Maybe it’s time to ban PowerPoint again.

A note before you read: I spent time working within Amazon. 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, and shouldn’t be read as a complete account of how the company operates, past or present. Everything in this article is based on publicly cited references, listed at the bottom.

I joined Amazon during COVID, remotely, like thousands of others that year.

I learned about the doc read: six pages of narrative, read in silence at the start of a meeting, then challenged paragraph by paragraph.

I saw the finished documents land in my inbox and read them, sometimes, rarely, we jumped on a chime call to review them in a shared quip. I asked colleagues how common doc reads used to be. Very, they said. Then during COVID they slowly started fading away.

To understand why that matters, you have to go back to 2004.

In June that year, Jeff Bezos sent a short email to his senior leadership team. The subject line was blunt: “No PowerPoint presentations from now on at S-Team.”

In place of slides, Amazon would use narratively structured documents, written in full sentences with real arguments. His reasoning was that PowerPoint-style presentations give permission to “gloss over ideas, flatten out any sense of relative importance, and ignore the interconnectedness of ideas.” Writing a good four-page memo was harder than building a twenty-page deck, because the narrative forces you to work out what matters most and how it all connects.

He later called it probably the smartest thing Amazon ever did.

He was right, but most people repeat the wrong reason.

What the doc read actually was

Most coverage of Amazon’s writing culture focuses on the format. Six pages, narrative structure, no bullet points, silent reading.

The format was just the container. The doc read was an accountability mechanism. Write in full sentences and you can’t hide. The logic holds or it doesn’t. No animation, no charisma and no seniority in the room can cover for thinking that isn’t finished. In his 2017 shareholder letter, Bezos wrote that the best memos had “the clarity of angels singing”, and that others fell well short. He was also open that the silent reading was there for a reason: without it, he said, executives would try to bluff their way through the meeting like high school kids.

It was also a democracy mechanism. Anyone could write a document. In 2004 a junior software engineer, Charlie Ward, suggested the idea that became Amazon Prime. It reached Bezos, and Prime now has more than 200 million members.

Working Backwards ran on the same idea. Before AWS launched S3 and EC2, Andy Jassy and his team spent more than a year writing, rewriting and debating the PR/FAQ documents that defined what AWS would be and why customers would care. That was the thinking happening on the page, where everyone could see it.

Ideas moved on the quality of the argument, whatever the title of the person making it.

Then COVID happened

Amazon grew fast during the pandemic. Huge numbers of people joined, me included, most of us remotely. Many were experienced professionals from outside Amazon, good at their jobs and keen to prove it quickly.

When I joined, Amazon had an onboarding program called Embark, designed to slow new hires down and immerse them in how Amazon thinks before they were let loose. Remote onboarding made that much harder to sustain at scale. Reading how something is supposed to be done is very different from doing it in a room with people who’ve done it for years.

I can only assume the senior leaders kept writing and demanding narratives. The S-team and the people around them had operated that way for decades. The doc read probably survived at the top.

Bezos saw this risk coming. He used the idea of Day 2 to describe what happens when a culture stops maintaining itself: “Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline.”

COVID didn’t cause that decay through any decision. It sped it up, by breaking the way the practice was passed on.

The middle layer problem

In the middle of the organisation, I sensed a different skill emerge. Compliance.

I watched people produce a document that met the format without going through what the format was designed to force. They knew the rules well enough to follow them, but had never struggled through a real document with their team at the edges. Never spent a weekend rewriting. Never had a colleague rip their argument apart line by line. They had seen the artefacts, and heard the fireside stories of how it used to be.

They got good at writing documents that pass inspection.

When the document becomes a compliance exercise, everything Bezos built into it goes quiet. The accountability, because nobody is testing the thinking. The democracy, because the ideas that get through now come from the people who have personal influence, were trained properly, mostly those who joined before COVID or are senior enough to have learned the hard way.

The junior engineer with the next Prime is still there. The tool that would have carried their idea upward just doesn’t work the way it was built to.

Now add AI

AI writing tools can produce a narrative document in minutes. Proper sentences, topic sentences, logical flow, arguments that seem to connect. On the surface it looks exactly like what Bezos asked for.

But his insight was about what writing the document forced you to do. In a 2012 interview with Charlie Rose he said that writing your ideas out in complete sentences and paragraphs forces a deeper clarity of thinking. In his shareholder letter he wrote that great memos simply can’t be done in a day or two.

AI does one in twenty minutes.

That makes the accountability mechanism easy to bypass. You don’t need to understand the argument. You need a prompt. The output looks right, and the thinking never happened.

The democracy mechanism breaks in a quieter way. The junior engineer with a great idea can now produce a polished document instantly, which sounds like progress. Except the rewriting was how people found out what they actually thought. Jassy’s team didn’t spend a year on the AWS PR/FAQs because they were slow writers. The drafts were how they worked out what AWS was.

So, maybe it is time to ban presentations again

In 2004 Bezos didn’t tinker around the edges. He made a hard call and enforced it from the top. The doc read was mandated, practised and passed on deliberately until it became the culture.

The threat today is different, but the response has the same shape. Someone has to call it, and it needs to be a genuine reset on what counts as thinking in a meeting rather than another policy memo about AI. A document generated by AI and submitted without real engagement isn’t a doc read. It’s a very polished bluff, which is exactly what Bezos designed the process to catch.

The tool isn’t the problem. The willingness to skip the thinking and submit the output is. Only one of those has a technical fix.

You don’t need to run Amazon to bring the struggle back. What changes with altitude is what it looks like.

For individual contributors, it means writing the first draft yourself before any tool touches it, and treating every rewrite as the moment you find out what you actually think. Bring AI in to test your argument once you have one.

As a manager, it means running real reviews again. Read in silence, then challenge the argument paragraph by paragraph. Put new people in the room where documents get made and pulled apart, rather than sending them a good example.

For the C-suite, it means making the call Bezos made. Decide what counts as thinking in your meetings, and defend it as clearly as he did in a short email in June 2004.

Whether Amazon’s version survives is an open question. Whether your organisation has anything equivalent, and whether you’d defend it, is the more urgent one.