Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos, 60, has long been in the spotlight for his special requests of employees, and this time, another source revealed that the billionaire always ensures that there is an empty chair during all meetings.
Why? To represent the end customer, according to a report by Unilad Tech.
The “empty chair theory”
Dubbed the “empty chair theory,” the report cited insiders as saying Bezos requires a spare chair to be prepared at all Amazon meetings to represent the “most important person” who makes business decisions – the customer.
“One problem is that clients don’t actually show up for every meeting. So we like to reserve a seat for a client at every meeting,” another source told Inc in 2018 about the practice.
The Two Pizza Rule
The report also pointed out that since the founding of Amazon in 1994, Bezos has stipulated that the team should have fewer than 10 people, or be small enough to share two pizzas.
The guiding ideas behind it are “too many cooks spoil the broth” and “minimize communication channels and reduce bureaucratic overhead in the decision-making process.”
“No PPT Rule”
Earlier in 2019, insiders shared a memo from Bezos that called the company’s decision to do away with Slides and PowerPoint-style tools “the smartest thing we’ve ever done.”
“At Amazon, we don’t do PowerPoint (or any other slideshow-style) presentations. Instead, we write narratively structured six-page memos. We read one silently at the beginning of every meeting in a kind of ‘study room,'” Bezos wrote in his 2018 annual letter to Amazon shareholders.
While it’s unclear when Bezos banned PowerPoint presentations in the board room, his memo hinted that “we banned PowerPoint presentations at Amazon many years ago…it was probably the smartest thing we ever did.”
For Bezos, PowerPoints often fail to convey enough information and are prone to distractions from the audience. Instead, he believes that narrative-structured memos can communicate ideas more effectively.
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