like, but by putting them in rooms where documents get made, challenged, and improved in real time. Reading the artefact is not the same as earning the scar. Third, be honest about what AI actually bypasses. The tool is not the threat; the willingness to skip the thinking and submit the output is. Those are different problems and only one of them has a technological solution.
Amazon built something worth understanding. A process that made thinking visible, let good ideas travel on their own merits, and held people accountable for their reasoning regardless of their title. Whether it survives the current pressure is an open question. Whether your organisation has anything equivalent, and whether you are willing to defend it with the same clarity Jeff brought to a short email in June 2004, is the more urgent one.
References
Bezos, J. (2004). Email to the STeam: "No PowerPoint presentations from now on at STeam." June 9, 2004. Reproduced in: Charan, R. and Yang, J. (2019). The Amazon Management System. Ideapress Publishing.
Bezos, J. (2017). Annual Letter to Shareholders. Amazon.com. Available at: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/2017-letter-to-shareholders
Bezos, J. (2012). Interview with Charlie Rose. CBS News. Referenced in: CNBC (2018). Jeff Bezos: This is the 'smartest thing we ever did' at Amazon. Available at: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/14/jeff-bezos-this-is-the-smartest-thing-we-ever-did-at-amazon.html
Bezos, J. Forum on Leadership. Referenced in: CNBC (2018). Why Jeff Bezos makes Amazon execs read 6-page memos at the start of each meeting. Available at: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/23/what-jeff-bezos-learned-from-requiring-6-page-memos-at-amazon.html
Bryar, C. and Carr, B. (2021). Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon. St. Martin's Press.
Charan, R. and Yang, J. (2019). The Amazon Management System. Ideapress Publishing.
Stone, B. (2013). The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. Little, Brown and Company.
Working Backwards (2024). Working Backwards PR/FAQ Process. Available at: https://workingbackwards.com/resources/working-backwards-pr-faq/
Tufte, E. (2006). The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within. 2nd ed. Graphics Press.
Columbia Accident Investigation Board (2003). Report of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. Referenced in: Tufte, E. PowerPoint Does Rocket Science. Available at: https://www.edwardtufte.com/notebook/columbia-accident-investigation-board-the-boeing-powerpoint-slide/