Serendipity35

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos writes an annual letter and in 2018 he repeated his rule that PowerPoint is banned in executive meetings. Bezos has also talked about this in public discussions. What does he prefer to those slide presentations? Narrative structure.

Narrative structure is something Bezos believes is more effective than slides. It is said that in Amazon meetings, you're not reading bullet points of text on a slide. Instead, Bezos says that everyone sits silently for about 30 minutes to read a "six-page memo that's narratively structured with real sentences, topic sentences, verbs and nouns." And then comes discussion.

You have probably heard the expression "death by PowerPoint." Slides (using PowerPoint, Keynote, Prezi, Haiku Deck or any other) can be deadly boring, but I still find presentation tools to be effective when used effectively.

Narratives, storytelling and discussion are great ways to learn and retain information. We know images also activate other areas of the brain and neuroscientists find that we recall things much better when when we see pictures of an object or topic than when we read text on a slide.

Text alone on slides is boring. It is bad presenting. But using slides with text, along with images, is one way to structure narrative and discussion. Every tool has its proper use and best applications. PowerPoint is no different.