Amazon’s leadership meetings begin with silence because everyone’s reading. They are reading memos written like stories. There are no PowerPoints allowed in the meeting. Bezos wants to read narratives instead.

Replacing PowerPoint presentations with memos helps the participants in a meeting to develop clarity about the project or proposal under consideration. “It forces leaders to put away their computers, to put away their phones, to not be dumbed down by PowerPoint. It's forces them to read it, to grok it, to deeply understand it so they can have a much better discussion.”