Meetings of his “S-team” of senior executives begin with participants quietly absorbing the written word. Specifically, before any discussion begins, members of the team — including Bezos — consume six-page printed memos in total silence for as long as 30 minutes.

It’s apparently something of a shock for new hires. Bezos told Fortune:

“They’re just not accustomed to sitting silently in a room and doing study hall with a bunch of executives.” Bezos says the act of communal reading guarantees the group’s undivided attention. Writing a memo is an even more important skill to master. “Full sentences are harder to write,” he says. “They have verbs. The paragraphs have topic sentences. There is no way to write a six-page, narratively structured memo and not have clear thinking.”

This was by far one of the weirdest, most pleasant surprises about Amazon. This happens at every level of the company. Everyone writes. No one uses PowerPoint.

The last time I wrote papers this long and this often was in college. Every other tech company I’ve worked at or with relied on PowerPoint. You can hide a lot of fuzzy thinking in PowerPoint (I know I have). It’s much harder to hide bad logic inside of a 6 page Word document.  

Jeff Bezos Amazon Fortune Interview

I work at Amazon. These are my opinions. Please see my disclaimer here.